Get Bruno off corners and FKs he's dreadful at both. Eriksen has the most consistent delivery from corners but of the starting 11, I'd take anybody over Bruno.
Andreas Georgson - New Set-Piece Coach
- Thread starter RedRocket9908
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If you’re wondering what the point of a set piece specialist is, just look at Arsenal, who scores a fourth of their goals or so from set pieces, an has had one for years, notably Georgson as well.
If you’re wondering what the point of us having a set piece coach is, it’s that we have effectively lacked one since Solskjær was fired, and our set pieces both ways have given us a huge handicap.
If you’re wondering when we are gonna see an uptick in set piece ability, it’s a bit more complex answer. We have already improved very clearly on defensive set pieces, which are normally the first focus of a set piece coach. That’s the first part of the answer. The second part, regarding attacking set poeces, is that it depends on a lot. Set piece training takes time from a lot of the other training, so it’s a trade-off. In periods with a new coach, or many injuries, or when basic play isn’t working, a team aiming to dominate games will not prioritize set piece training. In preseason it’s possible to get some done, but with United it’s challenging since we have many key players with late vacations, so many of the key players are not on on much of the drills. Additionally, in s short time you can only implement a few variants. The way to be effective on attacking set pieces over a time span, is to have many variants, otherwise the opposition will quickly know what to expect. For Georgson, he probably has been tasked primarily with defensive set pieces for this preseason, and then given training time for a few attacking variants, which we saw in the first games of the season. When basic play was suffering, attacking set piece training has likely been set aside for later.
Van Nistelrooy taking over and now Amorim, will likely mean that Georgson is not going to be able to affect our attacking set pieces much this side of February anyway.
Bruno's corners are really not that good, though. He frequently hits them too low and straight at the front post defenders.
Mount's corners are better than Fernandes'. Even if we played with 10 men and he just sat in a mobility scooter waiting to be driven to whichever side of the pitch the corner was awarded from, we'd have more success.
I agree. I was more referring to Telles who use to bag tons of assist of them.
Delivery is the problem. Fernandes delivery technique is just poor.
Even if someone connects with one of his deliveries, the ball isn't hit in such a way that allows someone to direct it towards goal successfully. Height, spin & power determine how a header might be able to redirect the ball towards goal. His are low, flat and hit too hard and direct, doesn't leave players with much opportunity to adjust and attack the ball.
His run up is wrong and how he strikes the ball is wrong. It's not rocket science, either he needs to adjust his technique or someone takes them.
We aren’t exactly blessed with players who specialise in crossing a ball. Luke shaw use to take them whenever he plays.
People on the internet telling footballers how to play football will never not be funny. If it’s a technical issue, I would imagine one of the professional coaches from the last decade of his career may have noticed.
Nothing to do with telling him how to play football, it's as plain as day that it's a technique issue and a lot of it is down to understanding ball physics and how a cross can be met and where the ball will likely go after.
You don't need to be a professional coach or footballer to understand that, just look at his delivery and compare it someone who can deliver a good corner into a good area. It very much looks nobody has ever tried to work with him to improve the quality and consistency of his deliveries from corners.
Should teams have attacking set piece coaches and defensive ones?
Random thought I'm having seeing this thread near the top again. Would think they're very different skills.
Here's another - how much work do teams actually do on them? If I'd come up with a new routine I think I'd like to test it a lot in training to see how many we goals we actually score over 100 or 200 repetitions comparing it to all the other routines I had up my sleeve and doing the same for them. Need substantial testing to see if they actually work. Couldn't tell the defenders in training which one we were doing each time either and actually would want them coached by someone else to see what they come up with to stop us which would truly see how effective each routine was. Would make adjustments / tweaks from there or chuck out a particular routine altogehter. Then you'd have to deal with getting enough repetiton into everyone as big centre halves would have to be on the attacking team and the defensive one half the time each so you can double that workload.
I don't think there's any way they can put in that kind of volume or would I be wrong? Without that it would seem all a bit imprecise as a discipline. Players would be bored out of their mind if you did go that far of course and I'd doubt there's enough time for that anyway. Imagine set piece coaches must alway be nagging the manager for additional practice time though.
Random thought I'm having seeing this thread near the top again. Would think they're very different skills.
Here's another - how much work do teams actually do on them? If I'd come up with a new routine I think I'd like to test it a lot in training to see how many we goals we actually score over 100 or 200 repetitions comparing it to all the other routines I had up my sleeve and doing the same for them. Need substantial testing to see if they actually work. Couldn't tell the defenders in training which one we were doing each time either and actually would want them coached by someone else to see what they come up with to stop us which would truly see how effective each routine was. Would make adjustments / tweaks from there or chuck out a particular routine altogehter. Then you'd have to deal with getting enough repetiton into everyone as big centre halves would have to be on the attacking team and the defensive one half the time each so you can double that workload.
I don't think there's any way they can put in that kind of volume or would I be wrong? Without that it would seem all a bit imprecise as a discipline. Players would be bored out of their mind if you did go that far of course and I'd doubt there's enough time for that anyway. Imagine set piece coaches must alway be nagging the manager for additional practice time though.
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Absolutely in my opinion, and there's no better argument for this than simply pointing to Aston Villa. Since MacPhee joined they've been great at attacking set pieces, but that's undermined by the fact that they ship so many defending them. Even for us, there was that insanely long period where we couldn't score from any set piece to save our lives, but it flew under the radar a bit that we improved markedly at defending them when they fell under the purview of Eric Ramsay.
From what I've read teams typically spend practically a whole day on them, usually as close to match day as possible. Teams without midweek games naturally have a bit more time to work on them if they want.
The problem is, people think that it is an instant impact.. hire a set piece coach and suddenly we are better... it doesn't work like that.
We will have to see how we look at set plays during the season and how we have improved as the season goes on, as he was only appointed at the start of the season.
Needing 100-200 practice runs on a single routine is a ridiculous over-exaggeration. Set piece coaches will devise the routines based on video analysis of the team and their opponents, not by using the first team as test subjects. And professional footballers do not need 100-200 attempts to figure out a set piece routine. My 12 yo son and his mates could get consistent in fewer attempts than that.
I don't expect that they would do anywhere near that, and in terms of consistently having your players make the movements asked of them with the correct timing and the right delivery I'm sure it could be done as little as 6-10 attempts.
Still, that leaves a lot guesswork and makes the whole thing a bit vague, or difficult to assess I'd have thought.
4.8% of corners resulted in a goal last season according to this. Roughly 1 in 25. So if you ran a routine 10 times in practice there's huge chance you'd score 0 goals even if it was an average sort of routine and a perfectly average sort of idea. How does the set piece coach have confidence to take one idea into a game more than another if they'd pretty much all tend to result in 0 goals when practicing?
If video analysis shows an opponent is weak at the far post for example you'd seek to exploit that, but I'd have thought there's a huge number of possible ways to try and do that in theory.
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I don’t think that’s true. Set pieces in training are very different to in a game situation. Defenders won’t defend them as intensely (and sometimes not at all)
I remember Jose Mourinho said that Marcus Rahford had the ideal technique for corners and freekicks from wide areas, because he could hit them low, flat, hard and direct, because too much height and spin makes it difficult to redirect the ball towards goal with any speed and precision.
Good point. Suppose that adds even more noise and uncertainty to everything.
Maybe that should be a new venture of mine, start a school exclusively for set piece coaches with full time guinea pig practice players so they can test out whether or not some ideas even work in principle better than others. Different kettle of fish in the real world though as different squads will have different profiles of players when it comes to who can deliver what sort of ball, how many they have who are good at attacking the ball etc. and my poor employees will end up brain damaged from all the heading.
The set piece coach needs to walk Bruno over to a corner quadrant and get someone to stand facing them on the edge of the penalty area.
Then present him with a Subbuteo piece and instruct him:
"Ok. One last time. This man is small. The man over there is faaar awaaaaay"
Then present him with a Subbuteo piece and instruct him:
"Ok. One last time. This man is small. The man over there is faaar awaaaaay"
I recall he put him on set pieces for one game against Chelsea and never really did it ever again. I think aiming for just beyond the far post was Mourinho's go to corner, Rashford could barely ever beat the first man either.
You would work top down, not bottom up. You would review hundreds, if not thousands, of set pieces across lots of different games. Then you would extrapolate which principles or ideas worked most often, and in what context. Then you would devise routines that fit within those principles, in conjunction your understanding of the team and your opponent. You'd train the ideas and principles via a handful of routines that showed variation on a theme. Then you would judge their net effect over a long period of time, not a single game. Refine as needed.
Yeah, I think he was saying more about what makes a good corner than about Rashfords ability as a set piece taker tbh