Corner Takers

[theessexfox]

Our corners have been poor for the majority of the season, and we haven't scored many until tonight... 2, taken by Matty James.

So in an ideal situation, who'd be taking corners? James? Waghorn? Gallagher? Marshall?

[KFS]

James and his lean back and punt technique

[martyn]

If he takes them like that consistently, then James. Lovely pace and trajectory on the delivery.

[Fox92]

James' corners were excellent, why hasn't he taken them all season? Not only did we score two, but Keane had a good chance as well.

Best corner taker in years if those two are anything to go by.

[Mark_w]

I never want to see Marshall or Knockaert take a corner while James is on the pitch again.

[BoneDog]

The very first one tonight was whipped in beautifully and the majority of the rest followed suit. Encouraging.

[NewburyFox]

Why hasn't he been taking them all season? Genuinely stunned at a) how consistently good they were and b) why it's taken us until mid-April with four games left to let him take one. Either he hasn't taken one in training all season or we're forced to let a wide player take them for some unknown reason. Bizarre.

[Harry - LCFC]

Shows good management really. They saw something wrong and allowed James to take corners at Brighton instead of Marshall although this should've been done a while ago.

[brockmyster]

Finally a decent corner its only been about two years coming

[Leicester Lass]

Shows good management really. They saw something wrong and allowed James to take corners at Brighton instead of Marshall although this should've been done a while ago.

Good management? I'd argue it's the other way round. They see James in training all season, yet he only starts taking corners with half a dozen games to go.

[teblin]

Not as good I know, but James is reminding more and more of Lennon. Breaks up play, passes a ball well and is now showing he can take set pieces. Hope he continues to improve and we have a good player on our hands.

[Blue will]

I never want to see Marshall or Knockaert take a corner while James is on the pitch again.

Agree

[WilmslowFox]

Seems like a good time to resurrect this old thread, given the number of corners that have been won and then wasted in the last couple of games.  Five years ago there was a suggestion that Matty James should be taking corners - is there still an argument for this?

 

From what I've seen of the U23 games, George Thomas may well be the best corner taker that Leicester have on their books, but sadly he hasn't had a chance to break into the first team yet.

[KingsX]

Good question.

 

Albrighton and Mahrez have the skill required to place corners.  Maybe we need to refocus on varying basic set piece tactics like screens, runs, etc.  If you want to play to heads you need targets like Slimani, Ulloa, Huth, or a younger Wes Morgan ... oops. 

 

If they mark Maguire out (or just let him push, because a guy that big collects the foul every time) what big, strong target have we got?  James is immobile.  Iborra is on the bench.

[ScouseFox]

think if you actually look into it we score more from corners/more goals per corner than most other teams in Europe. just one day soon (probably not seen as it's taken about 200 years and it's still the same) people will realise that a corner is basically not a goalscoring chance. everyone is marked and everyone on the defending team is drilled to know what to do when a corner comes into the box. much more likely to score from a cross in open play. 

 

basically corners are a myth, yet people seem to think we should be scoring from every other attempt. 

[Leeds Fox]

A couple of seasons ago we were more dangerous from the oppositions corners than our own. 

[Captain...]

8 minutes ago, ScouseFox said:

think if you actually look into it we score more from corners/more goals per corner than most other teams in Europe. just one day soon (probably not seen as it's taken about 200 years and it's still the same) people will realise that a corner is basically not a goalscoring chance. everyone is marked and everyone on the defending team is drilled to know what to do when a corner comes into the box. much more likely to score from a cross in open play. 

 

basically corners are a myth, yet people seem to think we should be scoring from every other attempt. 

In the last few games we have failed to even give ourselves a chance of scoring from numerous corners, whether our terribly executed short corners (I'm a short corner fan, but we have been shit at them), or just aimless pumps into the keeper's arms. I know that scoring from corners is difficult, but if you don't score you still need to put the defending team under pressure and a well executed corner, basically past the first man and away from the keeper will cause panic and could lead to a chance. I'm a big fan of doing something different at corners, have a shot, just drill it as hard as you can, play it short work the angle, stick everyone on the Keeper, or even keep everyone out of the box and just confuse the opposition. We have a tendency to just surrender possession from corners and release any pressure we've been building.

 

The same goes for Fuchs' long throws a good option to have but if we do it every time then it gets easier to defend. Variation is key.

Edited 5 March 2018 by Captain...

[ScouseFox]

1 minute ago, Captain... said:

In the last few games we have failed to even give ourselves a chance of scoring from numerous corners, whether our terribly executed short corners (I'm a short corner fan, but we have been shit at them), or just aimless pumps into the keeper's arms. I know that scoring from corners is difficult, but they keep the pressure, put the defending team under pressure and a well executed corner, basically past the first man and away from the keeper will cause panic and could lead to a chance. I'm a big fan of doing something different at corners, have a shot, just drill it as hard as you can, play it short work the angle, stick everyone on the Keeper, or even keep everyone out of the box and just confuse the opposition. We have a tendency to just surrender possession from corners and release any pressure we've been building.

 

The same goes for Fuchs' long throws a good option to have but if we do it every time then it gets easier to defend. Variation is key.

I mean the stats massively disagree with you here. james had a huge chance from a corner early on vs stoke. Maguire hit the post late on (think that was from a corner?). iheanacho missed from inside the goal as well as at least one other goal line clearance in the game at the weekend. in that game harry Maguire had SEVEN attempts on goal, that is a lot of chances from corners/set plays. going back a few games earlier, ndidi hit the bar and iheanacho hit the post/somehow again missed from basically inside the goal away at everton.

 

obviously we're not going to create high quality chances from every corner, and some are really badly wasted, but I don't think that's just us as a team. 

 

good article here about how our corner kick routines regularly produce better chances than the rest of the league: https://medium.com/@MoeSquare/fox-in-the-box-examining-leicesters-corner-kick-routines-a71075882a17

[KingsX]

14 minutes ago, ScouseFox said:

basically corners are a myth, yet people seem to think we should be scoring from every other attempt. 

I found this from the Washington Post, that peerless source for sport ... 

 

Corner kicks are not particularly valuable events in soccer. When the defending team knocks the ball out behind their goal line, this is usually a positive defensive action, as possession around the penalty area is dangerous. Corner kicks, while they can produce goals, do so only quite rarely.

I ran a new study to estimate the value of corner kicks to account for a series of other variables, including whether there is a penalty called on the ensuing corner or for shots taken after a poor clearance. Using data from the past two seasons in the English Premier League, the German Bundesliga and the Spanish Primera Division, I identified nearly 20,000 corner kicks. I tracked whether these corner kicks eventually produced shots, whether on headers directly assisted by the corner or within the same attacking move. Including penalties, about ten percent of shots from corner kicks are scored. This gives a rough value of a corner kick at around 0.035 goals. Conceding a big chance in order to avoid giving up a 3.5 percent chance at scoring does not look like a good decision.

From the roughly 13,000 corner kicks which did not result in a shot, about 1,800 lead to a counterattack that reached the opposition final third. There were 526 shots from counterattacks off corners and 72 of them were scored. That is a scoring rate about 40 percent better than average.

Bottom line for our club:  Accepting this xG of .035 (one goal per 28 corners), we should have scored one in the last two matches, which would have been worth two points. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fancy-stats/wp/2015/05/02/the-value-of-a-corner-kick-in-soccer

 

 

[lgfualol]

What we need to do is just put nobody in the box, put everyone either side of the opposition's box because we either hit the kneecap of their first bloke, or put it out of play by hitting it too far. 

[Captain...]

16 minutes ago, ScouseFox said:

I mean the stats massively disagree with you here. james had a huge chance from a corner early on vs stoke. Maguire hit the post late on (think that was from a corner?). iheanacho missed from inside the goal as well as at least one other goal line clearance in the game at the weekend. in that game harry Maguire had SEVEN attempts on goal, that is a lot of chances from corners/set plays. going back a few games earlier, ndidi hit the bar and iheanacho hit the post/somehow again missed from basically inside the goal away at everton.

 

obviously we're not going to create high quality chances from every corner, and some are really badly wasted, but I don't think that's just us as a team. 

 

good article here about how our corner kick routines regularly produce better chances than the rest of the league: https://medium.com/@MoeSquare/fox-in-the-box-examining-leicesters-corner-kick-routines-a71075882a17

Interesting read, obviously cherry picking the corners where we have done something right, the problem is all these plans are often derailed by poor execution, and sometimes you just need to keep it simple and try and stick it on the big mans head. It has still be frustrating watching numerous corners pick out the keeper or the first man in the last 2 games. Notably games without Gray or Okazaki who were identified in the article as the player to run interference on the keeper. I don't remember anyone trying to make Begovic's job harder on Saturday.

[ScouseFox]

1 minute ago, Captain... said:

Interesting read, obviously cherry picking the corners where we have done something right, the problem is all these plans are often derailed by poor execution, and sometimes you just need to keep it simple and try and stick it on the big mans head. It has still be frustrating watching numerous corners pick out the keeper or the first man in the last 2 games. Notably games without Gray or Okazaki who were identified in the article as the player to run interference on the keeper. I don't remember anyone trying to make Begovic's job harder on Saturday.

yeah 100%, second half on Saturday was borderline depressing watching corner after corner float into their keeper's arms. but even saying that we were incredibly unlucky not to score at least once from any of our corners. I've been in the "our corners are rubbish" camp for about 15 years too, but I think it's just football in general evolving to nullify the output of corners at the highest level. there's less brutes up front, less goalscoring centre halves, so much video analysis by teams looking to defend corners that it's lead to a very low percentage of scoring chances, let alone goals. 

 

but yeah I think we can all acknowledge that a good place to start would be putting a half decent ball into the box. 

[Royston.]

We have more chance with Harry Kane taking them.

[RumbleFox]

1 hour ago, ScouseFox said:

I mean the stats massively disagree with you here. james had a huge chance from a corner early on vs stoke. Maguire hit the post late on (think that was from a corner?). iheanacho missed from inside the goal as well as at least one other goal line clearance in the game at the weekend. in that game harry Maguire had SEVEN attempts on goal, that is a lot of chances from corners/set plays. going back a few games earlier, ndidi hit the bar and iheanacho hit the post/somehow again missed from basically inside the goal away at everton.

 

obviously we're not going to create high quality chances from every corner, and some are really badly wasted, but I don't think that's just us as a team. 

 

good article here about how our corner kick routines regularly produce better chances than the rest of the league: https://medium.com/@MoeSquare/fox-in-the-box-examining-leicesters-corner-kick-routines-a71075882a17

How dare you use actual facts.  We want nothing here but good ol' fashioned, head the sand misguided bluster thank you very much.  X

[themightyfin]

More goals are scored on the counter from a corner that breaks down than are actually scored from your own corner.