Long throws are in vogue in the Premier League – Rory Delap and Stoke will be proud

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The defining moment of Stoke City’s 10 years in the Premier League came on November 29, 2008.

They were playing Hull City at home, whose defender Kamil Zayatte had just played a backpass to goalkeeper Boaz Myhill.

Myhill was immediately closed down by two Stoke attackers, so the standard clearance up the pitch was not an option. There wasn’t a short pass on. The next most logical choice was to go sideways and put it out for a throw — not ideal, but it would have dealt with the immediate issues. After all, how dangerous can a throw-in really be?

But Myhill stopped, hesitated, stuttered, regretted every one of his life decisions that had led him to this point, weighed up his options… and kicked it out for a corner.

Underrated Premier League moment No.51.

Boaz Myhill kicking the ball out for a corner to avoid giving Stoke a Rory Delap throw-in.
pic.twitter.com/RzJJTPsLF9

— Ryan Dilks (@RyanDilks1) December 13, 2024

There was logic to a seemingly illogical act. In that frantic few seconds, Myhill reasoned that facing a corner was preferable to what was then the Premier League’s most talked about, potent and unusual weapon: Rory Delap’s long throws.

Long throws are back in style again this season, after a few years when their use cratered. But as anyone who was around for Stoke’s early days in the Premier League will tell you, the throws you see now are like watching a potato gun compared with the bazooka fired by Delap.

Stoke had only been in the top flight for three months when Myhill had his existential crisis, but they had already got into everyone’s heads. Delap’s cannon shoulders struck fear into a baffled division, like a medieval army who looked across the battlefield and realised that the opposing forces had technology far beyond theirs.

In normal circumstances, a simple clearance out of play would do the job and you could defend in a conventional manner, but now you had to deal with this terrifying, fizzing missile sent towards you — and barely above head height.

Myhill was unnerved by the prospect of Delap’s throws (Michael Regan/Getty Images)

For a while, you couldn’t move for pundits taking a deep breath before solemnly saying things like ‘…of course it’s not the length, it’s the trajectory that makes it so threatening’. It became English football’s hot topic. How do you stop it? Is it fair? Is it football? It complemented the popular perception of Stoke as long-ball merchants, an overtly physical group that were allergic to a short pass and only loosely played football. The fact that their signature move involved throwing, rather than kicking the ball didn’t help with those who compared them to a rugby team. Hello, Arsene Wenger.

One of the reasons everyone was taken by surprise was that Delap was 32 and had been around for a decade, with nearly 250 Premier League appearances for Derby County, Southampton and Sunderland under his belt before he arrived with Stoke, but to this point few knew about this deadly piece of artillery.

That extended to team-mates who had played with him for years. “I definitely don’t remember it at Derby,” says Danny Higginbotham, for whom Stoke was the third club at which he had been Delap’s team-mate. “There might have been a couple of times at Southampton.”

The throw had made occasional, successful appearances before Stoke. Dean Sturridge scored from one for Derby against Sheffield Wednesday as far back as 1998. Robbie Keane scored for the Republic of Ireland against Canada in 2003 after getting on the end of a long, if rather more loopy, Delap throw.

But these were fairly ad hoc events. The only times it was used with any regularity in a tactical sense was defensively, when Derby or Southampton needed to get the ball as far away from their own goal as possible. It wasn’t until Tony Pulis happened upon Delap’s talents that it was truly weaponised as an attacking cheat code.

And it was discovered by accident, when Delap and a few team-mates were larking about in training. “David Kemp (Stoke assistant manager) was watching them,” Pulis tells The Athletic. “They were having a bet over the far side of the pitch about who could throw the ball furthest. I think Rory threw it across the pitch — I’d never seen him do it before.”

A light went on in Pulis’s eyes. He knew that, in order to stay in the Premier League, he couldn’t mirror the established teams’ style of play because everyone else was better at it at and they would get pulverised.

“We didn’t do anything new,” says Pulis. “It’s just that we had this person at the club that we didn’t know about, and we looked at him and thought he can help us. That is something I set my mind on. We needed to do things that would help us stay up. It wasn’t about me; it was all about the football club. For us to build a football club we had to stay in the Premier League.”

Pulis and his players made their presence felt in the Premier League (Ross Kinnaird/Getty Images)

This, along with Stoke’s physicality and directness, gave them a point of difference — something nobody else had.

Delap had been a javelin thrower in his youth, becoming local champion for his athletics club in Carlisle. “I could always throw things from a young age,” he said in an interview with SportBible in 2023. “Stones, cricket balls, golf balls, or whatever. When I threw things, I remember people going ‘Wow, look how far he can throw things’.”

The throw was used in Stoke’s Championship promotion season, but they really ramped things up when they got to the Premier League. Pulis had the width of the pitch at Stoke’s Britannia Stadium narrowed to 64 metres, the tightest it could be under the regulations at the time, partly because their system was narrow but mainly for Delap’s benefit.

The ball going out of play about 30 yards from the byline, went from a mundane event to the cue for a battle cry. Delap would wind himself up, snap his arms back and let loose, all accompanied by a sort of ‘OOOOOOOOOHHH’ noise from the crowd… which doesn’t really come across properly when written down, but trust me: it was much more intimidating out loud.

And boy did it work. Mamady Sidibe was the first, scoring from a Delap throw against Aston Villa in August 2008. In September, a Seyi Olofinjana strike and a Phil Jagielka own goal came against Everton. In October, Ricardo Fuller scored against Portsmouth and Sunderland. In November, Olofinjana again and Fuller again, against Arsenal.

“If I throw the perfect ball, with the height and quality of the players in our team, I think it is undefendable and that has been proven,” Delap told the BBC after that Arsenal game.

By the end of the season nine of their 38 goals had come from Delap’s throws. Those goals got them nine points: they finished 11 clear of the bottom three, so they might have survived without them, but it was close.

“Textbook Stoke City” 😍

💥 @RoryJDelap ➡️ Ricardo Fuller against Sunderland in 08′ pic.twitter.com/HqLoUlLyNz

— Stoke City FC (@stokecity) August 20, 2022

Accounts differ over how much time Stoke spent working on them. Delap has insisted they did minimal preparation, but his former team-mate Liam Lawrence told Sky Sports that they worked on them “religiously”, and Pulis insists plenty of thought went into how best they could be utilised.

“We made sure that Rory was throwing it in a certain area,” he says. “And we made sure we had certain runners across it and around it, we always had someone who would be able to attack across the goalkeeper. We did certain things specifically to get the majority of first touches on it.”

Managers across the league were less impressed. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” said Luiz Felipe Scolari, Chelsea manager in Stoke’s first season up. “We thought we had resolved the problems of coping with them,” said Martin O’Neill, after his Aston Villa side conceded a late goal from a Delap throw. David Moyes called Delap a “human sling”.

Even in games when they didn’t result in a goal, they caused enough chaos to be damaging. In one particularly frantic game, Tottenham Hotspur’s collective head was so fried that keeper Heurelho Gomes accidentally knocked out his team-mate, Alan Hutton, in trying to deal with an aerial ball. Gomes was in tears later in that game, which at the time was attributed to the physical and psychological bombardment from Delap, but he later clarified that he was in excruciating pain from a pre-existing rib injury.

And then there was Wenger, around whose Arsenal team a narrative coalesced that their players would dissolve into a quivering blancmange every time they entered Staffordshire. That did have an element of truth to it: of the six times they faced Pulis’ Stoke, in Stoke, they lost three, drew two and only won once, conceding three times from Delap throws. “You cannot say it is football anymore,” complained Wenger in 2010 about some particularly robust tactics. “It is more rugby on the goalkeepers than football.”

“Arsenal didn’t enjoy it,” Pulis chuckles, recalling that some former Arsenal players told him that the week before facing Stoke was the only time Wenger would do intensive work on defensive set pieces. A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but Delap recounted a conversation with Kolo Toure, who told him “for the whole week leading up to the game, Arsene Wenger would be talking about the throw-ins, set plays and stuff like that”.

Ricardo Fuller scores against Arsenal in 2010 (Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)

This is where the throws became as much of a psychological weapon as a a physical one. “It was huge,” says Higginbotham. “After games, you’d speak to opposition players who would say, ‘We’ve worked on this throughout the week’. I’m not saying it would take them off their game, but it’s just an extra thing for them to think about.”

The smart teams would try to strike a balance between being well-prepared but not over-emphasise the threat. “As staff, we would discuss things in a lot of detail,” says Paul Clement, who was Carlo Ancelotti’s assistant at Chelsea from 2009-10. “But then what you don’t want to do is put panic into the players. You want to be well prepared to deal with their strengths. But we would do that for every opponent. We also felt, ‘We’re Chelsea; Stoke should be worried about us.’”

Chelsea were cited by several people as one team that did deal with the throws pretty well, and when The Athletic asks Clement how they did it, he reaches into his archives and brings out his coaching notes from that season.

He recalls that they specifically instructed their players not to give away any “unnecessary” throws. “Usually a defender might clear up by putting the ball in the stands, that was a very dangerous thing to do against Stoke,” he says.

“Myself and Ray Wilkins were Carlo’s assistants. Carlo hadn’t seen this before: he’d seen a long throw, but not one like Delap’s. We saw it as dangerous, if not more dangerous than a corner. Ray was trying to explain this to Carlo and said it was better to kick it out for a corner. That conversation actually happened.”

Clement explains that they devised a sort of hybrid marking system for the throws, combining a couple of zones in the penalty area, which would shift depending on where the throw was taken from, with man-to-man marking.

“We put two players in what we called zone one and zone two. One would generally be around the near post, zone two would be bang in the middle of the goal. They were Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba. If the ball was level with the penalty area and forwards, we would put Ashley Cole on the back post. We felt anything that would be flicked on, the back post was an important area to defend. Then we had markers.

“We were a physical team. We had Frank, who was 6ft and a strong lad, then Didier. The markers were John Terry, Alex, Branislav Ivanovic, Michael Ballack, Michael Essien — we were a strong, physical side, and in a nutshell that’s why we dealt with it all quite well.”

Teams would get more and more creative in their efforts to disrupt Delap. At away grounds, the advertising hoardings would mysteriously move nearer to the touchline so he couldn’t get his usual run-up. Towels, usually placed on the sidelines for throw-in takers, would disappear, to the point that Delap started wearing a vest under his shirt to dry the ball.

Against Hull, in the same game Myhill made his big decision, substitute Dean Windass spent the game enthusiastically warming up next to Delap at throw-in time, to the extent that he got booked.

Even Chelsea, who won the double in Stoke’s second Premier League season, got creative. “We wanted to put someone right on the line in front of him,” says Clement, “but we found out there was a rule: you’ve got to give them two metres; you can’t stand on the line. So we told Salomon Kalou to get in line with where he wants to throw the ball, stay two metres away, but jump. Kalou did that, but as he jumped he ran forwards and encroached, and got booked.”

Eventually, the throw’s potency faded. It was still a handy weapon, but defences got more used to it, it became less of a brain worm. After nine goals came from the throws in that first season, ‘only’ eight more came over the following two.

For a newer generation, Delap will primarily be known as Liam’s dad, father to one of the Premier League’s most talked-about players, rather than one himself. But for a little while there, his throws were a weapon that few seemed able to combat.

“Football goes in cycles,” says Pulis. “And it’s started to change a little bit now. It was the right thing to do for us.”

(Top photo: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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