What's wrong with Norwich City's defending?
It's not over for Norwich City, not by a long shot. They're six points plus some goal difference shy of safety with nine matches to go in the season, and anything can happen. But for a squad that dominated the Championship last season, collecting just five points fewer than Wolves in the previous campaign, results in the Premier League have been disappointing. What's gone wrong?
Today we're going to focus on their defending. The Canaries have conceded 52 goals, more than all but two other sides. They – or at least Daniel Farke and Teemu Pukki – seem to have forgotten that defending starts at the front. Just look at Pukki's overall numbers:
Pukki was a reasonable defender back in Denmark, but since coming to England the 29-year-old has shown little desire or aptitude to get in opponents' faces. The quantity and quality of his defending are very low, and he has negligible skill as a tackler. By contrast, the wingers who usually flank him – Emiliano Buendia and Todd Cantwell – are very aggressive defenders, but the actions they do concede often lead to negative outcomes. And this suggests that the problem may lie further back on the pitch.
Indeed, two of Norwich's usual midfielders seem to be pretty low-quality defenders. Neither Tom Trybull nor Alexander Tettey is particularly aggressive, and bad things seem to happen when they defend:
Yet Trybull is actually a decent tackler, in fact a fairly skillful player in each of the four kinds of duels that we track. Unlike Tettey, who's 33 years old, Trybull is in his peak years at age 27. He also tends to play on the left, where Tettey is usually positioned on the right side:
So is there something wrong with Norwich's defending on the left? Quite possibly. Like Cantwell at LW, Jamal Lewis is an aggressive defender at LB. But he's fairly ineffective, rarely disrupting opposition moves or recovering loose balls. Worse, the LCBs who typically play behind him are two of the least engaged and lowest-quality defenders in the league. Both are excellent tacklers when they do deign to tackle, but apparently they do so far less frequently than they ought to:
Whether it's Grant Hanley or Ben Godfrey starting, an opposition coach seeing these numbers would probably place a huge target on the left side of Norwich's back line. The return from injury of Timm Klose might help at LCB, but with Sam Byram out until the summer, Lewis may be the only option at LB.
Oddly enough, the goalkeeper backing them up, Tim Krul, has been having one of his best shot-stopping seasons in years, at least in open play. Without Krul's uptick in form, things might be much worse for the Canaries:
Yet Krul is still mediocre from dead balls, and Norwich have been conceding a lot of them – more than seven corners per match, the most in the league.
Defending isn't the only issue for Norwich. They've scored 25 goals, the fewest in the league, and haven't been able to find an effective attacking midfielder to play between the wingers. And in the Premier League, goals scored are generally more correlated with positions in the table than goals conceded; Southampton have allowed 52 strikes as well, and they're in 14th place with 13 more points than Norwich. But if Norwich can fix the defending on their left side, despite their rotten luck with injuries, they'll stand a much better chance of survival.
[Photo: ZakNelson1995]
