100 corners, no goals. Edit: 140 corners, 1 goal. 152 corners, 2 goals.

Our corners are poor, but one thing I have noticed recently is we seem to be well positioned for the second ball after it’s inevitably cleared.

Happened several times tonight where we were able to get a second chance at crossing/shooting. Previously we seemed to get countered quite often in these situations.
 
It's not just that we don't score from them, It's that we barely even look threatening. Teams just clear the ball and wait till one of Fred/Maguire/AWB/Bailly lose it on the halfway line and then proceed to score.
 
Observations on this. We do not have a players who has the ability to deliver accurate balls into the penalty area nor vary that delivery, consistanly. At present the ball usually strikes the first defender. Secondly other than Ronaldo and Cavani we do not have players with very good heading skills.
Usually the tactic appears to ( providing you clear the first defender) to aim for Maguire, which in its self is self defeating because his heading ability is poor in the sense that he lacks the ability to give direction to the ball other than a straight header.
 
What compounds it is how vulnerable we still appear when defending corners. We really need to return to the basics in training it seems.
 
Defending corners is also compounded with having defenders with poor heading abilities but also by using the defend the space system, this only works well when you have a defender(s), capable of organising the defence or the goal keeper. we have neither so really it is a free for all every time.
 
IIRC did Ole not hire some set piece specialist coach in the summer from Chelsea?
 
0 in 100 is significantly behind any statistical averages. With the quality we have in the air (theoretical quality, apparently) the fact that we havent even scored one lucky flukey set-piece corner is pretty amazing.
 
babablue said:
Anyone know how many corners against us? And how many goals have we conceded from that?
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I think we conceded 2 goals from corners to Leicester and the last minute goal to Aston Villa. I might be missing one or two.
 
IrishRedDevil said:
The 6th corner tonight versus Burnley was our 100th corner this season. Yes I’ve been counting :(

No goals! Zero. Nada.

Will we ever score from a corner again?
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Didn’t we score one in the CL vs Villarreal? Telles volley.
 
It's all about the delivery, it's mostly shit.

Would probably score more if it was just chipped out to the edge of the box for a volley.
 
hungrywing said:
I remember reading that the historical average was around 5%. One in every twenty corners.

Maybe the person who calculated 1% included really really really really bad leagues?
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Really really really bad leagues wouldn’t even have such data available. The quality of league will be inconsequential anyway, poorer attacking players is offset by poorer defending players.

Either way the Reddit percent is for direct from corner goals. So no knockdowns or short corners which both lead to more goals than direct 2nd touch shots


In total, all types of corners typically are around 3% scored.
https://www.espn.com/soccer/english...orners-are-overrated-for-scoring?platform=amp

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fancy-stats/wp/2014/06/17/what-is-a-corner-kick-worth-in-soccer/
 
limerickcitykid said:
Really really really bad leagues wouldn’t even have such data available. The quality of league will be inconsequential anyway, poorer attacking players is offset by poorer defending players.

Either way the Reddit percent is for direct from corner goals. So no knockdowns or short corners which both lead to more goals than direct 2nd touch shots


In total, all types of corners typically are around 3% scored.
https://www.espn.com/soccer/english...orners-are-overrated-for-scoring?platform=amp

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fancy-stats/wp/2014/06/17/what-is-a-corner-kick-worth-in-soccer/
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It would be interesting to find out if it's inconsequential or not.

The "only direct from corner goals" thing would seem to explain the not-in-line-with-'historical'-average thing.
 
limerickcitykid said:
We aren’t shit at defending them though, we have the 5th best record in the league.
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We flap around like helpless fish, and yet at the other end they take care of ours with ease. Stats might say otherwise but we’re far from convincing at dealing with them.
 
Cutch said:
We hired a 'set piece expert' at the start of the season didn't we? There's a man that will be dreading his annual performance review
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Fire that man. His mate is already out too. What's the waiting
 
el3mel said:
Regardless, did you really count all our corners in every game this season ? A little bit too much, eh ?
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The premier league website can show you the stats for how many corners we've won so far in league games. Pretty sure you could do the same with the Champions league.
 
I have a vague recollection of Ronaldo taking a short corner to Telles who wellies it into the goal. Maybe it was a wide free kick
 
We've basically lost a solid 4-5 goals and about 6 points thanks to our incompetence in set pieces. Didn't we hire a new set piece coach from Chelsea in Aug? Surely someone needs to be held accountable for this?
 
Crashoutcassius said:
hardly relevant if the long term conversion is 1%, not saying it is 1% but if it is
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Mute point using historic data, (I’ve still not seen the 1% data?), as teams now have staff dedicated to training corners and set pieces. They are becoming a bigger part of the game and getting more training time.

Ralf recently said he would dedicate 30% of training time to set pieces. His reasoning was that 30% of goals come from set pieces.
 
matt23 said:
We must have conceded more than once from those 100 corners as well
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Everton scored against us, Fred didn't take the guy out at the halfway line right at the touchline. We are definitely in the minus goals from our own corners
 
hungrywing said:
I remember reading that the historical average was around 5%. One in every twenty corners.

Maybe the person who calculated 1% included really really really really bad leagues?
Click to expand...

Using this seasons PL data, which is all I care about, as that’s where Man United play, yes I would tend to believe the 5% average figure.

Now teams have staff focused only on training set pieces and dedicating more time to them, it makes sense that the figure is circa 5%, with the better corner scoring teams being up around 7 - 8%.

So in layman terms, can say we have failed to score at least 5 corner goals in 18 games.
 
youngrell said:
Our corners are poor, but one thing I have noticed recently is we seem to be well positioned for the second ball after it’s inevitably cleared.

Happened several times tonight where we were able to get a second chance at crossing/shooting. Previously we seemed to get countered quite often in these situations.
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Maybe this is actually our tactic that our new set piece coach has ingeniously invented.
 
That's particularly insane given Cavani and Ronaldo are 2 of the best headers of the ball in football today in the world, how have we not taken better advantage of that?
 
We should go short every time, all we do is launch the opponents counter attack given how poor our deliveries are.
 
CraftySoAndSo said:
Maybe this is actually our tactic that our new set piece coach has ingeniously invented.
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They have probably worked on this positioning but I doubt it’s the primary tactic.

There’s not a lot a set piece coach can do to get a corner taker to play the ball higher to beat the first man, it’s a minimum requirement of a pro footballer, all he can do is position the players and give instruction on where to play the ball. Not his fault the players can’t execute something so simple.
 
youngrell said:
They have probably worked on this positioning but I doubt it’s the primary tactic.

There’s not a lot a set piece coach can do to get a corner taker to play the ball higher to beat the first man, it’s a minimum requirement of a pro footballer, all he can do is position the players and give instruction on where to play the ball. Not his fault the players can’t execute something so simple.
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I know, i was being sarcastic about the absurdity of the whole situation. Hiring a set piece "specialist" and are the only team not to score from one, and having a team with i'd like to think enough technical quality that at least someone can take a decent corner but i guess not.
 
hobbers said:
We didn't hire a set piece specialist we hired a no mark with 1 year coaching U23s at Chelsea on his cv, because he's uni pals with McKenna, and then called him a highly-rated set piece coach as PR spin.
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That's why i put "specialist", he is in no way qualified for the role and makes it seem like he's won a competition or something. The thing is we don't even look like we put any thought in our set piece routines just whip it in, hit the first man and hope for the best.
 
Don’t know if there is any other thread is it’s this title but I couldn’t find one so I thought it was necessary for us to have a discussion specifically about corner kicks.

Don’t think we have ever had a season where we failed to convert one corner kick up till game week 20. What’s wrong with our corner kicks?
 
We've now had more than 100 corners in the Premier League this season...

and we haven't scored a single goal from one.
 
Nobody in our squad is any good at scoring headers apart from Ronaldo.

If you're an opponent, just set 2 men on Ronaldo each corner and you're mint.
 
We're terrible at many things this season. We can't even cunter attack properly now.

edit.I'm leaving it in there.
 
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