When the times comes for looking back, England's major tournaments tend to be dominated by a single over-arching question. In 2004, it was "What if Wayne Rooney had stayed fit?" In 1996, it was "Wait, Gareth Southgate?" And if the early exchanges of 2016 are anything to go by, this time around we're in for years and years of "What on earth are England doing with corners?"
Investigating the mystery of England’s corners
As England stumble towards the knockout stages, there’s only one question on everybody’s minds. Who’s going to take the corners next?
Alex Livesey/Getty Images
In the first game, Harry Kane was the nominated taker, which did not go down well. Alan Shearer said Kane taking corners is like Lewis Hamilton changing his own tires. Jamie Redknapp said it wasn’t good news. Even the French are curious. “Non, le gros point d’interrogation pendant 90 minutes, c’est de comprendre pourquoi diable Harry Kane tire les corners en faisant n’importe quoi?” thundered So Foot, in tones of ancient suspicion. What the hell are the roastbeefs playing at?
Roy Hodgson’s thinking on the matter was presumably simple. While it would certainly be nice to have all one’s best finishers in the box, it seems logical to sacrifice one of those finishers in order to ensure that the best corner taker is allowed to do just that. Otherwise, there’s no point having any finishers in there at all. You could have Steve Bruce on a giraffe in there and it wouldn’t matter if nobody could kick the ball at his head.
(In any case, as has been pointed out elsewhere, Kane scored exactly one header from open play last season, and one goal from a corner. Steve Bruce on a giraffe, he is not.)
And even the most strident critic would have to concede that Hodgson was probably better placed than almost anybody else to decide who is the best corner taker in the England squad. From the outside, it might have appeared that most of Kane’s corners were somewhere between mediocre and actively bad -- with one decent one that Chris Smalling put straight at Igor Akinfeev, if memory serves -- but unless Hodgson was being led to take actively damaging decisions by his dreams -- which might explain a couple of other things, thinking about it -- then we can safely assume that either Kane was doing something right in training, or that nobody else in the England squad can take corners either. Hodgson even alluded to the latter after the warm-up game against Turkey: “I don’t need to apologise for Kane taking a corner. Especially if you’ve got a player with his quality striking a ball and no one else in the team who comes up to that level of striking a ball.”
That thought was, for England fans, a bleak one. Somewhere between 65 and 70 percent of England’s football DNA is composed of big meaty central defenders and big meaty centre forwards with big meaty faces doing big meaty things, and nutting corners into the net is precisely the kind of big meaty thing that gets those big meaty juices flowing. An England without the means to activate all that siege weaponry is an England neutered, an England cowed. Perhaps Andy Carroll should have come after all; at least Kane would have had something a little more distinctive to aim at.
Indeed, it was hard not to wonder if the argument wasn’t fueled in large part by the thought Harry Kane shouldn’t take corners because it looks weird. And to be fair, it absolutely did. It’s always preferable to have a midfielder or a winger taking bad corners, because strikers should be in the box watching bad corners sail over their heads or into the keepers arms. And so it came to pass that Hodgson, ever in tune to the mood of the nation, changed things up against Wales. Rooney’s a midfielder now, he thought. He should be in charge of bad corners. He’ll definitely be sufficiently inadequate, since Louis van Gaal asked Phil Jones to whip them in for Manchester United. And lo and behold, he didn’t take any good ones either.
(Incidentally, Rooney’s promotion at Kane’s expense doesn’t seem to have upset nearly so many people. Which perhaps tells us something bleak about how the nation now views Rooney’s striking capacities.)
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter: everybody is rubbish at corners. Stat nerds will tell you that this is because corners rarely generate decent scoring chances, let alone goals, while everybody else will tell you that these donkeys couldn’t find Steve Bruce on a giraffe if they were on safari in Hull. (Though, to be fair, that does sound quite difficult. Are corners, perhaps, just quite difficult?) So perhaps England (the fretful nation) needs to relax; this strange football team will doubtless generate something more important to worry about soon. And come Slovakia, perhaps England the team, should they win another corner, might want to think about abandoning the plan altogether. Take the thing short and try and play a bit of football. Who knows what might happen then?
See More:
