It was two set pieces that proved crucial in Rotherham United’s Wembley success and Richie Barker insists that the foundations for next season’s dead ball routines are already being laid on the club’s pre-season tour of Austria.
Largely credited for a number of the training ground moves which saw the Millers convert from free kicks and corners last campaign, Barker says the current crop of players have once again had their significance drilled into them in meetings and sessions which have taken place this week at Sporschule Lindabrunn.
“We've started that ball rolling and over the next three weeks we'll be drip-feeding more information in,” he told www.themillers.co.uk.
“We'll keep hitting home the importance of them because they played a big part in getting us where we were last year and it'll play a big part in it again this year.
“We've already had our first set play meeting, where we presented to the players about some of the expectations.
“It's been quite good to watch in the World Cup how important some of these set plays have been. We've reiterated the importance of them again for this season.”
Whilst the Millers were unable to unlock a resolute SKU Amstetten defence on Tuesday, Barker admitted that despite the result, the coaching staff have been pleased with the players' outputs, with the majority having played both fixtures to date on the back of a heavy training workload.
“Yes, it's important that we learn to win football matches but certainly the Parkgate game was just to get used to playing 11v11 again,” he continued.
“At this precise minute it's a little bit of trying to put minutes into them, when they're very tired. We did three sessions on Monday and then played on Tuesday.
“Even before the Parkgate game I think we'd done about 15k the day before, which is the sort of distance you'd normally do in a week.
“There's always going to be tired legs in games so we're not reading too much into it. We've worked tactically for the last two or three days on some of the things that we thought needed improving and we're starting to put some of those tactics in place.”