RowJimmy I think the point is that we have found another solution, namely forcing a ton of corners and scoring a historically remarkable number of goals from them. It's still not clear to me why this is any more unsustainable than any other form of success that other teams try to figure out how to stop (and often do eventually, tactics are cyclical).
Part of it is the way we pin teams back generates all these corners. If they try to come out more than we do have other options.
These comments intrigued me and I’ve gone down a rabbit hole of stats.
We don’t seem to be particularly more notable at winning corners than other teams and average about 7.5 corners per game. Us pinning the teams back in the way we do doesn’t seem to have much of a multiplier effect on corner generation over our rivals. You're needing an impressive conversion rate to keep that sustainable as a solution to combatting low blocks. Interestingly, we only had four corners against Palace and it was the second lowest this season after just 2 against Leeds. Granted, there are also free kicks and throw ins in addition to corners though.
I suspect it’s a higher but not a ‘historically remarkable’ number of goals from corners, and the effect is being magnified by scoring fewer open play goals, resulting in a skewed ratio compared to previous seasons or comparators. Though it’s a small sample for now. Set pieces historically account for 22-26% of goals on average (Opta). This year across the league its currently at 30%, we’re at 69%.
Since Leicester won the league the fewest goals scored by a league winner is 83. After 9 games in we’re about 4 goals off the average pace of meeting that a lowly 83 goal target. There is important context – tough opening run including United, City, Liverpool and Newcastle; injuries; new signings etc. The standards of recent years mean we need to be scoring far more than we are, and your view on the current ‘solution’ of set-piece v open-play goals isn’t getting us to that point. If we continued at the current ratio to the level of goals we need, we’d be looking at 50+ set piece goals and around 30ish from open play – that’s just not a long term solution.
What will no doubt happen is we’ll get players back and be better, score more and have a bit more variation. Teams will likely get a bit better at working out how to defend and we’ll score less, or refs no doubt will get a bit stronger on blocking and penalise how we move. The point, and concern of some, is that when we inevitably get injuries, goals dry up and we don’t have that variation, in either tactics or alternative options.
RowJimmy My suspicion is that when our corners started to dry up it had to do with who was injured. And as I said, there's no strategy that protects against the loss of the players most important to that strategy.
And that's why it's not a sustainable solution itself. It should be one tool of several we can use, but at present we're overreliant on it.
