Managers, coaches, players and pundits alike often make reference to the importance of set plays, which can be a crucial means to force in a goal when things don’t look good during open play. Set plays by their premeditated nature offer a relatively consistent level of defensive and attacking opportunity and by looking at the effectiveness of teams against a variety of different opponents, we may be able to start to characterize what constitutes good set play defence and attack. In this blog post, we look at a good attacking setup, which is consistently getting me goals.

Let’s look at the setup in action before I start explaining anything. If a picture is worth a thousand words, moving pictures are probably worth a million words.

This setup isn’t particularly revolutionary or inventive. I basically tried old recipes to see if I could re-create effective setups from previous versions of the game. This one just so happens to work in the current Match Engine environment.

The setup isn’t a particularly difficult one to set. This is the setup for corners from the left side, where the left-back is the one taking the corner.

This is the setup for corners from the right side, where the right-back is the one taking the corner.

The setup relies on the concept of isolation, trying to find space for one particular player and then delivering the ball to said player. Ideally, this player has a good first touch and is able to finish properly, but as you can see from the next clip, it doesn’t matter if he’s not that good technically, with so many players in the penalty area, the ball can always take a lucky deflection somewhere along the way.

So there you have it. Nothing fancy, nothing special, nothing exploitative, just a simple, working corner setup.

Guido

Guido is the founding father of Strikerless and main nutjob running the show.