The huck-heavy offences on display at the 2025 USA National Championships made me question whether teams can play better help defence, and whether playing help defence is actually helping your team if you're giving up easy goals.
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On the face of it, playing help defence is a no-brainer; poaching to reduce the size available to an offence and switching to reduce the amount of running defenders need to do. However, I think it is easy to assume that such schemes will be perfectly executed, and that offences are too dumb to work out how to beat them. When drawn out on a whiteboard, switching and poaching improve the way that defences cover space, but executing the theory […]
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