I’ve always thought that teams don’t spend enough time practising throw-ins. Occasionally, a team will have a player with a long throw and will build a strategy based on throws in their opponents half but that seems to be about it.
How often do we see a defending team deep in their own half taking an age to take a throw, by which time the opposition have closed them down? At the moment, NW seems to use throws down the line to gain ground but it’s not very sophisticated.
Maybe they should approach this bloke for help. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/sep/23/liverpool-throw-in-coach-thomas-gronnemark-klopp?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Great link, Martin.
The Boro's way with throw-ins has tapped such a rich vein of comedy, however, that It would be a pity to interfere with it.
Who can ever forget the complete inability of Barragan to master the art of lifting the ball over his head?
We had to scour the whole of Europe to find someone who threw the ball in from close to his own hairline.
Barragan was worth every penny of his fee, every Boro supporter fully recognising that that kind of incompetence in the most fundamental basics of the game doesn't come cheap, and without some serious scouting.
For me, though, even this was surpassed by Pulis's coaching of George Friend to become our very own Rory Delap.
This performance was a riveting three- act drama which began with George spending about 30 seconds drying the ball with either his shirt or a towel.
Next came the building tension of George's run-up. This was a gallop only curtailed to 10 metres by the perimeter wall, George giving the impression that had the wall not been there he would have run down the gangway all the way from the top of the stands.
The fact that George generally fumbled the ball in mid-run, requiring him to go back to the start of his elaborate routine, only added to the suspense.
The climax to this second act was George's arrival at the touchline, the arching of the back and the straining of every sinew to achieve maximum torque.
After such elaborate foreplay even George's most ardent female admirers must have been disappointed by the bathos of the final result: a flaccid lob that rarely penetrated the outer reaches of the penalty area.
It was an anti-climax seemingly designed to satisfying the comedic demands of even the most hardened chicken runner.
The icing on the cake for connoisseurs was that this was a performance endlessly repeated without any discernible variation, let alone improvement, game after game throughout Pulis's reign. An act of comic absurdity which never looked like producing any results and which could therefore be enjoyed as a delicious slice of pure theatre, simply for its own sake.
The idea that throw-ins from any part of the pitch can actually be productive is the kind of reductive thinking that will thankfully never catch on with the Boro hierarchy. Their past record demonstrates how well they understand the importance of laughter in eventually attracting back the post-covid Boro crowds.
You are Harry Pearson and I claim my £5
The thing that always got me about professional players taking throw ins was that most of them encroached over the touch line and into the field of play. That of course is a foul throw but never picked up by the assistant referee.
OFB