Zonal marking gets blamed for goals that any system would have conceded

The system did not lose the header. A defender who guessed the flight of the ball did.

Watch the replay again and count how many defenders actually contest the ball. Usually one. Sometimes none. The pundit says the zone failed, the manager says the zone failed, and by Monday somebody has written that this is what happens when you defend space instead of men.

That is not what happened. What happened is that a delivery arrived with pace and dip between two zones, and the two defenders responsible for those zones both read it as the other man's ball. That failure exists in man-marking too. It just looks different on television, because when a man-marker loses his runner you can point at a person, and pointing at a person feels like an explanation.

Here is what a zonal setup is actually buying you. Every defender faces the ball. Every defender starts still, on his heels, then attacks forward into the flight. A man-marker starts side-on, watching a shirt, backpedalling, and he arrives at contact moving away from the delivery. Jumping backwards costs you real height. Not a bit of height. Something closer to a head.

So the zone wins you the ordinary corner, the seventy percent of deliveries that land in the six yard box at a predictable height. It loses you the strange one. The ball that holds up in the wind, the one clipped short to the near post, the one that a runner attacks from ten yards outside the box with a run nobody picks up because in a pure zone nobody is assigned to pick anybody up.

I think most teams have already settled this argument and nobody wants to say so. Almost nothing at the top level is purely zonal. There is a zone of four or five across the six yard line, one or two man-markers on the genuinely dangerous headers, a blocker on the goalkeeper, and somebody sitting on the edge for the cutback. That is a hybrid, and calling it zonal is lazy shorthand.

The honest test is not whether you concede from a corner. Everybody concedes from corners. The test is whether the same gap opens twice. If the ball keeps dropping in the same corridor between two zones, that is a coaching failure and it is fixable in an afternoon.

If it is a different gap every week, you were unlucky, and the system had almost nothing to do with it.