Andoni Iraola's Mission to Fix Liverpool's Set Pieces

Andoni Iraola did not arrive at Liverpool alone. He walked into Anfield with a clear idea, a trusted inner circle and a very specific problem to fix.

Set pieces.

Last season, Liverpool shipped 23 goals from dead-ball situations in the league. Only Bournemouth, Crystal Palace and Leeds were worse. For a club that once turned corners and free-kicks into a weapon, that number jarred. It will not be allowed to linger.

Building a trusted core

Iraola has wasted no time surrounding himself with familiar faces and sharp minds. From Bournemouth have come Tommy Elphick and Shaun Cooper as first-team coaches, Pablo de la Torre as assistant, and Alejandro Rosalen to oversee the goalkeepers after five years at Napoli.

For Iraola, De la Torre is the constant. They worked together at AEK Larnaca, then at Rayo Vallecano, and now at Liverpool.

“For me, it was important they came with me,” Iraola said, looking ahead to his first game in charge on Saturday, a pre-season friendly against Sunderland in Nashville. “Pablo is a physical coach but has been with me almost all the years I have been coaching. So, for me, he is much more than a physical coach really. He is an assistant and we know each other very well.”

That familiarity matters in a dressing room that will be meeting its new manager in competitive action for the first time. De la Torre knows how Iraola works, how he thinks, when to challenge and when to reinforce. It gives the Basque coach a backbone as he walks into one of the most demanding jobs in European football.

The Bournemouth connection

Not all of the trust was imported. Some of it was discovered.

“I was very lucky with Tommy and Shaun when I arrived at Bournemouth,” Iraola admitted. He had planned to bring Iñigo Pérez with him from Rayo, only for work permit issues to block the move. Pérez has since landed on his feet at Villarreal. “After, it worked out very well for him because now he is coaching Villarreal. Maybe we play him in the Champions League.”

The setback forced Iraola to lean on what he found on the south coast. It turned into a strength.

“But when I had Tommy and Shaun there, we did not feel the need to bring in another assistant. They were very prepared, they were very helpful for me in terms of understanding the English culture, the mentality of the players, what they were used to, what they like in training, even the small details that maybe in Spain are different.”

Elphick, a boyhood Liverpool fan, and Cooper became interpreters of a league and a dressing-room dynamic that can catch out even the sharpest continental coach. Elphick’s playing experience at Aston Villa, Bournemouth, Brighton and Huddersfield gave him a direct line to the squad.

“Also the experience Tommy has at Aston Villa, Bournemouth, Brighton, Huddersfield; they can be in a closer position to the players. They can feel more identified. I am a little bit older. Some of the players maybe didn’t know I was a player.”

There is no ego in that admission, only realism. Iraola understands that modern players often respond quickest to those who have just stepped off the pitch themselves. His solution is to empower them.

Fixing Liverpool’s weak spot

All of this feeds into the central task. Liverpool’s set-piece record last season was an uncomfortable outlier in a title-winning campaign under Arne Slot. It is not a detail a coach like Iraola will ignore.

“They are very good coaches,” he said of his staff. “We kind of understand the game similarly and they have different roles in the coaching staff, they help with set pieces also. That’s the reason I continued with them.”

The division of labour is clear. Elphick will take charge of defensive set plays. Cooper will focus on the attacking routines, the more “offensive, more creative ones”, as Iraola put it. The aim is obvious: close the back door and sharpen the knife at the other end.

There is another key figure already in place. Set-piece analyst Lewis Mahoney, credited internally for an improved second half of last season, remains at the club and is now plugged into Iraola’s structure.

“Tommy does defensive set plays, Shaun does more offensive, more creative ones. But also we are working very well here with the set-piece analyst [Lewis Mahoney], who was very good in the second half of last season. He is already with the club, so they are working on some stuff.”

The phrase is understated, but the intent is not. Liverpool are “working on some stuff” that opponents will only see when the real games start.

A new era, same expectations

Iraola steps into a dressing room that has just experienced the high of a title and the sting of its own vulnerabilities. He inherits a club that expects to challenge on all fronts, immediately. There is no bedding-in period at Anfield, only scrutiny.

He has responded by building around trust: long-time lieutenants, newly adopted allies, a specialist analyst already embedded in the club’s data culture. The structure is in place. The roles are defined.

On Saturday in Nashville, Liverpool will get a first glimpse of how Iraola’s ideas translate onto the pitch. The real question is how quickly those “some stuff” routines at corners and free-kicks turn from theory into points in a title race that rarely forgives a weakness as obvious as last season’s.