I thought our newfound prowess from set pieces deserved its own thread. Mous has done one hell of a job on them.
Just saw this graphic on Twitter and thought it was very interesting.
I appreciate it's fairly simplistic, but my main takeaways, looking at League 1, were that
A) We're surprisingly not that good, relative to the division, from attacking set plays. Pretty middle-of-the-pack. I suppose that's because we've only really started scoring prolifically from them recently (5 in our last 6 league games, I think?), but I intuitively thought we'd be better.
B) The correlation between prowess at set pieces and league position is pretty exact. Hull and Lincoln have the best GD, while Burton, Rochdale and Wigan have the three worst defences against set pieces (Swindon a notable exception). An interesting chicken and egg question for me - are they top of the league because they have the best players, and that quality is reflected in their dominance from dead ball situations? Or are they top of the league in part because, in a league of fine margins, they make the most of those dead ball situations? I'm tempted to think the latter, which is good news for us: with a dedicated set piece specialist on the coaching staff, a squad full of dead ball experts (Henry, Forde, Kelly, Grayson, etc.) and some big targets in the box (Moore, Atkinson, Ruffels), we must have the most danger we've had at corners in years.
Just saw this graphic on Twitter and thought it was very interesting.
I appreciate it's fairly simplistic, but my main takeaways, looking at League 1, were that
A) We're surprisingly not that good, relative to the division, from attacking set plays. Pretty middle-of-the-pack. I suppose that's because we've only really started scoring prolifically from them recently (5 in our last 6 league games, I think?), but I intuitively thought we'd be better.
B) The correlation between prowess at set pieces and league position is pretty exact. Hull and Lincoln have the best GD, while Burton, Rochdale and Wigan have the three worst defences against set pieces (Swindon a notable exception). An interesting chicken and egg question for me - are they top of the league because they have the best players, and that quality is reflected in their dominance from dead ball situations? Or are they top of the league in part because, in a league of fine margins, they make the most of those dead ball situations? I'm tempted to think the latter, which is good news for us: with a dedicated set piece specialist on the coaching staff, a squad full of dead ball experts (Henry, Forde, Kelly, Grayson, etc.) and some big targets in the box (Moore, Atkinson, Ruffels), we must have the most danger we've had at corners in years.
