Last season we ran into 2 really good teams in our state tournament that played a diamond back really well. We normally played with a single striker in a 4-2-3-1, we won the first game in a shootout and got beat in the 2nd game. But we didn't find much luck attacking this system. How would you approach this?
Make the sweeper play - make him/her have to mark somebody instead of laying deep and picking off balls. Get the middle player in the 3 AMs up high playing off the striker. One coach I know has the striker "mark the sweeper" - get all the way to that last defender to open space and make the sweeper work.
That's right. That is why you need your stopper to be a disciplined player besides being a beast of a defender. If he isn't sweeper can be beat. To play good man to man a good part of your practice should be devoted to 1 v 1 defending and group defending and the switching that you need to do in a good man to man defense.. No one does that at any level any more. That also helps keep the sweeper free. Plus if he has to leave the center of the field the far side back becomes the new sweeper. So your outside backs has to practice being a sweeper as well. If you can play a great man defense and you get a lot of intercepted passes, and you quick strike on attack. It is pretty hard to beat. Marking the sweeper can work. The better question for another thread is how to beat the zone.
Push the sweeper back as far as you can with your target player. Then play your second forward about 10 yards underneath that. Target player has his back to goal. Then he lays the ball off for the second forward. No way will the other team let the second striker hang out on his own. He has the time to run to receive that pass while losing his defender, and moves towards goal and shoots.
In one of the issues of the NSCAA journal last year they discussed the death of the sweeper. I think this is one of the reasons—teams figured out that they can force the sweeper to be a marking back essentially making him less effective, if not altogether useless as a "free player".
The classic way to beat a sweeper defense is with mobility. Make a wide attack, forcing him to commit to the strong side, and then switching the point of attack to the weak side which is coverless (since the sweeper is the only covering player). In other words: diagonal balls and crossing. The flat back four found favor because it was easier for the backs to adjust to the switches. The other problem is the sweeper is usually the best defender, so it makes it easy for the opponents to identify the weaker points in the defense. I guess diamond back defenses have become so old-fashioned that players today don't know how to break them down. Maybe I will bring back the WM and man-to-man defending I bet no one else here has played against a WM system!
"To play good man to man a good part of your practice should be devoted to 1 v 1 defending and group defending and the switching that you need to do in a good man to man defense.." Defending against diagonal runs. Part of that is a defender who is in a better position swithches with the marking back. He picks up the man crossing the field if he has got the inside on his marking back.
Overload a side to beat the sweeper Try this as an example when your left wing mid has the ball. Have one of your strikers make a diagonal run in front of the wing. That triggers the other striker to also move to that side. Hopefully that may pull the opponents sweeper more to that side. Then the left wing mid who has the ball moves more to the center of the field. While that is going on the far side wing moves to his near post. Then then left wing passes on the ground to that right wing for a shot on goal. A wing to wing pass. We have scored tons of goals doing the wing to wing pass. Practice it functionally and tell me how it went.
rca/ranova gets it again. (dude, don't you have a job or something?) a sweeper/stopper set-up is going to be more compressed (side-to-side) than a flat four. (if it isn't, then the passing lanes [between defenders] are going to be wider--and thereby vulnerable to dangerous through-balls.) you take advantage of this by playing to and overloading one side. as defenders shift to cover, you then switch the ball to the other side, which should be open. (so you can keep a 4-2-3-1... just make sure that your weakside outside mid knows that the switch/cross is coming to him.)
I have a job, I have soccer, I eat, I read books, and I sleep. Sometimes I work and eat, sometimes I read about soccer, and sometimes I dream about soccer. It is the rest of my life that loses in the competition for my attention, but I am at the grandparent stage of life so family obligations are not as time consuming as they used to be. And of course my family is a soccer family
This is how we do it with our HS girls. The last few teams we've played have use the sweeper/stopper formation and we love playing against it. I have our center mids look outside first and then we cross it back in. If a forward doesn't get to it then the other outside mid can usually catch up to the cross. One of the teams we played against kept their sweeper a good 30 yards behind the rest of the team. Fun times were had.
