James Ward-Prowse aside, where have all the great free-kick takers gone?

With his winning strike against Chelsea, James Ward-Prowse took his total of Premier League free-kick goals to 17, just one behind the record-holder, David Beckham. He is that most old-fashioned of things, a free-kick specialist. And he’s about the only one left in the Premier League.

Managers seem happy to spend their time strutting their stuff by constructing complex tactical systems; maybe just training someone to curve it around the wall is somehow too simple. There is clearly a decline in free-kick goals across the last five years. The average is slipping from the mid to high 20s per season to the mid to high teens.

Only 12 have been scored so far this season and JWP has three of them. In 2020/21 there were only 15, the lowest since the Premier League started compiling the stats in 2006. In 2013/14, it was 34, the highest total yet.

But why? It would make sense if every club had a dead ball specialist wouldn’t it? There was a typical example in West Ham’s game against Spurs. One nil down, the Hammers get a free-kick on the edge of the box. Very dangerous territory. Said Benrahma, who isn’t a free-kick specialist, just kicks it high over the bar in the same way any non-professional in the sixth tier would have done. A goal at that moment would have changed the game. But it was wasted through lack of attention paid to training players to be able to consistently take good free-kicks from dangerous positions. It’s such a glaring error, a glaring blind spot.

Why not intensively train a couple of players to stick it in the top bin six or seven times out of 10? It used to be recognised as a great asset simply because in most games there are one or more free-kicks awarded around the edge of the box that can be exploited for goals by a high-skill free-kick. Right now, JWP is keeping Southampton’s hope of survival alive pretty much single-handedly via his dead ball prowess.

This raises a bigger issue of how often dead balls, whether corners or free-kicks, are simply wasted or disregarded in favour of more fashionable football foreplay. There is literally nothing more frustrating than a corner which fails to beat the first man. But we see it happen all the time, often repeatedly by the same player, in the same game. Surely that can be a fault trained out of players for the majority of the time? Seemingly not. Or perhaps no-one is trying, overlooking the dead ball in favour of what they perceive to be more sexy football.

The large majority of…