Martin Keown questioned how Liverpool attempted to deal with the threat of Dan Burn for Newcastle’s opening goal in Sunday’s Carabao Cup final.
Burn dispatched a header from a Kieran Trippier corner in the first half and the Magpies went on to win the game 2-1, ending a 70-year wait for a major domestic honor.
Newcastle center-back Burn, who stands at more than two meters tall, went virtually unchallenged as he easily out-jumped Alexis Mac Allister, one of the smallest men on the pitch, to nod the ball past Caoimhin Kelleher.
Arne Slot explained his zonal marking system in a post-match press conference from Wembley. He said: “We play zonal, so we have five players, zonally, close to our goal. So if the ball falls there, there is always one of the five stronger players that is going to attack that ball. And we have three players that man-mark and Macca is one of them.
“Normally a player like Dan Burn or another one runs to the zone – and I think he’s an exception to that as I’ve never seen in my life a player from that far away heading the ball with so much force into the far corner.
“That is part of logic that they either have to go far away from our zone – which 99 out of a 100 times that will never lead to a goal – or they have to arrive in our zone and that’s an equal battle if you want to say it like this. So credit to him, I think he is one of the few players who can score a goal from that distance with his head.”
Keown suggested that Liverpool could have approached marking Burn differently. He told talkSPORT: “I understood his (Slot’s) logic. I thought he explained it well after the game, this zonal marking for set pieces but I wouldn’t agree. If I was in his staff, I would have questioned him.
“You have to mark somebody of Dan Burn’s size in your zone. We did this at Arsenal when zonal marking. It (Liverpool’s season) was going beautifully well and now the shine has been taken off, of course it has. And you still have three players (Mohamed Salah, Virgil van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold) who have not signed new contracts.”
