How did Robertson improve his corners? He made his worst discipline a priority

Andy Robertson has many strengths, but playing corner kicks was never one of them. However, he has worked tremendously on this discipline and it is now one of his strengths. How did he do it and what made him do it?

“P.S. need to train on corner kicks,” was Andy Robertson’s caption to an Instagram post on 16 December 2018. Liverpool had just beaten Manchester United 3-1 at Anfield, Jose Mourinho’s last game on the Red Devils’ bench.

At the time, the Portuguese coach himself marvelled at the Liverpool left-back’s tireless workrate. “I’m tired of just watching Robertson. He does a hundred-metre sprint every minute,” Mourinho said after the game. But while everyone has become accustomed to his physicality, even in such a great game there was something to criticise.

Robertson, in fact, played four corners, once short, and hit United’s first defender three times. He didn’t play a single corner the rest of the season.

Four years have passed and Robertson is one of the best enforcers in the Premier League. This season Liverpool scored 24 goals after standard situations played by Robertson. He has collected 15 assists, with five coming directly from corners.

The best corner takers in the Premier League

Expected goals (xG) counts the number of shots within six seconds of a corner being played

So how did Robertson become so good at something he was so bad at?

The Scottish captain told The Athletic newspaper that he struggled to give the ball height when hitting the ball from the spot. That’s why his teammates often played the ball to him to hit it on the move.

“I just couldn’t get them off the ground. I don’t know why. It was something I wanted to add to my game. It’s always great to prove to people otherwise,” Robertson said.

“I’ve worked so hard during the 2018-19 season to get better at it. I wanted to add the ability to play corners with my left foot, because before, only Trent Alexander-Arnold or James Milner played them with their right foot. I tried to become that left-footed option and I believe I succeeded,” says the 28-year-old defender.

And he did. While he played 5 corners in the 2018/19 season, he has already played 75 corners this season. The main factor is that his xG, the expected goals after his corners, has risen. Since the 2019/20 season, xG has shot up from 0.8 to 2.7. This makes every Robertson corner increasingly dangerous.

Focus is key

“I still can’t believe Robbo is kicking corners. You would never get him to do them,” says Athletic’s David Meyler, a former Hull City teammate. “He was terrible at it. Some hit the first player, some went completely over every player in the box. But he’s worked on it and his centres are unreal now. You can see that if you work hard at something, it will get results,” Meyler added.

“I wouldn’t say he changed his kicking style, but he improved his concentration. It comes more naturally to someone like Trent. Robbo won’t forgive me for that, but it’s not natural for him. If you look at David Beckham, who was one of the best in the world at it, he never sprinted to the corner, he always looked around concentrating on where he wanted to kick it,” Meyler muses.

Robertson and other Liverpool players began working with neuroscientists to help them concentrate better on certain situations.

Alexander-Arnold and Robertson have the great advantage of Liverpool having great headers in Van Dijk, Konate, Matip and Fabinho. But their job is to find their teammates, or rather the space where they charge. Robertson most often plays his corners between the small whitewash and the penalty area, where three Reds players often charge.

Robertson plays corners from the left side to keep the ball spinning away from goal, Alexander-Arnold from the right. Together, they form one of Liverpool’s big weapons, from which Jürgen Klopp’s squad score plenty of goals. And yet, a few years ago, Robertson was still unable to get past the first defender.

Source: The Athletic