Tony Pulis has given a characteristically blunt answer to whether he would come out of retirement to become a set-piece coach, almost a decade after his last Premier League job. The 68-year-old, speaking exclusively to the Daily Star Sport via sports betting sites, was asked about the prospect, and replied: "I was a set piece coach for 30 years!"
Stoke City's set-piece legacy
Pulis built a notoriously physical Stoke City side, famed across England and Europe for being imposing and set-piece heavy. He guided the club to the Premier League in his second spell, finishing runners-up in the 2007/08 Championship season, aided by Rory Delap's long throws.
In Stoke's first top-flight season, around a quarter of their 38 league goals came from Delap's long throws, worth roughly nine points, as they finished 11 points clear of relegation in 12th. While Delap registered just five Premier League assists via throw-ins, 25 goals were created directly from his throws across four years.
Manager's own methods
During Pulis's five years in charge, Stoke scored 81 set-piece goals out of 188 Premier League goals, all without a specialist set-piece coach, a role now common in the modern game. Figures like Arsenal's Nicolas Jover and Chelsea's Austin MacPhee have become integral parts of coaching setups.
Pulis explained his approach: "Along with everything else, we worked really hard on that all the way through my career. We worked out different combinations to score goals, offset plays, it wasn't just a long throw. We would do it off corners and wide free kicks and even free kicks around the box."
Drawing from other managers
He credited influences from his coaching development, saying: "We'd spend a lot of time doing it and that would be stuff that I'd seen during my time growing up as a young coach and watching other coaches work, watching Venables, Dave Sexton, Bobby Robson and people like that, top, top people who put different sessions on."
He added: "Or you'd watch a game, where someone did something different and you'd say, I like that, you know, playing around the wall. All the different ideas that other managers would use, you'd pick it up and use it yourself if it was necessary."
Pulis concluded: "So don't put me in just as a set piece coach! That was one part of my job when I was managing and one part of the job that most of us managers, who were successful, actually cracked."
