Corner kicks are important in United history, with Beckham's two corners at Camp Nou in 1999 helping the Red Devils reverse Bayern Munich in the Champions League final to achieve the triple crown of the season. However, now Manchester United's die-hard fans may not remember when the team last scored through a corner kick in the Premier League. The answer was nearly a year ago, and it was an opponent's oolong ball. In March 2021, in United's battle against West Ham, Craig Dawson headed a corner kick from Bruno Fernandez directly into his goal.
It was the Premier League match at Old Trafford on 15 March last year, and in the 53rd minute, Fernandez took a corner kick on the left and McTomine rushed to the front post, although he did not touch the ball, but shook the sight of Dawson, who was forced by Maguire to push the ball into the net, and Manchester United beat West Ham 1-0 with this goal.
If only the corner kicks scored by The Manchester United players themselves are counted, it goes back more than a year. On January 27, 2021, in the Premier League between Manchester United and Sheffield United, Maguire received Telles' corner kick on the left, the header from the front of the small penalty area, tapped the goal of his old club, and once equalized, but in the end, the Red Devils still lost 1-2, and the 13-round unbeaten end was tragic.
This season, United are the only team in the Premier League that has never scored directly from a corner! The Red Devils' only goal associated with a set-piece, came from a league match with Aston Villa, from a free kick, Tres flicked the ball, Fernandez took a step with the ball and shot from a distance, and Edinburgh Edinj dangled in front of goal, causing the opposing goalkeeper Martinez to get out of hand and the ball from his crotch into the net.
In corner kicks, whether United arranged for Bruno Fernandez, Luke Shaw, Tres or Sancho to take the penalty, the result was the same as not scoring. The data shows that Manchester United have 117 corners in the 22 rounds of the Premier League, averaging more than 5 per game, all without gaining, and even rarely creating a threat.
This is definitely not because Manchester United does not have players who are good at headers, C Ronaldo, Cavani, Maguire and even Varane's header level is good, and there are mcTomine, Pogba, Rashford and others who are more than one meter and nine meters tall, and Fernandez, Tres and others are also masters of set-pieces. However, the Red Devils have gathered the key elements necessary for a corner kick to score,
Ironically, United also hired a "set-piece full-time coach" before the start of the season, and when 29-year-old Eric Ramsey joined, then-manager Ole Gunnar Solskjaer publicly praised him as a creative young coach, which may be true, after all, this is the youngest record holder in English football history to receive a UEFA professional coaching certificate.
But a good coach, not necessarily a good set-piece coach, at least not immediately. Ramsey graduated from Loughborough University in the UK with a major in Sport Sciences before working as a youth coach at Swansea and Shrewsbury, where Shrewsbury promoted him to the first-team coaching staff before being poached by Chelsea.
While in college, Ramsey met former Manchester United assistant coach Kieran McKenna, who recommended him to Solskjaer. The coach had high hopes for him, giving him the two responsibilities of training set-piece attack and defense and personal reinforcement training.
But Ramsey's past coaching career has been mainly in youth training, and he has never been a full-time coach of set-pieces. In the coaching course materials found by the British media, Ramsey mainly explained how to start from the defensive line, crack the opponent's high pressing, send it to the attacking third zone, and if the ball is lost, how to react immediately. Rams emphasized diagonal passing, using the width of the field to pull away the opponent's defense.
It's the most popular tactical routine nowadays, but the sporty offense is very different from set-pieces, which require creating and exploiting gaps in less time and in tighter spaces. To break through corners, coaches need to let players watch a lot of videos, grasp the characteristics of the team's main penalty and the opponent's defensive advantages and disadvantages, and improve their execution in actual games through continuous drills.
There is no doubt that judging by United's performance in the first half of the season, Ramsey did not quickly adapt to his new role. United's corner kick attacks, often released from the front point, have become the starting point for opponents to counterattack.
Manchester United rivals Liverpool, Manchester City and Arsenal have all benefited from set-piece coaches, greatly increasing the probability of pointing on set-pieces. But their coaches, such as Nicholas Joffre, who played for Manchester City and arsenal successively, are out-and-out set-piece specialists, rather than ordinary coaches who casually hang up the title of set-piece coach, and Liverpool even have an out-of-bounds full-time coach Thomas Gronemark.
Letting professionals do professional things seems to have always been a dead end for Manchester United clubs, from transfer deals to corner tactics, the Red Devils always try to arrange a random person to get the best results, which is obviously impossible to achieve.
In time, perhaps the young Ramsey can make himself a good set-piece coach, but that requires the accumulation of knowledge and experience, and it is difficult to succeed in a short period of time. Now, United have only one small goal to set first, and that is to first break the embarrassing record of zero corner goals in the Premier League this season.
Although there are still 16 games left in the 2021/22 Premier League, manchester United seems to have enough time to keep corners clean all season. But the data tells you that since the 28th round of last season, United have gone 32 consecutive Premier League games without corner points.