GK Technical

Defending The Short Service

Maryland's Cardona Overplays Difficult Situation

Maryland hosted UCLA on August 31st in a great matchup of top programs.  Inside 15 minutes, however, the visitors had a 2-1 lead on a goal that could have been prevented.  A breakdown in still captures follows:

Cardona starts well off his line, but never advances, and so, after the attackers first touch, fails to generate any sense of additional pressure on him...

Cardona is off his line, but the attacker has no additional pressure.  While his move is generally correct, he's simply left the goal mouth too early, and still hasn't accomplished the main goal of leaving the line; applying pressure on the attacker to make a quick decision.  If he shoots, the GK ought to be close enough to block at close range, or, better still, smash the attacker by forcing a straight 1v1 confrontation.  

What he has accomplished is to remove himself from the face of the goal while still allowing the attacker to select from several options...

A split second later, the attacker has played the ball central...while this may be a result of Cardona's gobbling up the near post angle, he's done so in a Pyrrhic fashion, and left a second, equally devastating option on the table (note the red line, where his feet are located)...

The ball is hidden behind the players at the top of the 6, but we can see that Cardona never repositioned as the wide attacker served the ball.  Granted, there would only be time for a single step, but that step may well have provided enough push to get his hands to the shot (which was a one-timer).  So his mistake of taking an overly advanced position has clearly been further compounded by a failure to anticipate the wide attacker serving the ball (versus shooting it, or continuing to dribble).  

The center back in the yellow circle, for his part, should be harshly criticized for not marking the goal scorer (the UCLA player between the penalty spot and the 6).

Cardona misplayed one of the most challenging situations for a GK.  He got caught in no man's land, neither close enough to play the ball with the initial attacker, nor close enough to home to manage the shot from the middle.  It could also be argued that he should have organized his backs better so that the scorer was marked better from the get-go.  Then he lost the plot completely by failing to read the crossing pass fast enough to get any momentum built up toward the middle of the net, and simply never stood a chance of making a play.

To his credit, here are a couple times when he played similar situations without conceding...but there is inconsistency here, clearly, and he'll want to develop more precision and quality in his play.

In this shot, we see that because of the better ball pressure, and the extra bit of width in the attack, Cardona stays much closer to home, though still ball-side of his front post.  No ball can enter the 6 between him and his center backs (hence their positions directly on the 6...still very poor marking on the runner marked by the red arrow) or he has failed to do his bit.  Incidentally, the MD player in the yellow circle is demonstrating proper "box" defending/marking.

Lastly, on a breakaway from the other side, we see Cardona get high and set early, and clearly pressure the attacker by cutting angles down (to a greater degree than on the goal scenario) and making it known that the next touch forward will be a confrontation.  The attacker perhaps could have scooped him, tried to beat him to the left/byline (tough angle to score) but can't go right because of the MD defender chasing.  So he bails out a little bit by dropping a pass to a teammate, which is shot wide right.  Cardona appeared to have things covered, but we can't be sure as the shot was wide.  However, his angles, distances and footwork are greatly improved over the goal play.