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Ange Postecoglou is unfazed by standard figures, as he has repeatedly made clear over the past few weeks. Football is football, the more they ask and the more he downplays their importance, the more goals Spurs seem to concede from set pieces. At the same time, as Arsenal scored more and more of the standards, their head coach Nicolas Joverbecame an increasingly prominent figure, leaping off the bench whenever Arsenal were awarded a corner or free-kick near the box.
Kits feel like the new frontier. It may look familiar as Declan Rice heads over, Ben White checks the keeper and a phalanx of big boys head for the near post, but the blocking shots are more carefully plotted than ever.
Data analysis means that plays are becoming more and more complex. Google DeepMindwhich has previously looked at board games such as Go, is working in collaboration with Liverpool to demonstrate how artificial intelligence can improve corner positioning.
But there’s an assumption here that Postecoglou doesn’t seem to share, which is that the sets are somehow separate from the rest of the game. That’s why DeepMind started looking at soccer with corners. There is a fixed point from which the ball will be delivered: far fewer variables than in open play.
Before the 2018 World Cup, Gareth Southgate realized that practicing standard figures was effective: relatively big gains for relatively little work. The result was England’s best World Cup since 1990, based largely on Harry Maguire and John Stones, who were good in the air, and Kieran Trippier’s delivery.
Countless managers over the years have come to a similar conclusion: good balls in the box plus big boys plus organization equals a threat, no matter what difference in ability there may be in other areas of the game.
Postecoglou does not seem to share this opinion. After North London derby defeat, when all three of Tottenham’s goals conceded came from corners – two from Arsenal and one from their own – he pointed out that his sides often initially struggled to defend set-pieces, but then improved. “There’s an underlying reason for that that I’m very, very comfortable with,” he said. “At the end of the day, I’m going to build a team that’s successful, and it’s not going to be because of working on stage pieces.”
His vision seems to be holistic: he sees the standard pieces as part of a larger whole, not as a separate part of the game. In one sense, Postecoglou is right: entering the weekend, Spurs had conceded 14 set-piece goals this season. In terms of goals conceded, only Nottingham Forest have a higher proportion coming from set pieces. Even if that figure could be halved, which would be a remarkable success, it would not reduce the gap to Manchester City or Arsenal. If Spurs are to reach the league’s elite, it will be by improving coherence and consistency in the game more generally, which will almost certainly require some strengthening of the squad.
More contentious is the suggestion that improvements elsewhere will lead to an improvement in corner protection – although they may reduce the number of corners allowed, which would obviously be a big help. That’s certainly not how the many clubs now employing standards specialists see it.
But then this has been a fundamental problem almost since the beginning of coaching: once you’ve broken down the game into its component parts that can be practiced, how do you put it back together to make it fit for the smooth whole? Soccer is the most fluid of all the major ball sports, the one with the fewest fixed points and the longest passages between kicks, and this makes it difficult to analyze and predict, and therefore to practice.
This is periodization, the theory introduced by Vítor Frade, a a huge influence on Jose Mourinho and a whole generation of Portuguese coaches set out to cope. At its most basic, if Tottenham had conceded not 14 set-piece goals but 10, if they had scored three or four more than the 11 they managed, that might have been enough to draw level with Aston Villa.
Jover was Thomas Frank’s assistant manager at Brentford when he joined Manchester City as a specialist in 2019. That in itself is telling; when Pep Guardiola was at Barcelona, with a team largely made up of diminutive technicians, corners were usually an opportunity to return the ball to the midfield to create an opportunity for the practiced moves in which they specialized, something of a part of the open game. Nobody was throwing crosses to attack Gerard Pique and Sergio Busquets.
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As Guardiola evolved and adapted, he decided it was worth working on individual scenes. Jover’s impact was immediate: in his first season at the Etihad, City scored more goals from set-pieces than any other team in the league and conceded the second fewest. But what is perhaps most significant is the change in Guardiola’s mentality that he has come to see set-pieces as a part of the game worth practicing and treating differently.
Arteta was clearly impressed and convinced Jover to join Arsenal in 2021 when Andreas Georgsson returned to Malmö. The season before Jover arrived, Arsenal scored six goals from set pieces (not including penalties); under him they’ve scored 16, 15 and this season so far 22. Set goals allowed have remained largely unchanged at around six.
This season Arsenal have a net win of 16 sets. That’s just two more than City – not much, although when the title race can come down to goal difference, it doesn’t matter either.
Tottenham, meanwhile, have conceded three more than they have scored this season from set pieces. In other words, set pieces alone play 19 of the 49 difference between Arsenal and Tottenham’s goal difference.
Postecoglou is right that an improvement in set-piece play alone would not be enough to propel Tottenham into the elite, but identical set-piece plays do account for around 40% of the difference; however, the bigger issue is whether he is right that when the overall game improves, the set play will necessarily improve with it.
Arteta clearly believed his side needed more help in this area. So far, his belief in the value of specialization is paying off.
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