R2 vs Perth Glory | 9pm Sun 18th Oct | Prestigious Distance Derby

Think one of the things with Fenton is I reckon he is holding back and not going for it like he did before his injuries. Not every time but occasionally you will see maybe not push on or make that challenge he may have done before.

Newcastle seemed to spend the first 45 minutes trying to injure it again.

Would  imagine all the teams would be aware he is fragile.

This was a great thread to read, so much angst that I'm sure I would have joined in on if I was awake. But this is the best comment of the night made before half time. Everything in hindsight eh!

Will take the 3 points and then we will be up for a tough challenge against Roar next weekend, it appears there off field problems hasn't affected their on field performance.

Also that is Lia's third A-League goal, hasn't scored since January 2011 also against the Glory but that one was at home.

(ignore  - phk up)

"Vinnie Lia, the scourge of Perth"

I can see a marketing opportunity for Vinniesta t-shirts in Western Australia.

We can do them in white on Purple.

(skip to near the end)

Obviously this training technique worked.

Great thread to catch up on.  Some great comments when you already know the punchline.

The technician keeps saying the TV is OK, but I'm not letting him leave cause there is no firkin way Vinnie Lia scored.

"so much angst"? I think people just say that without actually reading anything

Siggy and McGlinchy in A League team of the week. Well done boys!

Gourdy or Hampster if you are reading this- I'm close to stopping using the TV3 highlights and other news stories on the website as the videos keep getting obscured by the ads. You can see the subway one over the screen below. I've sent off an email about it, but I haven't heard anything back.

Insult to injury today- the two pre-ads were working fine, but then the highlights of our lord and saviour Vinnie Lia were missing...

Right mouse click > Inspect Element > Delete the ad element, which is usually an iframe a few elements up the tree (also works for popups over streams)

Or run an adblocker.

Don't forget Ernie he is coach of the week.

Gave it a bit of a go. The other ads just came further up the page then. Seems like a mess and a pain in the neck to watch 30 seconds of highlights.

Just zoom? Either use mousewheel (ctrl + mousewheel) to zoom in, or ctrl and the +/- keys on a laptop keyboard.

to

Not enough angst in this thread

I probably need to watch the game again as I just saw bits and pieces but early on in the game I was staggered by the lack of numbers in their box when we had corners. On one occasion I counted only three Phoenix players in the box.

No wonder we have such a horrid strike rate from corners when you can't be bothered to place players there. By cramming it as we did at the time of Lia's goal, the probability of a lucky toe poke or volley increases exponentially. 

We are poor at corners even when we have 5+ players inside the box, so why bother sending everyone up? Keep players in their usual positions and turn it into just another attacking play via a short corner.

While it's nice to score from corners the goals last season certainly werent scarce even though we didn't score directly from a corner.

You say that like having numbers in the box for corners has helped us the other 171 times.

Sorry, was in reply to Orcs.

You can't even see the 3news clips with an adblocker, in my experience.

Exactly. Although uBlock is supposed to be quite good so maybe give that a shot?

TAB Multi was good

Vinnie Lia scoring + Nix Scoring from a corner + Vinnie Lia scoring from a corner + Louie Fenton not dislocating a shoulder

$2500 return for a $5 punt

anyone have it?

I missed out by having all of the above but added Riera holding his arms out to the ref with a "who me?" look on his face 8 times and he only did it 5.

only about 2% of corners actually result in a goal anyway (probably even less for us). So it's hardly worth getting worked up about. 

The thing is of your not going to get players in the box then just take them sorry and use them as a way to get posession in the right part of the pitch.

A few points about that 2% figure:

• That's across all teams - some teams do much better than that
• Goals are rare in football. What percentage of attacks in open play lead to goals? If you improve your corner conversion rate an extra goal every few games might actually make a big difference over a season.
• Even if you only increase your odds of scoring off a corner by one percentage point, that means that you'll score once every 33ish corners rather than once every 50, which is actually a pretty significant improvement.
• I don't know how accurate the 2% figure is - depending on who is saying it some people go as high as 7%. Probably depending on how many touches after a corner they look at.

Take Atletico Madrid - they got their corner scoring rate up to once every 2 games - and they don't even win a lot of corners: 

http://13steps.co/2015/01/30/diego-simeones-atleti...

Winston Reid's old Danish club FC Midtjylland are now trying a stats analysis based approach and have identified set pieces as a place where maximum gains can be made, and are scoring almost a set piece goal every game: 

http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/feb/...

Now I know we have a team of midgets and that makes scoring from set pieces more difficult, but we don't seem to concede from them more than other teams so that height disadvantage can't hinder us too much. I don't like the attitude that we suck at them so why bother - if we took that to it's ultimate endpoint we would have drawn Sunday's game, not won it. I think it's an area where a slight improvement in how we do them could help us a lot.

The other quality of having 2 or 3 corners in a row even if you don't score is it adds pressure to the other team... how much is that worth??

By only putting 3 up top, Perth must have seen it as a chance to relax and get easy possession. 

Whilst we may not have lost anything in terms of goals, i would consider the mental edge component as well.

Though with the high number of corners in a game, a goal from a corner every game or 2 would be handy.

Conan, your posts have been top notch lately. Smashing it.

We seem to have an amazing ability to take decent dead ball strikers (McGlinchey, Bertos, Roly etc) and suck the corner taking ability out of them until they either can't clear the front post or the hit it past the far 18 yard box line.

apart from the fact that the more you send up, the more the oppo will send back - if we are considered 'exposed' when we have three men back during a corner, then we might as well pack up our stuff and find a new sport.