At 4:30pm on Sunday afternoon, Everton were the only team in the Premier League not to have conceded from a set piece this season. By 5:21pm they had done so twice, with Tottenham Hotspur’s Micky van de Ven scoring two close-range headers in the first half of his team’s 3-0 win at the Hill Dickinson Stadium.
Spurs are struggling to create chances from open play under Thomas Frank but we can still celebrate how formidable they have become from corners and free kicks.
There was a sense that set pieces were neglected by former head coach Ange Postecoglou, who dismissively compared them to a “rugby scrum”. At the beginning of his career, Frank did not champion set pieces either. During his time as an integrated talent development (ITU) coach with Danish second-division side Lyngby, Frank took inspiration from how Barcelona played under Pep Guardiola.
“In that period, we didn’t think set pieces were part of football,” Birger Jorgensen, who hired Frank at Lyngby, told The Athletic in July. “We wanted to have the ball all the time. It’s Thomas’ personality that catches you but he has progressed tactically. He is clever to take the next level and follow how football has developed. He can adapt to different clubs.”
Frank’s mindset changed when he worked at Brentford. They had a smaller budget than the majority of their promotion rivals in the Championship and experimented with unique ideas to help improve performances.
“We need to make the business sustainable by buying cheap and selling expensive,” Rasmus Ankersen, Brentford’s then co-director of football, told Sky Sports in February 2019. “It comes down to not only identifying undervalued talent in the market, but also we invest a lot in the development of players. We invest in different types of specialists — sleep coaches, kicking coaches — to try to raise the level of the players who come in. Then we make the asset worth more than it was before.”
Andreas Georgson was one of the specialists that Brentford hired. He spent a year in west London working on set pieces under Frank until he was poached by Arsenal for the 2020-21 season. He then worked for Malmo, Southampton, Lillestrom and Manchester United before he was reunited with Frank at Spurs in the summer.
Brentford had an excellent record from dead-ball situations throughout Frank’s reign. After losing at the Gtech Community Stadium in January 2023, Liverpool’s head coach Jurgen Klopp said that Brentford “create chaos” from set pieces.
“I respect that a lot and it’s really good and well organised,” Klopp said. “They stretch the rules in these moments. They’re really pushing, really holding and everything. That’s why it’s really difficult. I wish we could have done better there.” There are lots of similar examples from this season of Spurs “stretching the rules” by blocking opposition players and preventing them from clearing the ball easily.
Georgson spent a lot of time in pre-season drilling the squad on defensive and attacking scenarios, assisted by analyst Sean McManus. They held long-throw auditions to establish who could become their new secret weapon. At a training session in the baking heat on tour in South Korea, Georgson worked individually with Mathys Tel, Wilson Odobert and Djed Spence to improve their set-piece deliveries.
Before Spurs’ victory over Everton, the 43-year-old led a set-piece drill that involved the coaching staff acting as the attacking players when Tel swung free kicks into the box. The coaches used crash bags to push and disrupt the players when they jumped to clear the ball. The idea is to make them stronger in physical duels and unafraid of taking contact in mid-air.
In an interview with The Athletic in November 2021, Georgson admitted that “no coach goes through the ranks of education to become a set-piece specialist. They go because they love the tactics, or they love the leadership or they love the team building.” He then revealed how he keeps the players engaged.
“You can try to make it fun — a match-like, live situation where you compete,” Georgson added. “But then sometimes you have to take it slow, because it might be a situation where the player needs a bit of calm, for their technique or to focus on details.
“The main thing is when they see results. That’s how simple the human brain is.
“If you’re a specialist coach, it’s easy to think, ‘I need more time in my specialist area’. But I don’t think that’s the way to think of specialists in football — the process has to be holistic, synchronised.
“If the team at that moment will take more from a big tactical preparation of the game, with the focus on open play, then I say, ‘OK, at this time, it would be good to have 15 minutes. But for the team now, it’s better that it’s eight (minutes)’. And then I have to make the most of those eight minutes, not try to achieve everything — just focus on the one or two things that will be the most important.”
Georgson is happy for players to “improvise” during games but provides them with a framework.
“You have to see it as a long-term project,” he said. “So even if I don’t get everything I wanted done by the second gameweek, I accept that we build it block by block. A big part of the job is not getting desperate, and accepting that, over time, we will improve. It’s not like American football, where the quarterback is used to keeping 200 plays in his head. It’s a different situation in football, that’s not the traditional culture. If you look at some of the strongest teams in set pieces, it’s not like they’ll have 100 plays. They might have surprisingly few, but they’re just very efficient. You don’t have to have more than two.”
Georgson can be spotted at the edge of the technical area when Spurs are defending or attacking a set piece, frantically dishing out instructions. According to WhoScored, Spurs have scored five Premier League goals from set pieces this season, with only Chelsea (eight) and Arsenal (nine) scoring more.
Georgson gives Frank advice on other areas of the game and is unafraid to challenge his boss’ decisions. He has quickly proven his worth.
“He has a different approach, which is important in a group, to ask different questions,” Frank said of Georgson in a press conference before September’s 2-2 draw with Brighton & Hove Albion. “Sometimes the questions are extremely annoying and put me on the spot but that’s good. We need that. I need that.
“But on the set pieces you can see we have a very good foundation to stand on. We can get better, but defensively we look strong, offensively we look strong. So a big credit to him. But also a massive credit to Sean, our analyst, and to the players that really bought into it.”
Spurs can hurt teams in a variety of ways which makes them tricky to predict. Van de Ven’s opening goal against Everton came from Mohammed Kudus hitting an inswinging corner towards the back post which Rodrigo Bentancur knocked back across the penalty area. Van de Ven attacked Pedro Porro’s delivery at the front post for Tottenham’s second. Lucas Bergvall and Cristian Romero scored from cleverly worked free kicks against West Ham United and Paris Saint-Germain respectively.
Everton had nine corners against Spurs but Guglielmo Vicario marshalled the defence expertly. David Moyes admitted it was the correct decision to disallow Jake O’Brien’s 25th-minute header because Jack Grealish and Iliman Ndiaye were offside. Georgson and Frank’s attention to detail in attacking and defensive situations is paying off.
“We have specific principles and also specific routines,” Frank said. “It’s very important to have those principles in place and then tweak them a little bit towards the opponent, depending on their system, how they defend, let’s say corners or wide free kicks. Then we can tweak it a little bit. But we can’t change it too much because then we need to be consistent in the messages.”
Van de Ven is the biggest beneficiary of Tottenham’s improvement from set pieces. The Netherlands international has scored five times in 14 appearances under Frank — he did not score at all last season.
“He is really growing and has taken some big steps,” Frank said after beating Everton. “I’m very pleased with him overall. He is taking more leadership, defending better and better and not only using his pace but also more clever positions.
“I said at the beginning of the season, ‘It’s OK if you score with your left and right foot but you need to score more headed goals. You are a centre-back, you need to score more of that’. We have worked on it, big praise to Micky and especially to Andreas. The way he attacks the ball and gets in there where it hurts is key. Now hopefully he can continue.”
Spurs cannot simply rely on set pieces for the entire season but free kicks and corners have been crucial in the first few months of Frank’s tenure. If things start to click from open play too, maybe they could make a genuine push for a spot in the top four.