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The Premier League is blessed with football purists like Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp, Mikel Arteta and more – managers who want to show why it’s called ‘the beautiful game’ when they win.
But they are now as meticulous at set pieces as those who play percentage football.
Graham Taylor was a great believer in the importance of set pieces, long before the game brought in specialists.
I played under Graham at Aston Villa and in October 1987 we faced Spurs in the League Cup.
We won an early corner and I knew exactly what to do. Taylor had me do plyometric training – jumping on top of boxes, jumping over hurdles, that sort of thing – because I was responsible for tapping the ball from the front post.
Set-pieces are a Taylor-made way to win matches and every team is focusing more on it now
Old-school managers like my former Aston Villa boss Graham Taylor (right), who played percentage football, were a big believer in the importance of set pieces
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At 6 feet tall, I wasn’t the tallest, but I could climb as high as the best of them. The corner came in. There was no one in front of me, so I turned it on so Alan McInally could go home after storming into the box. We scored several goals this way.
Taylor spent hours perfecting these set-pieces – sometimes at the expense of working on how to play in and out of possession – because he saw them as an essential way to win.
Just like Dave Bassett and Howard Wilkinson when I went to Leicester. Between the two, I privately renamed us ‘Leicester Set-Piece City’.
Arsène Wenger at Arsenal would spend time on set pieces, but that was simplified: zonal marking when defending and an agreed sequence of movements when attacking. Wenger largely trusted us to know what to do on the day.
But nowadays even football purists are just as meticulous when it comes to set pieces (photo: Pep Guardiola with one of his coaches Carlos Vicens, who oversees Man City’s set pieces)
Nowadays, however, managers like Guardiola, Klopp and Arteta want the best of both worlds.
They want to win big, but they also leave nothing to chance when it comes to set pieces.
