Are We Seeing the Downfall of Passive Zonal Defending?

We have covered the struggles of AIK deploying their 2-2-1 defense on a couple of instances here on xProgress. They have had a weak start to the SSL season.

Another traditional club in Sweden is also having a tough time in the beginning of the season – and that is Pixbo. A common theme, is that both clubs are playing rather passive in their own end, and not deploying much tendencies towards player vs player approach in terms of marking, within their zonal structures.

Pixbo and AIK are two of the bottom three teams in the SSL, at the time this post is written.

Now, Pixbo has had a rather tough schedule, already having faced Falun, Storvreta and Kalmarsund, along some less strong opponents as well. They will face an easier schedule soon. But still.

A common theme for those two teams, are that they are having a really tough time to get sustainable results out of their defensive systems. Pixbo is using a zonal based 2-1-2 system, in which the center is pretty dynamic and is counted upon to make reads and block a lot of shots.

I zoomed in on Pixbos big loss away against Jönköping last weekend, to see what looks like warning signals in terms of patterns I do not like while they are defending zone entries, and playing zone defense.

Pixbo tried to activate full court press in the third period, leaving us with a smaller sample size in this game – remember that these numbers are from two periods of play.

Pixbo defending entries and defending their own zone

Looking at the numbers, Pixbo actually got away with a decent result, drawing Jönöping 1-1 in these two game phases. But the underlying xG numbers look way more disappointing, trailing 0,6 to 2,0. Project that to three periods of play, and it would be an xG result of around 1-3.

Let us look at game tape from the game, to try and see where the most obvious warning flags are in Pixbo's game in these two game phases. 👇