It’s 25 October 2012. Those of you who follow the Austrian regional leagues won’t need reminding. SC Weiz versus Fürstenfeld in the Landesliga Steiermark. I won’t insult anyone by explaining which tier of Austrian football we are talking about.
Weiz have a free-kick 25 yards from goal. Kevin Steiner stands over the ball. There are six players in the defensive wall. There’s no draught excluder; this is 2012 – there were no draughts that required excluding.
All regulation stuff except that halfway between the ball and the wall are two players from the attacking team, on their knees – creating their own fun-size dummy wall – worryingly close to the ball. But these are Austrian regional league players we’re talking about. They are not in any danger.
Steiner takes a short run-up and absolutely belts the ball directly into the face of one of his teammates. He’d been protecting his delicates with one hand, the other across his shoulder. His head is just exposed – it’s point blank range. He crumples to the floor and Fürstenweld launch a counterattack.
The camera pans back to the bench: standing alongside the manager is a young long-haired man shaking his head. On closer inspection, it’s Austin MacPhee – now the acclaimed set-piece coach at Aston Villa.
OK, it’s not Austin MacPhee. At the time he was playing a pivotal coaching role at St Mirren, helping them to Scottish League Cup glory. But the rest of it is true – a brilliantly ridiculous set-piece idea, executed more terribly than you could ever dream.
Twelve years on this is the season of set-piece coaches. Before 2023-24 all we had was “left hand raised front post, both hands raised back post”. If you were lucky you might have an Andy Hinchcliffe/Duncan Ferguson cheat code. If you experimented with anything, there’s a high chance you’d just Kevin Steiner it into your teammate’s face.
One of the joys of football is new stuff. New people doing new things – and of course watching old people lose their minds over it. It’s OK to acknowledge that teams have worked on corners since corners began (1872 if you’re interested – from 1875 you weren’t allowed to pass to yourself, ie dribble towards goal). You can be cynical about the new performative art of being a set-piece coach: Nicolas Jover taking over the technical area every time Arsenal get a corner. Kids will be triple-captaining MacPhee in Fantasy Football, or fighting over a Jover shiny in Panini 2025.
But Arsenal’s set pieces in particular are so good and have become an event in their own right. Radio stations cut away from the main commentary game when the Gunners have a corner. One Spanish commentator started singing the Jaws theme as Declan Rice jogged over to swing one in the other weekend. The delivery is brilliant from both sides. The blocking and choreography – somewhere between a working loom and a line of scrimmage – is strangely mesmerising.
It’s interesting to see how teams will react. Everton did a fair job last weekend; there were fewer cutaways of Jover as James Tarkowski headed each corner 30 miles upfield. In the Carabao Cup on Wednesday, Crystal Palace left three men on the halfway line to stop Arsenal having all their players in the box. How far could you push that? Half the team up there. Just leave one big centre-back and the keeper.
And in the same way Pep Guardiola has influenced every Sunday league team to the point where clogger full-backs would rather play a blind ball into central midfield than hoy it upfield, go to any park this weekend and you’ll see Arsenal’s corner tactics being copied.
A few years ago you probably wouldn’t have accepted the idea that set-piece coaches would become so fetishised regardless of their obvious merits. So it’s interesting to speculate what the next role could be that will transfix us enough to fill airtime and column inches. Let me introduce … Director of Vibes.
Unofficially you might find vibes “in and around” the training ground – your player liaison officers, your kitmen, your Sammy Lees. But imagine each team with a DoV in the dugout wearing an initialled tracksuit, celebrating when a player simply smiles.
Perhaps broadcasting and elite sport aren’t interchangeable but over the past two decades I’ve come to the conclusion that the only thing that matters is the vibe. If the vibe is good, the show is good. If the team are happy, the show is better. If people want to be there and they get on, it makes a marked difference.
There’s a serious side to this. Michael Caulfield, a psychologist who works at Brentford, did an excellent interview on the Monday Night Club on BBC Radio 5 Live this week – more than a month after he spoke to the Guardian – in which he talked about the need for players, coaches, staff and especially Thomas Frank to be happy and to have a work/life balance and to take time off. Normal job stuff.
We don’t view it as a job with a workplace and colleagues. Who needs a work/life balance when you’re playing football? But it is still work. On Football Weekly we have discussed the idea of giving players annual leave. Unavailable: Mount (calf), Shaw (hamstring), Mainoo (OOO).
It sounds ridiculous – but come back to me in 2028. And for only £500,000 a year, I’d take Director of Vibes at Spurs: be quite nice to have around the place, good in a WhatsApp group but not over the top, and step in at half-time with some classic Beadle’s About just to get the players smiling after being played off the park by Bournemouth for 45 minutes. Daniel Levy – my phone is on.
