Oscar Wilde once famously wrote, “To concede a goal straight from a corner is unlucky, and to concede two in eight days seems careless.”
The thoughts of renowned corner scholar Oscar will have been going through the minds of everyone associated with Manchester United after conceding not one, but two ‘Olimico’s recently. Directly from around the corner — in two different competitions in just one week.
The first was in the Carabao Cup quarterfinals against Tottenham, when Son Heung-min’s corner kick beat second-choice goalkeeper Altay Bindyr and went into the goal. The second, in the Premier League on Boxing Day, saw Matheus Cunha stump Andre Onana with help from carefully placed Wolves defenders.
Olimpico is a relatively rare phenomenon. They don’t tend to get more than one in a season, so it’s quite surprising for United to get two in such a short period of time. Although, given the problems with defending set pieces and the overall existential crisis, if I were to predict which team this would happen to, it would probably be them.
The instinct is to regard these goals as flukes, errant crosses relying on goalkeeper error rather than genuine attempts by corner takers to score. How can an attacker make sense if they can’t see their target?
That’s certainly true for some. However, many of them exist in a sort of gray area where the intentions of the corner players and the attacking team are there and ultimately the goal is reached, if not through completely traditional means.
Former Blackburn Rovers winger Morten Gamst Pedersen is still playing for his native Norway at the age of 43 and made scoring an Olimpico an iconic move in the second half of his career. He claimed that he scored three goals in one season a few years ago, and that he once scored five goals in a game when he was younger.
Pedersen celebrates Blackburn’s Premier League goal in 2005 (Paul Mcfegan/Sportsphoto/Allstar via Getty Images)
His argument is that Taker doesn’t always ‘shoot’, but the ultimate outcome of a well-struck corner kick is a goal.
“If you can get the ball straight in, it’s like a perfect free kick,” he says. athletic. “A lot can happen when you’re aiming for the far corner, and the goalkeeper can get distracted. Anyway, if there’s no one there and you can get in, it’s probably a good corner.
“You can see what Arsenal have done this season. They scored from a lot of corners and if no one had touched it the ball would have gone straight in anyway.
“It’s important to get as close to the goal line as possible. “Anything can happen.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by another Olimpico expert and former Wycombe Wanderers full-back Joe Jacobson. He scored twice in one game against Lincoln in 2019 (as part of a set-piece hat-trick) and has scored several goals over the course of his career.
Here it is!
One of the most amazing hat tricks you will ever see. pic.twitter.com/N7jbaWsD9T
— Wycombe Wanderers (@wwfcofficial) September 9, 2019
Jacobson says: “I never thought, ‘I’m going to hit it in the top corner.’ But there were many times when my coach would tell me, ‘Hit the target.’ , as if it were a gun’, so if someone gets a nickname or something, they can get in.
“I think inswinger corners have been out of fashion for a while. There have been many studies showing that defensive headers do not go as far when playing outswingers. Now suddenly Arsenal have made the inswinger popular again.”
But in some cases, the taker is clearly trying to make a shot.
Megan Rapinoe famously scored directly from a corner kick at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, following her performance at the London Games nine years ago. The first example may not have been entirely intentional, but the second was. At least according to her.
She told the media after the match against Australia in Tokyo: “I actually said this to Vlatko (Andonovski) and our coach Laura Harvey yesterday. They said, ‘Put it here, this is where we want to go, this is kind of the game plan,’ and I thought, ‘Well, I might just shoot it.’”
Pedersen’s symptoms became so frequent and evident that his colleagues adjusted their movements accordingly.
“At one stage my team-mate, who was playing centre-back, asked me before the corner kick: ‘Morton, are you going to shoot?’ “I said yes, but he just stayed in the middle line.”
Pedersen practiced his corner kicks as if he were trying to score, even if someone intervened before he scored. “Early in my career, when I played for Tromso, I would put a basketball hoop and a board in front of the goal and aim at it,” he says.
In layman’s terms, the secret to a dangerous inswing corner is to spin the ball as much as possible, so the taker must adjust the way he or she hits the ball accordingly. However, Jacobson suggests that while change of direction is an important factor, speed and angle of delivery are even more important.
“You see a lot of instances where a nicely curled ball goes into the box and the goalkeeper picks it out of the air. But I think if the speed of the ball is there and the ball doesn’t go up too high and the look doesn’t go up too far, it’s really difficult for the goalkeeper to come in and claim anything.”
Instead, Jacobson relied on his run-up angle to create the right amount of curl so he could focus on hitting the ball as cleanly and powerfully as possible.
“Like free kicks, I always stood square to where I wanted to hit the ball and where I wanted it to end up. I tried to go over the top of the ball, like a topspin in tennis, without letting it curve a few miles out and then back in again.
“I overhit a lot and underhit a lot. But when hit correctly, the angle meant you didn’t have to worry about which way the ball was going. I knew that if I ran at that right angle, the ball would land where I wanted it to.”
From a goalkeeper’s perspective, it’s pretty embarrassing to see one of these go in. But sometimes the penalty area is crowded and there isn’t much the kicker can do when he gets the kick right.
“It’s tricky because there are a lot of guys around,” says Matt Pyzdrowski, a former goalkeeper and goalkeeper. athleticis a resident expert. “The goalkeeper’s tendency is to move forward first. Your instincts tell you that you want to move forward to attack the ball, reach the highest point and get the ball before your attacker.
Bindir advances at first… (Sky Sports)
… before getting caught under the ball while trying to retreat (Sky Sports)
“As a goalkeeper you want to resist the tendency to be a bit more patient and if you look at the goals Tottenham scored (against United) it is clear that the goalkeeper has been bitten very early. There’s an athlete running ahead of him and he’s almost more interested in the athlete in front of him. He took a few steps forward and then realized the ball was passing over his head.
“As a goalkeeper, it’s quite difficult to retreat whenever the ball goes over your head. I think it takes his attention away from the ball and he misses it completely.”
In the case of Onana, for the goal scored by Cunha, it was extremely difficult for the United goalkeeper to move anywhere as there were attackers in front and behind him. In this case, the blame will probably fall more heavily on his defenders.
“Each goalkeeper is different, but when I play, I want the defenders to be outside the attackers so they can push players into the goal and take away space,” Pzydrowski said. In this case, the defender (Manuel Ugarte) does not do his job well and basically pushes the attacker towards Onana.”
Onana, surrounded by Wolves players, is also beaten in the corner. (Jack Thomas – WWFC/Wolves via Getty Images)
Teams train for these scenarios, but like any other, replicating the unpredictability and intensity is difficult. Are these goals partly a result of teams practicing corner kicks? Pyzdrowski believes this could be a factor.
“The day before the game (when we practice corner), the intensity was always low. And when the intensity of training decreases, there is a natural tendency for athletes to relax a little too much.”
When you see any Olimpico, your instinct is to assume that getting into the far post is intentional, and sneaking into the near post is luck. But the truth may be just the opposite.
A perfect example is a game in which Jacobson scores directly from two corners. The first sneaked into the near post, while the second curled higher into the distance.
“The second one certainly looks a lot better, but it’s so high up against the near post that it would have blown off,” he says.
“Wycombe assistant manager Richard Dobson, who was in charge of set pieces, always told us to keep the near post above our heads. Because the attackers will get there or it will cause chaos behind them. “If you have a player running across the ball, it’s really difficult for the goalkeeper to read it.”
Pyzdrowski confirmed this. “Where I always felt uneasy was when I knew teams were trying to push the ball towards the near post,” he says. “Because you want to move forward and attack, other players can get in your way and that’s where you’re a little more vulnerable.”
With more and more teams following Arsenal’s lead and forcing vicious in-swinging corners into the six-yard box, it may not be the last time we see the Olimpico this season.
And while they may seem like coincidences, there’s often a little more to it than that.
(Photo: Getty Images; Design: Will Tullos)
