My father always said that a corner was half a goal. It isn't true. He never was. Today, in the English League only 3% of corners end in a goal. In fact, since Sergio Ramos disappeared from our radar, a corner is more a representation that something is going to happen, that it actually does happen. Nor do I want to be unfair with the corner. I know that many things have happened waiting for a corner kick like the invention of Tinder by Míchel with Valderrama, but Cruyff taught us that scoring from a corner or from a set play is for cowards, and I'm still there.
The archaic corner did not exist as such. When the ball crossed the goal line without being a goal, the ball was continued by whoever was going to look for it. Later it was always the defending team until between 1868 and 1873, its rules were established. In those early days, corners should have been taken as a free kick until an Everton player dribbled out of that corner. There was no room for a direct goal either until 1924 in which the Argentine Cesareo Onzari embedded the ball into Uruguay in that way. The goal should not have gone up on the scoreboard, but being friendly, the referee became progressive. Uruguay was at that time Olympic champion, hence the name of that type of goal.
The corner generates expectations like a first date. Defending a corner has something of the ending of a Poirot novel: everyone is a suspect. The rest, policemen. In the event that Ramos plays in either of the two teams, Poirot is obviously superfluous. It is likely that they were half a goal when the defenders did not know how to jump. Now that all the players know how to do everything, the corner is just a throw-in that still believes in the debts of honour.
Although a corner kick can also be something transcendental. The only moment in the history of Spain in which the tectonic plates converged and it was shown to the world that we were something more than a pure version of Joseph Conrad's The Duelists, occurred on July 7, 2010. Xavi and Piqué plotted a corner kick against Germany that Puyol destroyed by finishing off a goal to qualify us for the World Cup final. The reverberation was such (Catalonia, Spain) that it reached the ears of Zeus, who, enraged, wanted to punish us and for this he sent us the process, Vox and hair grafts in Turkey.
