Set-piece goals just the latest overblown moral panic for the Premier League content machine | OneFootball

After a brief midweek hiatus for some lighthearted fun in the Carabao and the ongoing distraction of the Liverpool crisis, one that is in language-mangling fashion somehow both deepening and escalating, it’s all eyes back on the Premier League.

And right now that means only one thing: panicking and demanding that someone think of the children whenever anybody (but obviously and especially Arsenal) scores a set-piece goal.

Let it never be said that coverage of the Premier League isn’t beset by wild overreactions. The latest moral panic gripping the Premier League (or, more accurately, gripping coverage of the Premier League) is the set-piece goal. And everyone agrees Something Must Be Done.

There’s been quite a lot of them, you see. The runaway league leaders are particularly adept, and a few teams happen to have simultaneously landed upon some particularly skilled long-throw merchants.

And that won’t do. Because set-piece goals aren’t proper goals are they? No, open play goals are proper goals that proper teams score. We can’t be having a team winning the Premier League on the back of set-piece goals, can we? That would never do.

Here’s the thing, though: it doesn’t matter, and if you think it does then you’re wrong. Really is that simple. As much as anything because even the very idea of a ‘set-piece goal’ itself is so woolly as to be almost entirely irrelevant as a serious point of wider discussion.

The creation of the ‘set-piece goal’ as an idea itself comes from the school of thought that lumbered us with VAR; that everything in football, a sport the very essence of which lies in its flowing and subjective-by-design rhythms, can in fact be codified and given a number or declared right or wrong, true or false, good or bad, legal or illegal.

Of course, football cannot be so easily deconstructed. This is not a flaw, but in fact the biggest single reason why it’s the biggest and most popular and most successful sport humankind has yet devised. It is the perfect combination of simplicity and complexity. Everyone can understand the basic idea of football, but nobody has ever mastered it.

VAR is a failure because the people who introduced it simply don’t understand what makes football tick. The result is that, with nobody in power willing to admit that fundamental mistake and the toothpaste now impossible to get back in the tube, the entire sport is being retconned and retrofitted to try and mash it into a shape where absolute certainty can be achieved.

It will never succeed. The current panic over set-piece goals is small beer compared to the game-mangling dominance of VAR, but it comes from the same place: that all goals, like all decisions, can be neatly and uncomplicatedly compartmentalised.

Of course they cannot. Set-piece goals come under the classic description that fits all undefinable concepts: we know it when we see it.

But try to come up with an actual watertight working definition of a set-piece goal and you immediately run into problems.

There are all sorts of definitions out there, but all hit the same snag. Take this one, which we single out not to mock but to point out just how hard it is to actually pin this concept down.

Notice how the first half of that is perfectly precise. Notice how the second half is completely and unavoidably not that. When, precisely, does a phase of play ‘break down into open play’? You can’t define it, because it cannot be defined.

Which is fine. It really doesn’t matter. There is absolutely no harm in collating and recording ‘set-piece goals’ and ‘open-play goals’ according to some necessarily subjective and at times quite arbitrary criteria to obtain a rough idea of how a team goes about its business. What you really can’t do about something so inherently fuzzy and nebulous is to then get really upset about it, or pretend a rise in one or drop in the other constitutes the falling in of the sky.

We can use easy examples of corner goals from three different Premier League games last weekend to show just how daft it really is to get worked up about these things. Eberechi Eze scored Arsenal’s winner against Crystal Palace, Matty Cash got Aston Villa’s against Man City, and Micky van de Ven scored twice in Spurs’ win at Everton.

None of these goals are remotely similar. Eze’s goal is a brilliantly inventive and improvised finish as the ball dropped awkwardly to him from Gabriel’s mistimed header.

But if you try to suggest that ‘second-ball’ element means it’s no longer a set-piece goal then you run into the immediate problem of Van de Ven’s first goal also coming from a second ball, with Rodrigo Bentancur heading back across goal for the centre-back to nod in from close range. No sensible argument could define that as anything but a set-piece goal, yet no definition that excludes Eze’s could include Van de Ven’s.

And then you’ve got Matty Cash waving his swinger at a long-range effort and by hook or by crook locating the bottom corner of City’s goal. Again, it comes so soon after the corner that there can be no compelling argument that it’s from open play.

Indeed, Opta’s definition of a ‘set-piece goal’ revolves around the ‘pattern of play’. Which in practice means if after a corner or free-kick all the big lads from the back are still up in attacking positions then it doesn’t really matter how long the reload into the box might take, it’s still a set-piece goal. It hasn’t broken down into open play when so many players are in atypical positions. Cash could have laid the ball off for someone else to shoot or cross back into the box, and you’re still looking at a set-piece goal by that definition.

If any team other than Arsenal scores that Eze goal, nobody says anything at all beyond complimenting the elasticity and cleverness of that finish. Had Arsenal beaten Everton with the two goals Van de Ven scored from a combined distance of about three-and-a-half yards, it would have signalled the death of football as we know it.

But perhaps more important still is the fact this really this is already shaping up to be a bizarre season to complain about. Having established that even just goals from corners can include such wildly differing finishes as the three we’ve briefly looked at here from one day’s action, the idea that set-piece goals are more boring or inherently somehow lesser than open-play goals is for the birds.

And especially so in a season that is so far from boring. Even if it plays out in the most predictable and pedestrian way it can possibly go from here, it would mean crowning a third different champion in three years and the end to a 22-year title drought.

In a season where we will hold our hands up and admit we fully expected a return to Big Six dominance after the summer talent drain from the have-nots to the haves it is currently impossible to predict with any kind of certainty who might occupy the European spots by the end of the season. The very fact that ‘Bournemouth’ and ‘Sunderland’ currently represent viable answers is reason enough to cheer.

And the same is entirely true at the other end of the table, where the determined competence of all three promoted sides means absolutely nothing about the relegation fight can currently be predetermined with any great conviction.

It might be easy enough to pinpoint Wolves, West Ham and Nottingham Forest as the three current weakest teams, but can anyone really say ‘Well, we know those three are all going down’?

It’s not even November yet and we’ve already had the two biggest clubs in the country gripped by full-blown crisis, while there is currently absolutely no reliable information upon which to decide whether any of Chelsea or Spurs or Newcastle or Villa or even Man City are actually any good or not.

Not since the Leicester Ridiculousness of 2015/16 has the Premier League offered up a season with greater potential for uncertainty and the unexpected than we have right now. Cherish and relish it.

Don’t whinge that a few more goals than you consider optimal are getting added to the ‘set piece’ rather than ‘open play’ pile by some nerd at a laptop.