Anyone who watched Premier League football between 2008 and 2012 will remember Rory Delap’s long throws for Stoke City.
The potency of the ‘Delap special’ – when he hurled the ball into the penalty area from the sidelines – filled opposing defences with dread.
However, bar that brief spell when Delap defined an era for Stoke, throw-ins have been one of football’s untapped resources.
Delap showed what was possible. But there must be more tactical possibilities for a set-piece that operates outside both the offside and handball laws.
About 35 times every match an outfield player is allowed to throw the ball on to the pitch, often from a position only approximately close to where it went out of play. Oh, and – inexplicably – there are no offsides.
Perhaps their basic absurdity explains why throw-ins have slipped by almost unnoticed and untouched over the past century. It’s as if they are such a bizarre outlier we don’t quite register them as being part of football but rather adjacent to it, an awkward interlude before the real thing gets back under way.
Whatever the reason, it’s noteworthy that the law around throw-ins hasn’t changed since the 19th century, and neither – unlike pretty everything else in football, be it tactical or technical – has the look and feel of a throw-in scenario.
Here are five ideas of how throw-ins can be reinvented.