Soccer corner kick plays: near-post flick and short corner

What Law 17 gives you

The rules of a corner are short, and every routine is built on them. Under Law 17 the ball is placed in the corner area, opponents must stay at least 9.15 m from the corner arc until the ball is in play, and the ball is in play as soon as it is kicked and clearly moves. It does not have to leave the corner area. The taker may not touch it again until another player has, and a goal can be scored straight from the kick.

One more line matters more than it looks: under Law 11, there is no offside offence for a player who receives the ball directly from a corner kick. So at the moment of delivery your runners can stand anywhere, including in front of the goalkeeper. That stops being true after a short corner, and the second routine below is built around it.

If you coach under-12s, the five soccer set pieces for U12s guide is the better place to start: it has a back-post corner that works at that age. This page is for adult and older youth teams, where the defence is organised and the delivery can be trusted.

Routine one: near-post flick-on

Against a zonal defence, the dangerous space is in front of the zone, not inside it. A zonal defender who is standing still has to jump from a standing start, and an attacker running onto the ball arrives first. So the delivery is an in-swinger aimed at the near post, the post nearer the taker, and one runner attacks it to glance it on across the six-yard box.

Three runs make it work, and two of them never touch the ball:

• The flick-on runner starts deep and late, and attacks the space in front of the near-post zonal defender. He does not try to score. He tries to change the direction of the ball.
• The back-post runner checks away from his marker first, then curves round behind the zone to arrive at the far post as the flick comes across.
• The decoy runs at the penalty spot to keep the central zonal defenders and the man marker looking at him instead of at the ball.

Coach the delivery as much as the runs. An in-swinger hit at pace to the near post, at head height, is the whole routine. A floated ball gives the goalkeeper time to come and take it.

Routine two: short corner, change the angle, cut it back

The short corner is not about beating the defender sent to close it. It is about moving the ball to a new angle so that every defender in the box has to turn. A defence set to defend a cross from the corner flag faces the flag. Move the ball ten metres along the goal line and they are facing the wrong way.

The taker plays it short and immediately runs infield along the goal line. Because another player has now touched the ball, the taker can play it again, and the return pass finds him at the corner of the penalty area. The runners in the box have been waiting behind the ball, so when the cut-back comes they are not offside, and the defenders are turning to face it while the spot runner arrives on it.

That is the offside trap in this routine. After the short pass, Law 11 applies again, so any attacker standing goal-side of the ball and of the second-last defender is offside when the return pass is played. Your runners hold their positions behind the ball until the cut-back.

Defending against them

Both routines teach you how to defend a corner too. A zonal defence beaten by the near-post flick needs a player in front of the near post, attacking the ball rather than waiting for it. A defence beaten by the short corner needs two players ready to close it down, not one. The zonal corner defence template shows a sound starting shape, and the attacking corner template shows the set-up these two routines start from.

Practising it

Fifteen minutes is enough, but it has to be against defenders. Start the near-post routine with two defenders and a goalkeeper, add the zonal line once the timing of the flick-on is right, and only then add the short-corner option, so the defence has to choose. The crossing and finishing drill is good preparation for the delivery.

Sending it to your players

Both routines are live animations. Open either in the soccer play designer, swap in your own players, and send the link to the squad. A twenty-second animation does more for the timing of a run than a whiteboard does.