At the end of October this year, Leeds United announced the appointment of a former AC Milan coach onto the staff at Elland Road – Gianni Vio joining the club.
Rather than being a coach tasked with working with a part of the squad, Vio’s job brief is arrowed down into the technical aspects of dead ball/set piece situations. It is a vital part of a team’s set-up approaching a game, with dead ball situations presenting the opportunity for shots at goal for all teams, in all games.
Teams will always be looking for an edge, Leeds’ signing of Vio being just that – the Whites looking to gain a competitive edge on their Championship opponents in a vital area of the game.
Goals from set pieces level out at between 25% and 33% of all goals scored across a season – the remainder being simply wasted or off-target shots. Up that ratio of shots hitting the back of the net through planned free-kick routines and you up the number of goals you score – it’s hardly advanced calculus.
That’s what Gianni Vio is there for, that’s why he’s been brought to Leeds United – to create routines that lead to better chances of goals. He was at Brentford for a season (2015/16) and increased their goals scored/percentage from a set-piece situation from 14/18% to 10/27% in one season.
When he was first making his name at Catania, in Italy, the fans there called him the Little Wizard. Former Catania coach, Italian great, Walter Zenga, said of Vio, “He isn’t just a free-kick wizard. He is like having a 15 or 20-goal striker in the team. A 20-goal-a-season player can get injured. He can get suspended. But there are set-pieces in every game. Always. And he knows how to exploit them best.”
That was evident today with Pablo Hernández’s absolute peach of a free-kick against Burton Albion. The execution that Hernández displayed, coupled with the distraction and build up that Leeds United put on before the Spaniard’s curling Exocet-like strike, was a move straight from the training ground, definitely showing the influence of Vio on the whole construction.
Going from this…
…to this…
…shows that Gianni Vio is getting it right at Elland Road.
Why do they need Gianni Vio? Quite simply he’s there to raise the volume of goals and threat that Leeds United possess at set-piece situations, be that corners or free kicks. Long gone are the days when you could simply loft a ball into the mêlée of players in the area and let it pinball about.
Today it’s all about nuance, spin, whip and dip on the ball rather than reverting to the tactics of Sam Allardyce when he was at Bolton or the long throws of Rory Delap when he played for Stoke.
And Leeds need all the help that they can get, and I don’t mean that in a negative way. Up to Boxing Day 2017, the Whites had scored 37 goals (joint-5th in Championship) with 27 of these (73%) were scored from an open play situation (joint-4th in Championship). To date United have only scored six goals from set-piece plays – equivalent to just 16.2% of their goals for the season.
Gianni Vio is there to nudge them closer to the 25-33% margins mentioned earlier. Was today only the start? Let’s hope so.
