It's clear alot of work has gone into set pieces, but at the same time it looks to me like much of it has simply been down to Ritchie (and now Shelvey) delivering decent-to-good balls into the right areas at the right time consistently. They're not whipping the ball in particularly well at pace, but just getting enough bend into the right areas (without floating it too much) to give our big lads a chance. Makes such a big difference when the rest of the team know that 7 or 8 times out of 10 they'll have a chance of attacking the ball, when previously our corner takers were hitting the ball terribly with no timing the vast majority of the time. In fact, we've gone for quite a long time since we last had players capable of putting e.g. decent corners in consistently (probably back to Nobby/Robert). Even Cabaye oddly enough was more "miss" than "hit" when it came to them.
We've also now got the lads in the air for it.
For a long time we had:
Colo, Mbemba/Willo, Cisse, Haidara in the box.
We can now choose from:
Lascelles, Clark, Hanley, Dummett & Mitro
We are simply much stronger in the air as well.
Pardew evidently knows nothing about set-pieces. But Palace are a danger from them simply because they've got the right type of lads in the box.
convinced palace lived off the tony pulis set piece coaching for a while under pardew.
Sorry for the long quoting but interesting points for sure. While we definitely are better in the air now, a lot of our set piece goals haven't been headers from crosses. I suspect the total may even include breakdowns and second balls, like the Hayden goal and the Gayle header after the missed pen. Against Brighton, the two goals from set pieces were the Gouff volley and the opportunist "err, let's not play for the corner flag" cross and pull back to Yedlin. Both Gayle and Shelvey have scored from direct free kicks. So it's not just headers.
But for a Sergio Ramos header from a corner in the dying minutes, Athleti won have won the CL, so they matter in the biggest games and for the best teams.
The most interesting point is the use of Haidara to overegg his Haidara hate pudding point.