“Get Ya ‘Ed On It!”

Liverpool concede goals from set pieces. Lots of goals. Seriously though, lots of goals. That won’t come as a surprise to you, after all it’s hardly a shock is it? It’s been a problem all season, and if truth be told, last season too.

There’s been many an argument over our defending of set pieces, and more column inches have been written about the positives and negatives of both man-to-man and zonal marking than we’ll all care to recall. Even on the TBT talks podcast, it’s almost guaranteed that we’ll get at least one question a week asking us to discuss our set-piece problems – usually because we’ve conceded another goal from one!

We’ve all got out individual preferences, and we’ve all got a theory on why we can’t defend set pieces particularly well – in fact, if we get any worse George might have to start playing the Benny Hill music every time the opposition gets a corner!

So, having had a little time to think about this problem, one simple yet pretty important aspect of our defence sticks out to me like a sore arm – none of our players are good at heading the ball. If you go through our whole squad, you won’t see a player who you think is great in the air – at least I didn’t see any, other than Andy Carroll.

Players like Daniel Agger, Jamie Carragher, Sebastian Coates, Steven Gerrard, Jordan Henderson, Glen Johnson and Martin Skrtel are all tall men, yet you wouldn’t say any of them are dominant headers of a ball in defensive situations. A lot of teams rely on bringing their centre forwards back to defend the near post – as they have a big, physical presence – but we don’t have that luxury, we have Luis Suarez. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t swap Suarez for any striker in the world but he’s not exactly helpful when defending our own box.

Perhaps we’ve been looking at what we want from a centre back from the wrong angle? We wanted an organiser (Carragher) and a ball-player (Agger) and that’s fine, but somewhere along the line, we’ve forgotten to get somebody in who will win headers for us, or at least make it difficult for the opposition to win them.

Approximately 25% of goals in the Premier League come from set pieces so defending them isn’t the be all and end all, and we aren’t the only team who look vulnerable from corners and free-kicks. However, we seem to look among the worst at defending them, and it seems clear that our opponents are looking to exploit this weakness at every opportunity – even Arsenal managed to score against us from a set-piece!

It looks like we’ll be buying at least two centre backs this summer, I just hope one of them knows how to win an aerial battle – anyone know what Ashley Williams is like in the air?