cockbeard
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I’d be amazed if the football data analysts haven’t looked into this. It wouldn’t surprise me if from certain free kick angles a wall was more of a hindrance but I guess the challenge would be convincing goalies to trust the data.
Definitely heard discussions about it in the past. There's a growing school of thought on not bothering to use walls, men on posts seems the thinking allowing the goalkeeper to cover the angle better and have more visibility. Issue with data is that no-one's done it enough to draw a decent comparison, with such a tiny sample size the data itself is useless
True on goalies faith though, if you grow up doing it a certain way there's some kind of comfort in it. I play in goal for a floorball (indoor hockey) team and whilst it's often a tactic for defenders to screen the keeper, I hate it, as it impinges visibility, so have taught my defenders that my area is out of bounds to them as I need that extra reaction space
I wonder if it's as much to intimidate the forward, to try to restrict their options. But that's out of the water now though as forwards spend so many hours practising free kicks against walls