How Gianni Vio’s excellent corner routines saved Tottenham Hotspur’s season from being even more disastrous – set-piece analysis

Tottenham Hotspur finished their season in the Premier League in eighth place, which was a huge disappointment for their fans, but the season could have ended worse if not for set pieces, especially corners.

Gianni Vio was working as a set-piece coach within the technical staff of Tottenham with his compatriot Antonio Conte and continued in Tottenham after his departure.

Gianni Vio, who was Italy’s secret weapon in Euro 2020, achieved great success with Tottenham. Despite their bad situation this season, it is enough to know that nobody scored more goals from corners than Tottenham this season with 12 goals, level with Arsenal. In set pieces generally, they scored 16 goals, in second place for the team that scored the most goals from set pieces in the Premier League level with Brentford and just below Liverpool with 17 goals.

Spurs scored 70 goals in this Premier League season, 16 of them from set pieces with a percentage close to 23%, which is a number that is not easy.

There is no doubt that Spurs have a squad full of tall and strong players in aerial duels such as Harry Kane, Eric Dier and Ben Davies, who is one of the smartest players in moving and escaping from man-marking. We shouldnt forget Ivan Perišić and Emerson Royal, who are distinguished by their ability to get the first touch.

However, as we will see in this set-piece analysis, we can not deny the role of the technical staff, represented by Gianni Vio, who distributed the roles and designed the routines and, most importantly, always changed his strategies to be difficult to predict.

This tactical analysis will discuss different routines that Tottenham Hotspur used in attacking corners in this Premier League season.

Flicks

Here, in this next example, Newcastle defend with two zonal markers (highlighted in green). Miguel Almiron is there to defend the short corner if it happens while Joe Willock defends the rebound zone. The remaining six players act as man-markers.

Clement Lenglet, with the green arrow, is the player who flicks the ball in this routine, so as the taker prepares to play, he starts moving with a curved run around the goalkeeper, using him as a screen to win a battle before his marker comes from Joelinton’s blind side. You can notice that there are seven players of Tottenham against six markers, so Eric Dier with a yellow arrow runs towards the near post to hit the ball if the ball passed Lenglet using Oliver Skipp as a screen.

To