Football punditry is awash with well-established cliches and assumptions. Many of them are flimsy at best.

Should you always shoot across goal? Should goalkeepers always save a shot to their near post? And is zonal marking actually any good? Also, does their prominent use mean they should simply be accepted as truth? Or are they myths we have merely grown to trust?

On the latest episode of The Athletic FC Tactics Podcast, host Michael Bailey examines the data with Michael Cox, Mark Carey and Liam Tharme.

Check it out on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — and you can get in touch with the podcast team by emailing your thoughts and voice notes to tacticspod@theathletic.com.

You can find a condensed, lightly edited version of the discussion below…

Michael Bailey: Last week in our listener mailbag episode, we said that some questions were so good they deserved a full episode. Well, this is one of those.

This idea of disproving or proving pundit cliches came from a comment on the app by Gavin B, who said: ‘Pundits often repeat the same axioms, especially when it comes to goals and goalkeeping. Has the increase in football data helped prove or disprove any of these? Are there any other claims that pundits state as fact that have now been proven or disproven?’.

First of all: great question, Gavin. Thank you. How about we pick apart this one first: ‘Goalkeepers should not concede at their near post‘. Michael, is it true?

Michael Cox: It’s the classic example of if a ’keeper is beaten at their near post, it does look strange. But as a footballer or manager, you’ve got to be prepared to look silly to actually do the thing that, statistically over time, is beneficial.

If you take that cliche to the letter, the goalkeeper should just position themselves touching the near post — but then they’ll concede loads of space towards the far post and probably get beaten there quite a lot. You have to put yourself in the best position to stop the shot.

If a striker is in, one-on-one, and they go across the goalkeeper and score in the far corner, the ’keeper is rarely blamed. But there must be positional issues sometimes, when they are too far across. But we’ve been conditioned to think it’s just the wrong thing to do, to be beaten at the near post.

One example would be when Arsenal’s Gabriel Martinelli scored at Chelsea this season. He just stuck it in at the near post past Robert Sanchez. That looked very strange. But if Sanchez was the equivalent distance towards the near post and left space at the far post, we probably would have just said, ‘Well, it’s one of those things’.

You remember the outliers, the things that look weird, but it doesn’t matter where you’re beaten. Just keep the ball out. Be in the best position.

Bailey: It’s an aesthetic thing, Mark, isn’t it? If you’re a goalkeeper and you’re at such a tight angle that you are quite close to your near post, there isn’t a lot of space there. So if it squeezes through, then you’re expected to save it.

GO DEEPER

Why are Premier League forwards increasingly choosing one of football’s most difficult shots?

Mark Carey: It might be a lazy thing to say, but modern attackers and strikers are super-intelligent and they’ll look to see where they can expose even the smallest bit of weakness.

We’re speaking here more about shots at the near post but goalkeepers, if they’re not entirely sure whether there’s going to be a shot or a cross, do sometimes have to take more of an aggressive stance slightly away from their goal to actually block the cross that might be going into the centre of the six-yard box for a team-mate to tap in.

I once spoke with an EFL goalkeeping coach who talked about having aggressive positioning at the near post and diving across to stop it at the source. But then you sometimes do need to take a couple of yards to either side, away from the near post, to make sure that you’re stopping it in the first place. We’re talking about shots here, but as a goalkeeper, you don’t always know exactly what’s going to happen. And that indecision then influences what you end up doing.

Emi Martinez tries to protect his near post (Mark Leech/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)

Bailey: OK. Well in that case, let’s move on to another one — ‘The goalkeeper should always try to catch the ball, not punch it‘. Liam, why would you punch it?

Liam Tharme: I loosely agree with it. There’s a hierarchy of ‘catch it if you can and punch it if you must’. The benefit of catching isn’t just stopping their attack. It’s that then you have the ball and it’s your turn to play. And with punching, people often underestimate how safe it can be. A genuinely good punch can clear the lines in the same way as a defensive header. If you connect with it well enough, you’re probably going to eliminate the attack.

But it’s been a bit more difficult this season. I did a piece recently on inswinging corners being up, where Mark ran some numbers for me in terms of the number of punches or catches goalkeepers are doing, and it’s gone up from about seven per cent of corners over the past four or five seasons to almost 10 per cent this season. Guglielmo Vicario at Tottenham Hotspur and Andre Onana at Manchester United do it but across the board, ’keepers are being tested by having to deal with a lot of bodies around them and attackers almost jumping on top of people. It becomes a lot harder to catch it.

Manchester United’s Andre Onana leaps to punch a ball clear (Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)

Cox: We have to take into account what happens with the next phase of play. It’s a funny one because traditionally, it was seen as a European thing to punch (as a goalkeeper), wasn’t it? British goalkeepers would, stereotypically, just catch the ball. But I always thought that slightly went against the general vibe that English football and the safety-first approach. The punching option is more safety-first, it minimises the risk. So I never really understood that.

Punching probably is a bit overrated, to be honest. I’ve got a big thing that the second phase of set pieces is really difficult to defend — when the set piece is delivered, you’re organised but if it’s partially cleared, you’ve almost got the worst of both worlds because you’re not organised, but the opposition have their centre-backs forward. If you’re punching, it’s often from a set piece, and that’s generally going to create a second phase. So I’m broadly against punching, I must say.

Bailey: Well, that’s good to know. The next one comes courtesy of Rio Ferdinand, on commentary duty for TNT Sports during the north London derby: “What’s wrong with just kicking the ball straight up the pitch when you’re under a bit of pressure?”

Antonin Kinsky looks to play out for Spurs (Alex Pantling/Getty Images)

Carey: Short goal kicks sometimes frustrate the crowd because they think their team is bringing pressure onto itself. But ultimately, when you run the numbers, there’s a higher likelihood of actually taking a shot or reaching the opposition box as a consequence.

The game state is super important here. When Rio Ferdinand said that, Spurs were losing and Arsenal were controlling the game. But (Sky Sports pundit and Ferdinand’s fellow former England defender) Jamie Carragher has spoken about this before, about having the footballing intelligence to know what the state of the game is and realising that actually if I do play this one long, it’s OK, because if I am caught on the ball here, then the crowd are going to get whipped up, especially if we’re away from home. A simple clearance can eliminate that in one fell swoop.

Tharme: In a game of that magnitude, Ferdinand’s point is more valid. Playing for territory and having a release valve under pressure can be very useful and make your plan more achievable. If you’re always playing into the press and into midfield, teams can get used to it.

I don’t think the kicking of Spurs goalkeeper Antonin Kinsky was actually a huge problem. His passing range was OK. His passes were quite flat and the worry was his striker, Dominic Solanke, on his own against the Arsenal centre-backs, William Saliba and Gabriel. You’re kicking it to two 6ft-plus guys who are absolute monsters in the air.

It was more the amount of time he was taking in actually playing the passes. There’s a balance to be struck — I’ve seen plenty of games where teams go long all the time and then the ball keeps coming back onto them because they can’t seem to stick. Having that variety is always really, really useful.

Carey: Mixing it up is the best way to go about it. We’ve spoken about it a lot with the risk and reward of goalkeepers doing different things. Michael’s spoken about this before, in terms of just how much we’ve come to accept the way that goalkeepers take chances more as part of the game.

I looked at the numbers — the errors leading to a goal among ’keepers in recent seasons; which, granted, aren’t always as a consequence of poor passing. In the 2020-21 season, there were 30 errors leading to a goal among goalkeepers. The following season, there were 23. Then 29. Last season it was up to 40, and we’re already at 28 this season — more than in the entire 2021-22 season.

Maybe it’s something we have grown accustomed to. It’s not as shocking now compared to five years ago, never mind 10 or 20.

Bailey: It’s good to know that Southampton have really impacted the Premier League.

Brentford goalkeeper Mark Flekken launches the ball (Ben Stanshall/AFP via Getty Images)

Cox: Tottenham do have to go long more. We can’t talk about how they played yesterday (against Arsenal) and divorce it completely from how they play overall. They are just too committed to the style. If you look at the launch percentage of goal kicks in the Premier League this season, which is when the ball travels more than 40 yards, Tottenham are at five per cent. There’s no one else in the league that has 17 per cent or below. So they are a massive outlier.

The problem is that they aren’t offering any unpredictability. There’s a Johan Cruyff quote for everything in football. He used to say, ‘To do what you want in football, first you’ve got to do the opposite’. So if they (Spurs) just launch a goal kick long two or three times, OK, it might not get them anywhere, but it creates doubt in the mind of the opposition. And if you’re an opposition central midfielder who knows that every time you push up to the edge of the Tottenham box there’s a chance you’re going to win the ball, you keep on doing it. What you don’t want is for it to go flying over your head and you have to run back 50 yards.

So if you offer a bit of variety, then you create the space and can play out. That’s the issue and it’s only really Spurs head coach Ange Postecoglou who is doing it like this. There are lots of other managers who want to play out from the back, but they realise you need the variety to create the space. The problem with Tottenham is not that they’re playing out, it’s that they’re so predictable in how they do it.

I don’t think you just have to kick long to relieve the pressure. You kick long once in a while so that you can actually play the football you want to.

Check out the full episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — and you can get in touch with the podcast team by emailing your thoughts and voice notes to tacticspod@theathletic.com.

(Top photo: James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)