Ah, corners! The best available data is from the PL, and that shows that a team will score from one in about 40-50 corners. I suspect it is a little better as you go down the leagues, but still nothing to justify the level of excitement a corner generates in a football crowd.Miss Tickle's bottom wrote:We win lots of corners. We're not particularly effective from them. So I was pleased in the first half when the team tried a rehearsed short one, involving passes between Roberts, Bennett and Baker. It was an imaginative move which failed due to a poor touch from, I think, Bennett. The reaction from the crowd - howls of derision, people screaming "Just get it in the f****** box!".
In Pompey's case, we have smallish forwards, and not the most threatening of CBs (Webster was good; Clarke is OK), so swinging the ball into the box against L2 CBs is doomed to failure. The key is variation: short corners, passes to the edge of the box, deep corners to a player from the opposite wing, etc., to keep the opposition honest. Then a "normal" corner comes as a surprise, so can also be effective. Of course, the problem is that a hoof into the box is relatively easy (and the crowd understands it), whereas variations require practice and can much more easily go wrong, which risks the wrath of the supporters.
Worth noting that Barcelona (with a similar size issue) take almost all their corners short, and have come to view them as just another way of getting the ball into play, not much different to an attacking throw-in. Unfortunately, we are not that good, but we do need to be far more inventive with corners to overcome the physical disadvantages. Not easy to explain that at FP on a Saturday afternoon!
