“Our setup is slightly different, but the biggest reason is that things have gone back to normal,” Arne Slot rationalised after victory over West Ham at the weekend, where Liverpool scored three times from corner situations in the first half of a 5-2 win.
Seven of Liverpool’s last nine Premier League goals, in fact, have come from set-pieces and five of those were corners. The uptick has addressed a severe imbalance from the first half of the season where Liverpool briefly held the worst set-play record in Europe’s top five leagues.
Slot might not like it, it might hurt his “football heart”, as he claimed on Monday, but accepting the Premier League’s new reality is really the only logical and sustainable play here. If you can’t beat them, join them.
Virgil van Dijk scored from a corner in victory over West Ham
So, how have Liverpool gone from the league’s worst-ranked team to one of the best in a matter of weeks? Acceptance is often the first step to recovery.
Set-piece supremacy was not in Slot’s playbook to begin with but slowly he’s come around to the idea, so much so that he has taken on the responsibility himself alongside coaching assistants Sipke Hulshoff and Giovanni van Bronckhorst. Set-piece analyst Lewis Mahoney has been given a greater voice, too, with no plans to bring in a new set-piece specialist.
Perhaps coincidentally, but likely not, this new dead-ball efficiency has materialised after the departure of set-piece coach Aaron Briggs at the end of December, with the manager now favouring collective charge of set-play commands. Under Slot’s instruction, and in line with most other teams in the league, inswinging corners have become commonplace.
It’s clear the six-yard box is now targeted by most teams in order to cause maximum chaos by aerial bombardment. Arsenal are the masters of it. Liverpool are late adopters, but generally this is a league-wide trend.
Offensive teams are placing 3.25 players in the six-yard box on average, up from 2.51 last season – which itself was the first season this metric had gone above two. As a result, defensive teams are now having to put 7.33 players in the six-yard area, up from 6.67 last term.
It particularly restricts space for goalkeepers and reduces the likelihood of them making first contact.
On corners crossed directly, 81 per cent are now inswingers, up from 71 per cent, with previous seasons hovering around 59 per cent. For Liverpool specifically, the inswinger has been of great value to Virgil van Dijk and Hugo Ekitike, and those who mop up the second phase, like Alexis Mac Allister.
Each of the Reds’ last three league outings, all wins, have contained a corner goal. Across that run, 28 corners have been taken with 70 per cent of them landing directly in the centre of the six-yard box, i.e. the sweet spot. A comparison between their corner locations before Slot took ownership shows a staggering percentage decrease in deliveries that hit that same optimum zone for a goalscoring action – just 19 per cent.
The three corner goals they scored against West Ham were helped in no small part by their opponents, who were particularly erratic in their defensive duties, but it was telling that all three crosses swung inwards. This ploy has a higher success rate directly, as evidenced by Van Dijk’s header, and indirectly, as shown by Ekitike’s opener.
Mateus Fernandes even told Sky Sports at full-time at Anfield that his side had worked all week on a plan to stop Van Dijk, now the second-highest scoring central defender in Premier League history behind John Terry. It failed quite spectacularly.
Nuno Espirito Santo was left scratching his head after West Ham failed in their efforts to stop Liverpool from corner
For the third goal, the Hammers criminally allowed three contacts on the ball without intervention as Mac Allister netted from Mohamed Salah’s delivery – this time dropping the ball a bit shorter for Van Dijk to flick at the front post. Perhaps that entire phase says more about West Ham than it does about Liverpool, but the point still stands.
This improvement has been trending upwards for weeks now.
Simple movement helps too. Ekitike’s 6ft 3in frame and positional intelligence is key to this, used in different ways in each goal at the weekend. He holds the space in the box and then finishes the first, acts as a prop to draw defenders away for the second, and peels to the back post to assist the third.
When Ekitike’s most reliable supply line, Florian Wirtz, is unavailable to provide passes from open play – either because he has been nullified or is absent altogether, as was the case here – it’s vital that Liverpool’s only fit striker can be a set-play threat. This becomes even more more important when you consider Slot’s side are the fourth-highest generators of corner kicks in the division (163) – with only seven fewer than Arsenal (170).
The Gunners might still be the gold standard in terms of set-play conversion, but as Dutchman has acknowledged many times and is illustrated in the graphic above, Liverpool have never been shy of set-play creation.
Now, with the help of some subtle tweaks to zonal play and delivery, they are finally making good on those chances.
