The biggest difference between James Ward-Prowse’s approach to free-kicks and David Beckham’s, according to Ward-Prowse himself, is not in the curl, the power or the percentage that go on target, but the practice. Beckham would famously practice his set pieces repeatedly after training, staying behind with a bag of balls and a youth-team goalkeeper.
The obsession started as a child, when he says he would have tried tens of thousands of times to aim at the wire meshing over the window of a small community hut on a park near his home. He would bend free-kicks around his father in the dark, the target made visible only by the lights of nearby homes. When night eventually forced him home, he would kick teddy bears in his sister’s room. This was, Beckham readily accepts, a complete obsession.
Ward-Prowse is proudly different. If practice usually makes perfect, he believes in an alternative method. Once you have the ability to curl the ball beyond a goalkeeper’s reach, it’s all about making sure you peak at the right moment. Take 50 free-kicks in training, and it doesn’t really matter how many you score. Take far fewer, and you can better recreate the pressure of a match situation.
“At the start I would take 12 to 14; not every day, but twice a week,” Ward-Prowse says. He is speaking at St George’s Park ahead of England’s two friendlies against Switzerland and Ivory Coast. “Now I’m more into taking six to eight, just once a week. I’m trying to recreate the pressure of a game because you don’t get too many opportunities. If I can limit the amount I take and put pressure on those, it works better.”
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Beckham holds the record for the most free-kick goals in Premier League history with 18 and is widely regarded as one of the best dead-ball specialist in England’s history.
But at the age of 27, Ward-Prowse is now tied second on that list with 12. He has already made more Premier League appearances than Beckham did, but then Manchester United were a dominant team that gave Beckham ample opportunity. Ward-Prowse is statistically and clearly the best of the current crop.
Ward-Prowse says that he has never met Beckham. He retired in 2013, when Ward-Prowse had made only four career league starts. But he does admit that he would love to meet up for a coffee and a chat one day to pick Beckham’s brains about the science behind their art. Reach Beckham’s total of 18, and he might just reach out.
“It would be an incredible achievement,” Ward-Prowse says. “But it would also be a good lesson to me that if you work hard in life at a skill, you can reap the rewards and beat someone like that. He went on to play in other countries while I have spent a long time in the Premier League, so that says much about his qualities. But it’s a good target to have in the back of my mind.”
The magical element of Beckham’s free-kicks lay in the reduction of the battle to its simplest parts. He, the goalkeeper, the defensive wall and everyone watching in the stands, whether they were urging him to score or miss, knew what he was trying to do.
But if he placed it in the corner of the goal with the trajectory and pace that he practised for hours on end, nothing else mattered. They were impossible to stop. Ward-Prowse clearly feels roughly the same way.
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The similarities with Beckham there are obvious. Ward-Prowse is not Beckham. He is no superstar and he is certainly not a guaranteed starter for his country. He freely admits that watching Euro 2020 from home, having been in the preliminary 33-man squad, was tough although he was evidently proud of their progress. Now it’s time for him to be part of that progress.
A major tournament can be made or broken in one moment, and Ward-Prowse’s set-piece delivery might just be his VIP pass into the World Cup squad. At some point over the next 180 minutes, he may get a chance to push the needle his way. The magnitude of the situation doesn’t matter and it’s never just a friendly in a World Cup year. No wall, no goalkeeper, nobody else. Just Ward-Prowse. and a ball.
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