The art of short corners: Part two — defending against effective short corner strategies – set-piece analysis

Recently, many teams have opted for the short corner and increased its importance to face the good teams at defending systems in corners. In our previous article of this series, different tactics used by the attacking teams at corners were explained, which are exploiting the numerical and dynamic superiority, direct passes to the rebound zone, gaps in reorganising as a line, mismatch and orientation problems on the far post.

First and foremost, do not expect me to tell you this is the best and most effective solution to face short corners to end the matter! Because things do not go like this in football in general, as when you have a successful idea, the opponents try to think of a counter, and so things go on forever.

Against Man United, Liverpool faced a new challenge with four attacking players in this area. In the first photo, the four attacking players are highlighted in red using two attacking short options and a rebound player out of the shot. Liverpool, as usual, defend with a green player to defend the short option with the yellow player who comes to help and the blue player on the rebound zone, so the situation is 4v3, but they have a plan which is making the rebound player, in blue, defend against the second short option while the near post player, in black, goes to defend the rebound zone.

In the second photo, the rebound defender, in blue, faces the second short option, which gives the near post player in black time to meet the rebound-attacker, which forces him to pass the ball to the back, as shown in the third and fourth photos.