What % of crosses are converted?
KDB's delivery from corners and wide free kicks is probably the best in the league.
It does come down to this ultimately. The set piece delivery is so poor. I go to watch semi pro football and it’s genuinely better. Pretty much every corner will be dropping right in the mixer. The amount of our corners that hit the first man are genuinely insane. I’d love to see stats for it.
It's quite strange also how players like Bruno/Pogba etc can hit an almost effortless crossfield pass from 1 flank to another, landing perfectly in the path or to the feet of a player. Yet they can't just float a cross into a blanket area.
Exactly, you can set yourself up however you want but if the delivery is poor, there isn't much you can do.
Or oppositely, you’ve got Telles who’s guaranteed to hit the first man wherever he swings it in from.
United coaches are in high demand after the success of McKenna and Carrick it seems.
Yes he's quietly but efficiently improved us bit by bit. Even last season, we didn't concede much at all from set pieces, but it was still frustrating that we weren't scoring either.
2 seasons ago we were second worst in the league defensively on set pieces in terms of goals conceded. Last year we were 4th best, this year so far 7th best. Attack wise, we’re bottom 3 the last two seasons.
Thanks. So if we’re judging him on how much he’s improving our set pieces it’s fair to say that so far he’s done an ok job but nothing special.
Yeah he’s doing a decent job. Pretty immediate improvement defensively, but offensively we still struggle. You could put those struggles down to squad composition I guess.
It was also said last season that his main focus was on defensive set pieces, not attacking ones. He is also a general first team coach so he does more than just set pieces.
Yeah I vaguely remembered that but I wasn’t 100% sure so left it out.
Going from second worst to being 4th best in the league last year was a massive improvement though.
We were barely conceding from set pieces last year.
That’s interesting. Because we’re seeing a big difference in our corners this season. Much more being taken short. Plus the one Rashford scored from. I assumed that was the ETH influence but maybe not? Although it’s a bit weird to hire a set piece specialist and not have him working on attacking set pieces from day one.
Most managers have their own attacking set piece ideas to implement, Rangnick was well-known for this, I presume we hired Ramsay because we conceded about 200 goals in 19/20 from corners. He's also a first team coach so he likely has multiple duties.
Before he joined we had the second worst defensive record in the league on set pieces. It makes perfect sense that his first focus was on improving the defensive side. We were also in general in poor form and poor defensively and every coach knows you sort out your defending first. It would have been weird in that situation to have someone fannying about with attacking set pieces while ignoring that you're leaking goals left and right.
I meant the fact we never scored from any.
Maybe you guys just had a bad year. Goals from corners average at about 4%. The fact you conceded so many could be attributed to a lot of things and I don’t think 1 person could have much such a difference. You’ve just gone back to the mean average again.
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Good experience for him. Didn’t McClaren do the same thing for us with England?
Our set piece xG conceded is still pretty bad (17th in the table), so we should still be shitting ourselves every time we concede corners.
How does that work? We don’t really concede from set pieces much?
And to think just over a year ago loads on here couldn't wait to get rid of Carrick & McKenna, apparently useless and were only at United because of Ole's jobs for the boys policy.
What's our actual set piece goals conceded?
We're 9th in most goals conceded from set pieces. We've conceded 7, 3 more than City and Arsenal.
Means either we benefit from bad opponent finishing, or De Gea is saving shots at an above-average rate. Or both.
I'd need to look into it more but I wonder how many of those were early in the season when we had a few shockers and hadn't established Varane and Martinez yet.
Who?
