Practice and persistence is paying off for Blues when it comes to set-pieces.
Their frailties when defending corners had become a cause for concern. And Blues lack of goals when attacking from dead ball situations had also been flagged up.
But all that’s seemingly changed now.
Blues dealt with nine corners (and a whopping 46 crosses) in keeping a clean sheet at Preston North End, and fended off seven corners against Hull City. Against Bristol City, Blues didn’t actually concede a single corner.
Two of their four goals came via corners against Portsmouth, another from a free-kick into the danger zone; this coming on the back of Phil Neumann’s winner at Preston, when he stuck away a deliciously delivered Alex Cochrane free-kick. Tomoki Iwata also hit the post from a corner at Deepdale.
The routines that unhinged Pompey on Saturday were varied and the opening goal, from Paik Seung-ho, was a diving header from Cochrane’s corner towards the penalty spot, where space had been cleared for him.
“We had worked on that corner (specifically), yes,” said Davies.
“Obviously, it’s one of those things. They don’t always sort of come off for you, but we’ve been practising them.
“The players obviously have to execute that. You can have all the great plans, but they’ve got to do it.
“And I thought, Alex put the ball into the perfect spot, but Paik arrived and had to sort of work his feet to position himself to head it really well, because it came at a height that you could think about volleying it or heading it, but he got low and headed it in.
“It just gave us a great start after missing the penalty (Jay Stansfield in the seventh minute). It was kind of what we needed, you know, to get a goal while we’re up (on top, after a quick start) was really good.”
Expanding on the set-piece theme, Davies said: “We have been working on them, we have been wanting to improve them.
“We obviously we won a game up at Preston off set-piece with a really good ball and timing and we obviously worked a corner for the first goal (against Portsmouth), which was something that we’d been practising.
“We’ve spent probably a bit more time on it, trying to make sure that like last week when we played against Bristol (it could make a difference).
“It was nothing in the game. We had six corners. They had no corners. And like I said to the players, if we score one corner out of those six, the game’s different, maybe we draw, maybe we win, 1-0.
“So they are important, set-pieces. They can just unlock a game and so we have been working on them trying to get the right players in the right areas, basically. And I thought the deliveries on all three of them were very good, actually.”
