“With the constant evolvement of football tactics and with the defensive systems becoming more and more structured and organised, any football fan needs to understand the basics of defending in football. Defending is applying pressure, both as a player and as a whole team, on the opponent to prevent him from progressing forward to your own goal. A team can mark and press every player, but then there will be no room for error because when the marker gets passed, the team is immediately outnumbered. Then you can defend zonally, but you can’t let the opposition have all the time they want on the ball too. So there are a lot of defensive strategies applied by any team and for any particular match, according to the current circumstances. Football teams in the modern era defend as a unit, and every player is getting a particular defensive task in every game. …”
Total Football Analysis (April 2020)