Set-piece goals have long been considered rather gauche, the reserve of relegation battlers with burly centre-backs who need to beg, borrow or steal points however they can.
Great teams are supposed to finish intricate flowing moves, seamlessly converting after 40 consecutive passes. Very rarely can you play sexy football from a corner.
Yet of course, this is based on the misconception that set-pieces are down to a combination of luck, a decent delivery and a squadron of human battering rams.
In the modern era, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Before his sacking after just six games, Troy Deeney revealed even Forest Green, currently bottom of League Two, employ a specialist set-piece coach.
The reasons behind this are obvious – around 30 per cent of the goals in any given season come from set pieces, either corners, direct or indirect free-kicks or penalties. They present one of the very few directly predictable scenarios in a football match, one which can be replicated in training with little difference to the match arena.
Nicholas Jover was first hired as a set-piece coach by then-Championship side Brentford from 2016-2019, before Pep Guardiola poached him to join Manchester City. When former City assistant Mikel Arteta then left to take the Arsenal job in December 2020, the Spaniard spent months trying to persuade Jover to follow him, which he did in July 2021.
He may now be the most important individual at the Emirates, bar perhaps Arteta or Bukayo Saka. Arsenal’s first two goals in their 5-0 win over Crystal Palace on Saturday were the product of corners, the Gunners’ ninth and tenth corner goals in the Premier League this season. They have 13 set-piece goals in total, two more than second-ranked Everton in second.
Arsenal with the early lead!
— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) January 20, 2024
Gabriel fires it home from Declan Rice's cornerpic.twitter.com/df1TUzqFU3
“Credit to all the coaches, to Nico [Jover] for the amount of time and belief we put in,” Arteta said after the game.
“It’s got a huge impact – we’ve seen that as well in recent games that we’ve lost when we’ve conceded set-pieces, so the outcome is very different when you don’t concede and score.”
Arsenal have won 164 corners in the league this season, 23 more than Man City in second. This means they average around eight corners taken per match and they score from around one in every 16 – meaning a goal every two games from corners alone.
Last season, Arsenal scored 13 goals from corners, the joint-most in the league with Spurs, but they are scoring at an even greater rate this campaign. This is hugely beneficial as they have been scoring fewer goals from open play, restricted by more teams using low blocks against them.
So what makes Arsenal’s set pieces different? For one, Jover has a vast collection of routines, which he drills in to the players relentlessly, so they can execute a wide variety at will and they never become predictable.
Past this, almost every corner they take is inswinging. Opta research has shown more shots are taken after outswinging corners, but better-quality chances are produced from their inswinging equivalent.
They also use knock-downs a lot, which create chaos in opposition boxes and tend to be around two-and-a-half times as effective as attempting to score from a direct header. Another common trait is keeping almost all of their players around the penalty area, rather than on the halfway line.
It took Arsenal 26-seconds to take their corner before Trossard's goal…
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) September 17, 2023pic.twitter.com/nNZ5UjisHm
And this season Arsenal have also been taking a noticeably long time to prepare indirect free-kicks and corners, timed at 26 seconds to take a corner against Everton earlier in the season.
This both gives them time to get in place and distracts and frustrates opponents, making them more likely to make a defensive mistake.
Still just two points from the top, Jover and his set pieces have been crucial in keeping Arsenal in the title race despite a poor festive run of form. It remains to be seen whether they will be enough to fire Arsenal to their first Premier League in 20 years.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/X5Pvtcm
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