“Our setup is slightly different, but the biggest reason is that things have gone back to normal,” Arne Slot rationalised after victory over West Ham at the weekend, where Liverpool scored three times from corner situations in the first half of a 5-2 win.Seven of Liverpool’s last nine Premier League goals, in fact, have come from set-pieces and five of those were corners. The uptick has addressed a severe imbalance from the first half of the season where Liverpool briefly held the worst set-play record in Europe’s top five leagues.
Slot might not like it, it might hurt his “football heart”, as he claimed on Monday, but accepting the Premier League’s new reality is really the only logical and sustainable play here. If you can’t beat them, join them.
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Virgil van Dijk scored from a corner in victory over West Ham
So, how have Liverpool gone from the league’s worst-ranked team to one of the best in a matter of weeks? Acceptance is often the first step to recovery.Set-piece supremacy was not in Slot’s playbook to begin with but slowly he’s come around to the idea, so much so that he has taken on the responsibility himself alongside coaching assistants Sipke Hulshoff and Giovanni van Bronckhorst. Set-piece analyst Lewis Mahoney has been given a greater voice, too, with no plans to bring in a new set-piece specialist.
Perhaps coincidentally, but likely not, this new dead-ball efficiency has materialised after the departure of set-piece coach Aaron Briggs at the end of December, with the manager now favouring collective charge of set-play commands. Under Slot’s instruction, and in line with most other teams in the league, inswinging corners have become commonplace.
It’s clear the six-yard box is now targeted by most teams in order to cause maximum chaos by aerial bombardment. Arsenal are the masters of it. Liverpool are late adopters, but generally this is a league-wide trend.
Offensive teams are placing 3.25 players in the six-yard box on average, up from 2.51 last season – which itself was the first season this metric had gone above two. As a result, defensive teams are now having to put 7.33 players in the six-yard area, up from 6.67 last term.It particularly restricts space for goalkeepers and reduces the likelihood of them making first contact.
Datawrapper
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2026-03-02 15:41:00
