Rafa had the system working well at Valencia, 20 clean sheets in 38 matches for his last season in charge. No system is foolproof but he has proved that he can get the system to work better than man marking. The problem was that both rows of defenders moved toward the ball leaving the huge gap (men stayed on the posts as the should until the ball is cleared). You can't blame one man (as you would with man marking) it's a group thing and they should have covered the space not left it open while the closest line of defenders attacked the ball. Warnock clearly at fault for not holding the line. We are playing a risky game relying on ref buttistants to make a good call, as you point out when you have a good striker like Crespo against you then you can expect to be caught out by it at some point in the game. We were lucky that both buttistant refs got the vast majority of the calls right, it could so easily have gone the other way. No doubt about that the question. What I want Rafa to answer is why the hell are we not playing Crouch together with a proper striker? We'd have stood a better chance with Cisse-Morientes-God supporting him (we'd have scored at least one if God had partnered Crouch!)
