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Talk on Corners

28 Sunday Mar 2021

Posted by David Smallwood in Sport Sunday

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Corners, Football, Leeds United, Premier League, Sport Sunday

“(Still) Hittin’ them corners in them lo-los girl”

From “Still D.R.E” by Dr. Dre featuring Snoop Dogg

In their first season in the Premier League for 16 years, Leeds United have been accused of being too vulnerable to set pieces and especially corners. This defensive fragility has been apparent from 20 minutes into the opening game of the season against Liverpool, when the German centre-back making his debut, Robin Koch, lost his man and allowed Virgil van Dijk to make it 2-1. Conceding from corners has continued to plague Leeds until the last game before the international break, when Joachim Andersen got the better of Luke Ayling at the far post and volleyed Ademola Lookman’s out-swinging cross into the net.

Between these two games, Leeds let in another nine goals from corners, bringing the total up to 11 in the first 29 games of the 2020/21 season. During this period, Leeds have given away 160 corners, meaning they have a 6.875% chance of conceding from one, the worst record in the whole league:

TeamGames PlayedCorners ConcededGoals Conceded from Corners%
Leeds United29160116.875%
Brighton & Hove Albion2911986.723%
Liverpool298256.098%
Sheffield United2917795.085%
Wolverhampton Wanderers2914374.895%
Manchester United2912464.839%
Leicester City2915274.605%
Crystal Palace2916174.348%
West Ham United2914264.225%
Newcastle United2916863.571%
Everton2815953.145%
Chelsea2912843.125%
Arsenal2913143.053%
Burnley2917742.260%
West Bromwich Albion2918742.139%
Southampton2914232.113%
Aston Villa2813821.449%
Tottenham Hotspur2914821.351%
Fulham3015221.316%
Manchester City308811.136%
Total58028781033.579%
Goals Conceded from Corners

My brother has a theory as to why Leeds are so bad at corners: He conjectures that because Leeds rarely score from set pieces in matches, and especially corners, they also rarely score them in training. It therefore creates the illusion that the defence is amazing when corners are practiced, but it is actually just symptomatic of a wasteful attack that makes them look good.

If this was the case, then Leeds would not only have the highest rate of conceding from corners, but also one of the lowest rates of turning corners into goals. Leeds are actually the fifth worst, behind Arsenal, Crystal Palace, Leicester City and Brighton & Hove Albion:

TeamGames Played Corners WonGoals Scored from Corners%
Arsenal2915221.316%
Crystal Palace2911021.818%
Leicester City2915231.974%
Brighton & Hove Albion2917042.353%
Leeds United2917252.907%
Sheffield United2913143.053%
Aston Villa2816353.067%
Fulham3012943.101%
Southampton2912743.150%
Liverpool2918863.191%
Newcastle United2912343.252%
Manchester United2915053.333%
West Bromwich Albion2910143.960%
Manchester City3019984.020%
Tottenham Hotspur2911754.274%
Burnley2911454.386%
Wolverhampton Wanderers2915274.605%
Chelsea2917995.028%
Everton2811986.723%
West Ham United2913096.923%
Total58028781033.579%
Goals Scored from Corners

So, while I think the inability to defend corners reliably is partly attributable to this, I do not think it is the whole story.

There is another aspect of training under manager, Marcelo Bielsa, that the players talk about with inappropriate smiles and have nicknamed ‘Murderball’. It involves 11 players against 11, the same as in a normal match, but there are no stoppages. If the ball goes out of play, staff are waiting to throw it or another ball back in. Jermaine Jenas has said he would have loved Murderball because it would have avoided people wasting time arguing whether there was a foul or free kick or not.

Murderball keeps the players extremely fit, to the point where some of the players say that the Wednesday training is harder than the actual matches, but like everything, it has its disadvantages. It does not reflect the reality of competitive matches and may be another reason Leeds concede from corners. I am not saying that Leeds do not also practice set pieces and corners, but part of Bielsa’s philosophy is for players to repeatedly try things that are difficult in training so when they are faced with having to do them in matches, they become natural. Playing a game in which there are essentially no boundaries could, potentially, make something that could not happen in a game the first instinct.

It is also worth noting that the heightened state of fitness that drills like this create, combined with weigh-ins and timed runs, is the great equaliser that got a team mostly comprised of players who finished mid-table in the Championship into the Promised Land of the Premier League, but it is less of an advantage at set pieces and corners.

The above possibilities suggest ways that the whole team is responsible for conceding from corners, but there is also the matter of individual errors. I looked through all 11 goals that Leeds have conceded from corners to see if there was a particular player who was out of position or some other pattern.

I have already mentioned Koch and Ayling’s mistakes against Liverpool and Fulham, respectively. In the 4-1 away defeat to Crystal Palace, Koch and Liam Cooper both jumped with Scott Dann but were unable to stop him from heading it in. When Kurt Zouma scored for Chelsea, Cooper, who was marking him, ended up sitting on the floor with his arms spread out and appealing for a foul because of what I think is a trip by Olivier Giroud. In the 2-1 home defeat to West Ham, Tomáš Souček rose above Stuart Dallas to head in from a Vladimír Coufal corner.

In the 5-2 win over Newcastle United, it was Ayling who lost Ciaran Clark. In the devastating 6-2 loss to Manchester United, Patrick Bamford should have been in front of Anthony Martial and Dallas should also have challenged him before he flicked it on. When Lindelöf came in at the far post, it was Kalvin Phillips who was beaten. In the 3-0 loss to Tottenham Hotspur, Bamford got caught out and Phillips was beaten to it by Toby Alderweireld.

Perhaps the most egregious of the corners was in the 2-1 home loss to Everton, when Ben Godfrey beat both Dallas and Cooper to flick the ball across goal, where Dominic Calvert-Lewin escaped both Pascal Struijk and Ayling to launch a diving header into the back of the net. There were a few more passes leading up to the only goal in the 1-0 defeat to Aston Villa, but it was ultimately Helder Costa who lost the scorer, Anwar El Ghazi. For the last corner, it was Diego Llorente, who has only played seven matches this season due to injury, who lost Craig Dawson in the second defeat to West Ham.

The common denominator in all of these is not a player but that each player lost their man at the corner, which makes all the above hypothesising irrelevant. You can make complicated theories based around statistics and training methods all you like, but to paraphrase Gary Lineker, football is a simple game: twenty-two men chase a ball around for ninety minutes and at some point, Leeds United will concede a goal from a corner.

Georginio Wijnaldum and the Bullet Header

01 Sunday Jan 2017

Posted by David Smallwood in Sport Sunday

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Bullet Header, Footymology, Georginio Wijnaldum

“One of the things I did that would indicate my apartness, if it even had developed at that point, was that I would announce baseball games. I remember walking along the street with my cousins, announcing the game, and one of them just slapped me in the back of the head and said ‘shut up’. That didn’t last very long, my sports announcing.”

– Don DeLillo, Interview in The Guardian

If you put your hand over your mouth and say ‘Ronaldo’, it sounds like you’re saying ‘Wijnaldum’.

How I came to discover this scintillating revelation I am unable to disclose because a magician never reveals his secrets and a thirty-one-year-old man never wonders what it would sound like to hear the announcers on an AM radio across the street, places a hand over his mouth to simulate such an imaginary noise and then pretends to join in with the commentary. I am not Don DeLillo indicating my apartness, if only because there are presently no cousins in the vicinity to do me the service of slapping me in the back of the head, about which important organ the majority of this blog concerns.

In the much-anticipated fixture between second-placed Liverpool and third-placed Manchester City at Anfield yesterday, a high-scoring result was expected due to both sides’ lethal attacks and porous defences. The immutable Law of Murphy dictated there would actually be only a solitary goal scored by Georginio, or Gini, Wijnaldum, who I now prefer to think of as the gagged Ronaldo, with what was described by more than one commentator as a ‘bullet header’.

The beautiful game is replete with militaristic terminology – aiming, attacking, armies of supporters – err, – Arsenal – and that’s just some of the As. (Ed: You can’t make both these jokes, the one suggesting you’re struggling to think of examples and the other contradicting the first by suggesting there’s a plethora.) (I can and I will. The reader will understand my inconsistency is sincere.) (Ed: Okay, but on your head be it.) (Ha! That’s good. I’m gonna include this whole conversation.) This particular example of martial lingo infiltrating the parlance of the country’s most popular sport has always struck me, like the bullet that fortunately never has, as particularly misguided.

First, let’s dive like Steven Gerrard definitely never did into a bit of what I shall call ‘footymology’, a portmanteau of ‘football’ and ‘etymology’. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, ‘Header’ meant executioner or headsman in the mid-fifteenth century, while ‘Bullet’ with its present meaning as ammunition was first used in English in the mid-sixteenth century, meaning that if a time-traveller from these earlier ages heard the phrase ‘bullet header’, he would think it referred to a person whose occupation was shooting people’s heads off, which is a ridiculous role for a footballer. Everyone knows that’s the manager’s job.

When a footballer strikes a ball with his feet, it is called a ‘kick’. When a goalkeeper is unable to catch a ball, he will often scramble to parry it away with his hands, and that is called a ‘punch’, or if he does not have ‘command’ of his arms or the necessary foresight, he will ‘fumble’ it away, or flap at it like the man who was nicknamed ‘Flappy-Hands-Ski’.

If a goal comes off the shin, the player has shinned it, but it is not called a shinner, or if it is it is only to disparage the goal. If a player uses his chest to knock the ball down he has chested it, but it is not called a chester, partly because that sounds stupid and partly to avoid confusion with the Roman city where Hollyoaks is filmed. Shinned or chested are used as verbs but only because the action is unnatural. To the best of my knowledge, nobody goes into hand-to-hand combat with the intention of shinning or chesting someone as far as I am aware, but if there IS such an obscure martial art, I imagine practiced by Zlatan Ibrahimović in order to score dangerous and skilful goals that get disallowed, then I would very much be interested in enquiring further about it. When there is a handball, the questions usually asked are whether it was intentional or whether the hand or arm is in an unnatural position, but clearly your head is never in an unnatural position, unless you have been the victim of the aforementioned ruthless time-travelling bullet-header from the Renaissance.

Neither of the verbs ‘punch’ or ‘kick’ seems to bear any etymological relation to the extremity performing the action in question like the word header does. The hyphenated ‘head-butt’ or just the second half of that word would seem the closest without using ‘header’ but they are simply never utilised: Nobody except Zinedine Zidane in a World Cup Final head-butts in football, and using the sole word ‘butts’ sounds anachronistic and needlessly filthy. (Had I the time and inclination, of which I have far too much of the former and less than a little of the latter, I would create a highlight reel of ‘bullet headers’ to the soundtrack of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”, making sure to include an accidental ‘bullet header’ own goal under the line “And a round thing in your face”.)

Nobody hits a bullet free-kick or bullet penalty, no defender makes a bullet tackle and no goalkeeper bullet punches the ball. The action of a header is not a bullet. If anything the ball is a bullet, the header is the shooting of a shotgun, but ‘shotgun header’ is probably too on-the-nose, or whichever other part of the head from which it is controlled, usually the forehead.

What a ‘bullet header’ implies is a swift and straight trajectory. As far as I am aware, although the bullet’s design may assist with the speed and direction, the gun is very much necessary for these to have any effect. I expect nobody has ever died from having a bullet thrown at them. If anything, the speed and trajectory are related to the barrel of the firearm. ‘Barrel header’, however, sounds like it’s either been rolled in off slanting platforms like the kegs launched at Jumpman by Donkey Kong or luckily gone in like a dipsomaniac managing to get his key in the lock first time.

This leads us to the problem of how best to describe what has previously been called a ‘bullet header’ if shotgun header is too violent and barrel header sounds too clumsy. I therefore propose removing the human volition from the phrase and replacing it with something that is naturally quick and direct: the meteor header.

If you take nothing else away from this blog, let it be this: If you put your hand over your mouth and say ‘Ronaldo’, it sounds like you’re saying ‘Wijnaldum’, and yesterday he scored a meteor header.

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