On other threads our lousy total shots record the past two years and our "amazing" corner kick performance (or lack thereof) have been discussed. These seem related to me, but since I'm one of those who came late in life to the game, and never played it, I need those of you (most of you) who know more about the game than I do to chime in on this. By the conventional analysis, our corner kick problem isn't the high number of corners but the fact that we've done nothing with them. Still, I wonder if the high number of corners in fact isn't a problem. It seems that we're getting the ball into the goal area, but then we are't getting off the shots at anything like the rate we should. Defenders are getting to our attackers and putting the ball out for a corner. In otherwords, we seem to be able to bring the ball into scoring range, but then we break down. Too often the defender is able to put the ball out for a corner before our attacker can get off a shot. Is there anything to this? If so, what's the problem? More important, what's the solution?
Petke has said it several times. It's the final pass that has been lacking. We get near the penalty area, but don't do much with it once we're there. We used to send cross after cross into the box, but with short strikers it wasn't an effective strategy so we kind of stopped doing it but haven't tried anything else. I think we should have never stopped getting crosses in even with short forwards. We needed to change the type of cross to a more driven, low cross. But getting the ball into the "mixer" as they say, things can happen, a loose ball here a deflection there and next thing you know one goes into the back of the net. Say what you want about the height or lack thereof of our forwards, but even when we had Moreno, Lassiter, Wegerle et. al only Diaz Arce was any good with his head. If Moreno scored with his head it's because the ball hit him not for anything he did. But we did get a lot of goals because the ball was rolling and bouncing around in the box and someone was around to slam it home.