Although they eventually blew away their opponents in the second half of Saturday’s Premier League game, Tottenham Hotspur struggled to create high-quality chances from open play in the first half of their 4-1 win against West Ham United.
Every time Destiny Udogie, Son Heung-min and James Maddison combined down the left wing, Guido Rodriguez or Jean-Clair Todibo would charge over to block the cross or make an interception. On the one occasion when Udogie’s delivery evaded West Ham’s defenders, the ball bounced off team-mate Brennan Johnson’s shoulder.
It looked like the best route to a goal would be through a set piece. Spurs had 12 corners in the first half, the most any team has won in the opening period of a Premier League game since August 2022. The trouble is, they did not look threatening from any of them.
Julen Lopetegui’s visitors from down the road in east London hit the self-destruct button after the break and space opened up for Son to rip them apart on the counter. Tottenham will come up against teams who can defend stubbornly for 90 minutes, though, and on another day a clever set-piece routine might be key to earning all three points.
So was it just a bad day at the office against West Ham, or do they need to dedicate more time on the training ground to practicing set pieces?
The Athletic rewatched all of their corners this season to find out.
Tottenham have taken 76 corners in eight Premier League games this season, joint-most with champions Manchester City, and have scored twice from them. If they maintain that rate for the remaining 30 top-flight matches, they would finish with roughly 10 goals from 361 corners. Break that down and they would score on average once every 36 deliveries (it should be noted Pape Sarr did score from a corner in the 3-0 Europa League win against Qarabag last month).
Arsenal scored 16 goals from 265 corners last season, the best record in the division, and on average found the back of the net once every 16.5 deliveries. This suggests there is significant room for improvement in this aspect of the game for their north London rivals.
Spurs and Arsenal were joint-top on 13 goals from corners in the 2022-23 campaign. Gianni Vio oversaw Tottenham’s intricate routines after he had been appointed by Antonio Conte, their head coach at the time. Harry Kane was responsible for seven goals which is nearly as many as the entire team managed last season (nine) after he moved to Bayern Munich.
While Nicolas Jover is the mastermind behind Arsenal’s set-piece schemes, Tottenham do not currently have a specialist coach for such situations. Nick Montgomery, who was appointed as an assistant in the summer, is usually spotted giving players instructions when Tottenham defend dead-ball deliveries but it is unclear who has responsibility when they are the attacking side.
The bar chart below shows how many goals each Premier League team has scored per 100 corners since Ange Postecoglou became head coach for the start of the 2023-24 season. Spurs are not the worst in the division but their record is not as good as some of their assumed rivals for a top-four finish including Chelsea and Liverpool, nor Arsenal, who are reaping the benefits of having a specialist set-piece coach.
Zooming into Tottenham more specifically, there has been a general downward trend since Vio left in that summer of 2023. Although they overperformed from set pieces in 2022-23 — scoring 16 goals, while the quality of their chances (xG) suggested they should have scored around 12 — both the consistency of their chance-creation and goal-scoring from dead-ball situations has clearly declined since Postecoglou was appointed.
Against West Ham, Spurs used a combination of inswinging, outswinging and short corners. Maddison, Dejan Kulusevski and Pedro Porro alternated taking them. Tottenham’s players in the box did not make the first contact from any of the deliveries.
Poor execution is a factor here.
Kulusevski takes the first Spurs corner, in the third minute of the game, and he is tackled by Jarrod Bowen after playing a one-two with Maddison. A few minutes later, Maddison goes short to Kulusevski and receives the return pass but his cross gets cleared by Rodriguez.
There is a better example of what Tottenham are trying to do in these situations from their 3-2 defeat against Brighton & Hove Albion earlier this month.
Kulusevski locates Maddison, who nudges the ball towards Porro. As the Spaniard curls a cross towards the penalty spot, Brighton’s defence steps up and leaves Cristian Romero unmarked. Romero mistimes his header and it goes out for a goal kick. Replays showed the Argentina international was offside but the whole point here is for Spurs to unsettle Brighton’s defence with their ball manipulation, and it worked.
If you take a look at the graphic below, you can see Tottenham play it short with a high proportion (47 per cent) of their corners from the right, while on the opposite side Maddison usually aims for the near post.
Having a set-piece taker who can consistently deliver the ball into the right areas is crucial. Maddison was guilty of overhitting the ball against West Ham, including on one occasion when it sailed over everybody’s heads and went straight out of play. However, the 27-year-old did produce the perfect ball for Romero to score from in the 4-0 win against Everton in August.
Five of Tottenham’s 12 corners in the first half against West Ham went short. In total, around 38 per cent of their corners this season have been played short, which is a significant increase from 2023-24 (29.5 per cent). The Athletic asked Postecoglou about this approach during his press conference on Wednesday before today’s Europa League game against Dutch visitors AZ Alkmaar.
“We think it’s an effective way to look at set pieces, nothing too scientific,” he said. “But it sort of falls in line with our game plan, trying to control those situations. Fair to say at the weekend, especially first half, our set pieces were really poor. We were all disappointed with them, especially around the delivery. If you don’t get the delivery right, it’s not great. I think we had 12 corners in a half of football. It shows how dominant you are, but we didn’t really use them to any effect, so it’s something we’ve got to improve on.”
When Tottenham launch balls directly into the box, they use the same tactic every time. Five players will be positioned inside the area, with Dominic Solanke, Romero and Micky van de Ven hovering around the penalty spot. A couple of players wait outside in case the ball drops to them and also so they are well placed to deal with any counter-attacks. Depending on who is taking the set piece, Maddison or Kulusevski will still loiter around for a short pass but this is just a ploy to disguise their intentions.
You can see an example of this approach in the 3-0 win against Manchester United last month, when Solanke scores in the 78th minute (more on that shortly).
Mikey Moore and Lucas Bergvall, who had just replaced Maddison, are in charge here.
Romero and Van de Ven have the job of aggressively attacking the delivery. Solanke never tries to win the first ball but anticipates where it will drop and often runs to the back post. There will be one player who starts the sequence just in front of the opposition’s goalkeeper before they sprint to the front post and attempt to flick the arriving ball on.
During the 1-1 draw with Leicester City on the season’s opening weekend, Rodrigo Bentancur takes on this responsibility and it nearly ends with Solanke scoring but Wilfred Ndidi makes an exceptional clearance for the home side.
This routine worked to perfection at Old Trafford a few weeks later as Sarr flicks on Bergvall’s delivery and an unmarked Solanke scores.
Opposition teams’ analysts will spot this pattern and come up with ways to minimise the danger (it is unlikely anybody will ever leave Solanke free again like United did). This is why having greater variety is crucial.
There are no attempts to block defenders or make decoy runs, which other clubs have done successfully. Having a wider range of set-piece routines will make Spurs unpredictable and harder to defend.
Tottenham struggled to defend set pieces last season. They conceded 16 times from them, which was the sixth-worst figure in the league, but there have been signs of progress.
If they can slightly refine their attacking corners to provide a more consistent threat, two issues which troubled them a year ago will have been addressed.
Additional reporting: Thom Harris
(Top photos: Getty Images)
