Zoidy: Oh great, we've got another corner
Last updated : 20 September 2005 By Zoidy
 | Ooooooh! We've got a corner! |
|
We all know the scene, it’s a sunny Saturday afternoon, the Gills have a shot at goal, and the keeper makes a great save, and tips it round the post. The crowd cheers, we have a corner! Let’s see what we can do from this…
Hess trots over, puts the ball down, and paces backwards. There is jostling in the box, all the big guys have gone forwards and this is our chance to create a goal. Hess runs up, floats it in… and the ball misses everyone and falls beyond the back post [or is headed away easily, or claimed by the keeper – Ed]. The crowd sighs and the players jog back to their positions.
Sound familiar? Well it should, as it happens far too often to the Gills.
On Saturday versus Oldham, the fans in front of me raised the question about scoring from corners, to which my Dad commented that the statistic was that we would score once from every 26 corners. Now that seems a shockingly bad average, so I was set the task of finding out if it was true. And I can reveal that it definitely isn’t true..
Last season we had 213 corners in 48 games (46 league and 2 cups). That works out at an average of 4 corners a game (our highest being 12 versus West Ham, and lowest being 0 versus Sunderland), and in those 213 corners, we scored 4 times! Crofts got one against Brighton, Cox got 2 against Coventry and then against Preston at the end of the season Smith popped up in the 90th min to get one. The end result of this is that we actually scored once every 53.25 corners last year! Hmm… So my Dad was twice as wrong!
So where does this leave us this season? Well including the Oldham game we have played 10 times (don’t forget Oxford in the cup!), and we have had 51 corners, which has brought our average up to 5 corners a game! Using the statistic from last season were just 2 corners away from a goal! So look out guys, in the next two corners we may get a chance to cheer!