Oscar Wilde once wrote: “It is a misfortune to concede one goal directly from a corner kick, and to concede two in eight days seems like carelessness.”
The thoughts of Oscar, a noted scholar of corner kicks, may have recently crossed the minds of everyone associated with Manchester United after they allowed not one but two ‘olimpicos’ – which, if you use the term doesn’t know, scoring means. straight from a corner kick – in just over a week, in two different competitions.
The first came from Son Heung-min in that crazy Carabao Cup quarter-final against Tottenham, with his corner sailing over second-choice keeper Altay Bayindir and into the net. The second saw Matheus Cunha confuse André Onana, with the help of some judiciously positioned Wolves defenders, in the Premier League on Boxing Day.
The olimpico is a relatively rare phenomenon. If so, you don’t tend to get more than one per season, so it’s quite exceptional that United manage to land two in such a short space of time. Although given their problems defending set pieces and their general existential crisis, if you were to predict which team this would happen to, it would probably be them.
The instinct is to write off these goals as flukes, misdirected crosses that rely on goalkeeping errors to go in, rather than real attempts to score by the corner kick taker. How can the attacker mean it if he can’t see the goal?
That certainly applies to some. However, many of them exist in a kind of gray area, where the intention of the corner kick taker and the attacking team is there, and the goal is ultimately achieved, albeit perhaps not through completely conventional means.
Former Blackburn Rovers winger Morten Gamst Pedersen, who is still playing in his native Norway at the age of 43, has made scoring Olimpicos a signature move in the final days of his career. A few years ago he scored three in one season, and he claims he once scored five in one match when he was younger.
Pedersen celebrates a Premier League goal for Blackburn in 2005 (Paul Mcfegan/Sportsphoto/Allstar via Getty Images)
His thesis is that even if the taker is not always necessarily ‘shooting’, a goal is still the ultimate conclusion of a well-struck corner kick.
“If the ball can go straight in, it’s like a perfect free kick,” he says The Athletics. “You aim for the far corner and all kinds of things can happen: the goalkeeper can get distracted. If it goes in without anyone present, it’s a good angle.
“You see what Arsenal have done this season: from many of the corners they have scored from, if no one had touched the ball the ball would have gone straight in anyway.
“It’s about creating those situations as close to the goal line as possible. Anything can happen.”
This is a sentiment echoed by another Olimpico specialist, former Wycombe Wanderers full-back Joe Jacobson. He scored two in one match (as part of a hat-trick of set pieces) against Lincoln in 2019, and a number of others throughout his career.
Here it is!
One of the most incredible hat tricks you will see. pic.twitter.com/N7jbaWsD9T
— Wycombe Wanderers (@wwfcofficial) September 9, 2019
“I don’t think I ever thought, ‘I’m going to hit it in the top corner,’” says Jacobson, “but there would be plenty of times where the coach would say to me, ‘Do it on goal.’ , like it’s a shot so that if someone gets a nick or something like that, it can go in.
“I think inswinging corners have gone out of fashion for a while. There are many studies showing that if you use outswingers, defensive headers don’t go as far. Now Arsenal have suddenly made inswingers popular again.”
However, sometimes the taker tries to shoot for sure.
Megan Rapinoe scored directly from a corner at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, after doing so nine years earlier in London. The first instance may not have been entirely intentional, but the second was. At least according to her.
“I meant this one,” she said told the media after the match against Australia in Tokyo. “I told Vlatko (Andonovski) and our assistant coach Laura Harvey yesterday. They said, ‘Put it down here, this is where we want to go, this is kind of the game plan,’ and I thought, ‘Well, maybe I’ll shoot for it.’
Pedersen’s complaints became so frequent and apparent that his colleagues adjusted their movements accordingly.
“At one point my teammate, who played as a central defender, asked before I took the corner: ‘Morten, are you going to shoot?’ I said yes, so he just stayed halfway.”
Pedersen practiced corners as if he were trying to score, even though someone usually intervened before the ball reached the net. “When I played for Tromsø at the beginning of my career, I put a basketball hoop and backboard in front of the goal and aimed at that,” he says.
From a layman’s perspective, it seems that the secret to a dangerous inswing angle is to get as much deflection on the ball as possible, so the taker must adjust the way he hits the ball accordingly. But Jacobson suggests that while swerve is a factor, speed and delivery angle are much more important.
“You often see a beautifully curled ball enter the penalty area and the goalkeeper simply pluck it out of the air. But if there is pace on the ball and it does not come too high, not too far above his eye line, then I find it very difficult for the goalkeeper to claim something.”
Jacobson instead relied on the angle of his run-up to create just the right amount of curl, allowing him to focus on hitting the ball as cleanly and powerfully as possible.
“Just like with free kicks, I was always at a right angle to where I wanted to hit the ball and where I wanted it to land. I tried to hit over the top of the ball, a bit like topspin in tennis, so the ball didn’t curl out for miles and then curl back in again.
“I hit way too much and way too little, but when I got them right the angle meant I didn’t have to worry about where the ball was going to end up. I knew if I ran up that right angle the ball would end up in an area where I wanted it.
From a goalkeeper’s perspective, it’s quite embarrassing when a player like that goes in. But sometimes, when the penalty area is full and the kicker gets the kick just right, there’s not much you can do.
“They’re tough because you have a lot of guys around you,” said Matt Pyzdrowski, the former goalkeeper and The Athletics‘s housing expert. “The tendency of goalkeepers is to go forward first. Your instinct tells you that you want to move forward to attack the ball and get it to the highest point so that you get it before any of the attackers.
Bayindir initially progresses… (Sky Sports)
…before you try to retreat and get caught under the ball (Sky Sports)
“As a goalkeeper you want to resist that tendency to be a little more patient and I think the goal that Tottenham scored (against United) is very clear that the goalkeeper bites very early. There’s a player running in front of him and he’s almost more concerned about the player in front of him. He takes a few steps forward and then realizes the ball is going over his head.
“Every time the ball goes over your head as a goalkeeper, it is quite difficult to retreat. I think it takes his attention off the ball so much that he just misses it completely.”
In Onana’s case, for the goal Cunha scored, the United goalkeeper had attackers in front of and behind him, making it extremely difficult for him to go anywhere. In that case, the accusing finger probably points more at his defenders.
“Every goalkeeper is different,” says Pzydrowski, “but when I played, I wanted the defender to be on the outside of the attacker so he could push the player into the goal, taking away that space. In this case the defender (Manuel Ugarte) just doesn’t do a good enough job and actually pushes the attacker into Onana.”
Onana, surrounded by Wolves players, is also beaten from a corner (Jack Thomas – WWFC/Wolves via Getty Images)
Teams train for these scenarios, but like anything, it’s difficult to recreate the unpredictability and intensity. Could these goals be partly the result of teams practicing corners? Pyzdrowski thinks this could be a factor.
“It was always the day before a match (that we practiced corners) where the intensity is lower. And every time the intensity is lower during training, there is just a natural tendency for the player to relax a little too much.”
When you look at an olimpico, the instinct is to assume that those who sneak in at the far post are intentional, and those who sneak in at the nearest post are lucky. But the truth may be quite the opposite.
A perfect example is the match in which Jacobson scored directly from two corners. The first crept in at the near post, the second curled higher into the far post.
“The second one obviously looks a lot nicer, but it was probably a little too high for the near post and flew in,” he says.
“Wycombe’s assistant manager Richard Dobson, who was in charge of set pieces, used to say: try to hit the ball with his head high into the near post, because an attacker will get there, and if he doesn’t he will be for some cause chaos. It is really difficult for a goalkeeper to read it when players are running over the ball.”
Pyzdrowski confirms that. “Where I always felt insecure was when I knew teams were trying to get the ball towards the near post,” he says. “Because you want to go forward and attack it, other players can get in the way and that’s where you’re a little bit more vulnerable.”
With more and more teams following Arsenal’s lead and hitting those vicious inswinging corners into the box, it may not be the last time we see an Olimpico this season.
And while they may look like flukes, there’s often a little more to them than that.
(Photos: Getty Images; design: Will Tullos)