The Breakdown: Set Pieces with Eleri Earnshaw

Welcome to The Breakdown, where Angel City players (and staff) break down the basics of the game to help you understand what they do on the pitch. This week, First Assistant Coach Eleri Earnshaw talks set piece delivery.

AngelCity.com: Let’s start with the basics. When we talk about set pieces—corner kicks or free kicks—we describe them as “inswingers” or “outswingers.” What do those terms mean?

Eleri Earnshaw: An inswinger is a service that, as the ball is in flight, travels and curls towards the goal. An outswinger is one that may initially go towards goal but ends up swinging away from goal. Both are really difficult to defend, and you would choose to deliver one versus the other based on A, the quality of your service—and if it's consistent—and B, the opponent.

You might want to bait a goalkeeper off the goal line by using an outswinger. Initially the ball is going to look like it's coming towards goal, and then at the last minute is going to curl away from goal, so it's a good way to tempt a goalkeeper who is a little bit uncertain off their line. The other thing an outswinger will do is it will likely pull an opponent’s zone [i.e., the opposing defensive players] a little bit further away from goal, which gives you a little more space between the goal and the zone to attack.

Inswingers, depending on where a free kick is from—let's say it's from the half-space channel, which isn't quite wide and it's not quite central—if you deliver an inswinging ball that is on target, but you also have runners [players making runs towards the goal], sometimes you don't even need a touch and it can squeak in the goal, and again, it's really hard for goalkeepers to judge that. 

But ultimately, it’s really all on the service. It all depends on the quality and consistency of your service, and the opposition goalkeeper and how you want to manipulate that threat.

ACFC: When a player steps up to take a corner kick or free kick, how do they decide what kind of service to provide? How much input does the coaching staff have?

EE: We give her the best options against the opponent. We go into the game knowing where they’re weak—where they might stack an extra person in the zone, when they might leave space—and we just have target areas.

So if we know that their zone shifts forward, we might say, “target the back zone,” and we'll adjust our runs to make sure that we can get someone free at the right time in that space. Sometimes we'll pull someone out alongside [the kick taker] and threaten to play a short corner [where the kicker passes to a nearby teammate rather than kicking it all the way into the penalty area], which means they have to send someone from their zone [to defend the short corner], which means they’ve got less people defending the goal. Typically they’ll send a front-post player, and then you might see the ball whipped into the front of the zone. So we try and manipulate their zone to create space in certain pockets.

ACFC: Talk a little more about short corners—I think they’re a commonly misunderstood aspect of the game. Could you explain what situations they can be useful for?

EE: There's a few reasons. If we want to disrupt their zone and pull numbers out of the box—a team like Louisville, for example, almost every one of their players is over 5’7, so we want to pull someone out of that. If we do decide to deliver, we want less people. 

The other piece is most corners aren't scored off the first contact, so by using the player for the short corner, you can pull someone else out, or you're going to cause their zone to shift, and their attention is now on the ball, versus the job [of defending the goal]. So if we can distract them from the actual job and cause them a bit of chaos, let's just do it.

There are other teams where one to the box will hurt them, so it depends on the opposition.