KopTalk.com Forums Football Liverpool FC Forum If only we were better at corners

We would win the league. I think we had 11 corners on Saturday and if we could take a few chances, we would win with less effort. It's true that we don't have a lot of tall players, especially forwards, but that's one of the main areas where improvement will make a huge difference. I also thought VVD would score more from corners.

Vvd scored on his debut against Everton and from there I thought we will be stronger from corners with Lovren also a strong header of the ball but it's been quiet. I also blame the delivery because none of our takers seem to know how to cross properly.

I've said this for years but the last player to take a decent corner for us was Gary McAllister

If we score four from open play why does it matter that we don’t score from a corner?

Despite a lot of opinion to the contrary, not a great percentage of goals are scored from corners anyway, probably due to the concentration of players in the box, all getting in each others way. I've long since stopped expecting to score from corners. Indeed if we checked, it might emerge that some of our best breakaway goals have been scored from opposition corners.

We will also win the league if we get more points than other teams.

It does infuriate to watch us waste corner kicks and invariably free kicks. It's obvious very little time is spent on them in our training.

The last World Cup gave us a glimpse into just how effective they can be with 30% of the Tournament's goals having come from set pieces, outpacing the previous highs of (02' & '06) 23% among the most recent World Cups.

A given tourny produces a relatively smaller sample size, but that 30% of all goals that were scored at last summer's World Cup on corners and free kicks is significantly higher the rate last season in the top leagues of Germany 21.8%, England 20.2%, Italy 18.5%, Spain 16.9% and France 15.6%.

Southgate seen the benefit of practising set pieces on the lead up to the World Cup, which seen England get to the semi-final with a team not given much of a chance at the start of the tourny. England created a tourny leading 22 goal scoring chances on set-pieces through it's first 5 games and converted them into 5 goals.

For a club like Liverpool who have been meticulous through the FSG era when it comes to stats it's surprising that we don't have any real focus on our set pieces.

PL clubs' set-piece goals 2017/18* - Corner / Free Kicks / Pens

Man City 17 (5 pens)

Man Utd 15 (1 pen)

Spurs 15 (2 pens)

Liverpool 11 (2 pens)

Chelsea 13 (3 pens)

Arsenal 19 (4 pens)

We had the lowest % of goals scored for corners and free kicks last season amongst the given Top 6 teams.

If we could put more focus on them in training we could reap the rewards.

Because we can win by putting less effort. Our first goal was from an offside position and that made our task easier as they had to attack. Also, I am not talking of this game only, we usually get a lot of corners.

Brilliant, I didn't think about this one.