The quality of our corners, free kicks and crosses are very very poor. How many times have we seen our corners, free kicks and crosses fail to pass the first defender? Do we practice these fundamentals in training? Because if the evidence on the pitch is anything to go by, then we need to practice a hell of a lot more. Set plays win matches. Chelsea are superb on free kicks and corners, and Arsenal and Manchester United are not far behind. We rarely get the ball over, and when we do, we rarely attack it with any confidence and conviction. We should be doing a lot better and scoring more from these dead ball situations.
Alex Miller and Angel Vales. Remember these names as they are the main training staff who are degrading our players day by day and providing wrong statistics to the manager. It makes me wonder what they do in training. We should get rid of them first before getting rid of misfits like Kuyt, Kewell, Riise, Aurelio or Pennant. We were already crap even when Paco was here, so don't come telling me its his departure that brought us to this situation. In almost every game, we are getting countless corners and free kicks which end up going no where and wasted.
Despite the Inter win, I still maintain that the tinker man had it all wrong yet again. And had we lost, everyone would have descended on him like a ton of bricks. We played against 10 for most of the game and the 2 goals we scored were almost accidental. Its as if the brief is for every player to take as many shot as possible in the hope that one of those will hit the target. There was hardly any well constructed moves. Even the ball down the middle to Torres, which he missed, was accidental. The rest appeared hap hazardous and clueless. I don't expect us to go past the next stage with this squad.
If I were training this squad , I would have every one of them doing two sessions a day, everyday. I would have:
- Gerrard, Bennyoun, Babel, Finnan and Kewell praticing free kicks and corners time and time again until they got things right.
- Finnan, Pennant, Bennyoun and Babel practicing crosses.
- Hypia, Carragher, Skrtel, Agger, Torres and Couch practicing getting on the end of these corners, crosses and free kicks.
- Carragher and Riise learning how to play the ball out from defence rather than hoof the ball upfield.
- Crouch learning how to head the ball correctly.
- Babel taught how to take the man on and beat him, plus shown how to keep his shots down.
- Kuyt, well I think I'd be out on the training pitch till midnight every night showing him exactly where the goal is and how to shoot on goal, plus explain that he should be in the 6 yard box rather than over by the corner flag.
- Kewell I would show him how to break sweat and Riise would be shown how to keep the ball from hitting low flying aircrafts.
Seriously, are our training staff coaching these things correctly? Because its sure as hell doesn't look like like it. These training exercises are basic skills, yet so many of our players seem to lack them. It does make you question what they actually do in training.
Friday, February 22, 2008
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3 comments:
Dude, they call me the resident pessimist around these parts, but you beat me hands down – in your sleep, with your arms and feet restrained and a harem of nubile girls doing… err you get the point.
Things are not well, nothing’s gone according to the script, but perhaps we should do our part by getting behind the team and not gouge our eyes out over their many failings? They may be crap, but they are giving their all (most of them anyways…) representing us.
At any rate, I find that thinking fondly back to the times when we went “Kuyt tired? Never! :)” makes our current predicament very much less painful.
YNWA.
It has been widely reported that we are bad with set pieces, yet if you look at the statistics, we are not that far behind the other teams, off the top of my head we scored from free kicks against Villa, Arsenal & Derby, while we also put away from corners against Marseille, Porto, Newcastle and many more.
The thing is that there semm to be a campaign against Liverpool by all the journalist, most of them would love to turn any failings into a big crisis and write about it. The thing is that other teams are just as bad if not worst when it comes to set pieces, rotation etc etc. To me, it is lazy journalism when one would take a look at a couple of matches and proudly declared "Liverpool's set piece crisis continues!" in big, bold letters.
Just because we don't have players like Beckham (he's crap anyway) or Bentley who bends the ball and nestle at the top corner, we are bad at set pieces? If you dig out our games this season, Gerrard regularly sends the ball over the wall and into dangerous area with his free kicks and we have converted a good number of those or made the keeper work hard in keeping the ball out.
On corners, I have noticed that we have improve this season with the variety of delivery and the way we approach them. The thing is that there's no use to cross the ball into a penalty area full with strong, tall defenders when you don't have someone there to challenge, rather play it short and draw the players out before hitting it behind the defence. We have seen that a number of times and it was quite effective. More importantly, our game does not revolve around set pieces like Bolton, Villa or Boro, our game is more about possession and controlling the tempo and opposition, finding their weakness and draw them out to take advantage of.
True, we should be looking to make more out of free kicks and corners, but one thing is if you compare last season and this, we do score quite a number from free kicks and corners, as mention earlier, perhaps you were looking for the curler to the top corner or the blast from Riise like the one in 2001 against Man U, you can see both in this season, Gerrard for both mind you, one against Villa in the opening game (an exquisite curl) and Arsenal (one of the many blasts). If that doesn't satisfy you, I don't know what does, and if we are to score everytime we get a corner or freekick, then we would be winning every game 8 - 0, which is stuff from FIFA 2007 or FM 2007.
Oh yeah, I am not even going to touch on the criticism of the training methods and thank god that we have proper coaches to take charges of the team.
Julez, a bit unfair to criticize the team's performance against Inter if you ask me. More so after a convincing win albeit against 10-men. Look, it doesn't always mean that you're going to massacre a team just because they are 1-man down. Not least against Italians who are masters in the art of defending.
Another point I'm not in agreement is that fact that we were crap even before Paco left. WE WERE NOT! We had the best start in the league in umpteen years and things only started to go downhill after he left. I said in another thread that it might be a coincidence but then again it might not.
In any case, I agree that we should do much better at set pieces. I do not have the stats to support this or how many we have scored from set pieces so far this season. Perhaps we need a resident statistician here?
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