Ryan Shawcross should stop man-marking at corners after Stoke defender gave penalty away against Manchester City

MY former Stoke team-mate Ryan Shawcross is very much in the spotlight over shirt-pulling.

And I’ve got a simple  solution to stop him  falling foul of referees —  don’t let him mark  anyone at set-pieces!

That may sound counter- productive as Ryan is one of the best headers of a ball in the Premier League, if not the very best.

But Mike Dean set the tone by applying the new directive on grappling and tugging in the box to the letter in Stoke’s 4-1 defeat to  Manchester City. He awarded a penalty to each side, the first for a Shawcross tug on Nicolas Otamendi.

So how do you avoid the glut of penalties many are predicting, without reducing the effectiveness of your top defenders?

You can bet your life Everton players will be in the ref’s ear about Ryan before today’s Goodison clash, planting the seed by telling the official to keep an eye on him.

It happens. On the occasions when I captained Stoke, I would often hang back and do the same thing — ask the ref to watch out for a rival player.

Even if it is done in a half-joking way it does not hurt to get the message across.

It is easy to say the manager should just take players to one side and tell them they have to stop the shirt-pulling because referees are cracking down.

It is not that straightforward if you’ve grown up doing it. It’s human nature to try to give yourself an edge.

It has been a fact of life in the game for so long that you can’t expect to just go cold turkey and stop doing it.

So the answer is take the guy most at risk out of the firing line. I would tell him: “You don’t mark anyone.

“You are there to attack the ball and instead of picking up Romelu Lukaku or one of the centre-backs coming up, you concentrate on occupying the danger zone.”

In Ryan’s case I’d position him just outside the six-yard box, between the far post and the penalty spot.

Then he’s in position to deal with a near-post flick-on and can backpedal to win the ball if it goes deep.

Ryan is a good friend and he’ll know I am not picking on him or anything.

I rang him and told him  I was doing this  column — it will be interesting to see if we agree on the best way to deal with the situation!

There’s another bonus to giving your best header a free role — he isn’t going to be taken away from the danger area by the man he’s marking.

At Stoke, Ryan, myself and Robert Huth would all go up for corners and whoever was marked by the opposition’s best header would deliberately drift outside the box and take his man with him.

If it was James Beattie or Peter Crouch who was picked up by their top defender, the same thing would happen.

So when the rest of us went for the ball, it was one less big defender to worry about.

In defence, I am not a big fan of zonal marking and, in my Shawcross scenario, you don’t stop marking altogether.

You just bump up your next-best header one place — then the third-best marks their No 2 and so on.

Of course teams are going to try to find ways to turn the tables and the obvious way is to get one of your smaller players to disrupt the free defender.

But I’m looking at this from a defensive point of view and, hopefully, by the time teams react to the non-markers, referees will have taken note of their approach and accept they are not looking for contact.