Iraola’s Coaching Team and Liverpool’s Set-Piece Overhaul

Andoni Iraola has wasted little time sketching out how Liverpool will look on the training pitch – and who will be holding the clipboard beside him.

The new head coach has transplanted the core of his Bournemouth backroom team to Anfield, tasking them with one of the most glaring jobs on his to‑do list: fixing Liverpool’s set-piece fragility.

Iraola’s inner circle arrives at Anfield

Tommy Elphick and Shaun Cooper, trusted lieutenants on the south coast, have stepped in as first-team coaches. Pablo de la Torre, Iraola’s long-time ally from AEK Larnaca and Rayo Vallecano, has been installed as assistant coach. Alejandro Rosalen takes over as first-team goalkeeping coach after five years with Napoli.

For Iraola, this is not cosmetic change. It is his foundation.

“For me, it was important they came with me,” he said as he prepared for his first game in charge, a pre-season friendly against Sunderland in Nashville on Saturday. De la Torre, he explained, may arrive with the label of physical coach, but the relationship runs far deeper. He has been with Iraola “almost all the years” of his coaching career, and now steps into a broader assistant’s role built on familiarity and trust.

That trust matters in a dressing room that will be new to Iraola, but not entirely unfamiliar to those around him.

Elphick and Cooper: the English bridge

Iraola calls himself “very lucky” to have walked into Bournemouth and found Elphick and Cooper waiting for him. He had planned to bring Iñigo Pérez from Rayo Vallecano, only for a work permit issue to block the move. Pérez now coaches Villarreal – “Maybe we play him in the Champions League,” Iraola remarked – but that early setback forced him to look inward at Bournemouth.

What he found in Elphick and Cooper convinced him he did not need another assistant.

“They were very prepared,” he said. More than that, they became his cultural translators. They helped him read the English game from the inside: the mentality of the players, the training habits they liked, the tiny quirks that separate an afternoon in Spain from a morning in the Premier League.

Elphick’s career – Aston Villa, Bournemouth, Brighton, Huddersfield – gives him an instant line into the squad. He has lived the league they play in. Iraola knows that matters.

“They can be in a closer position to the players,” he explained. They understand the jokes, the tempo, the mood swings. They can “feel more identified” with the group, as he put it, while he stands half a step back, the slightly older former player that some of his new squad “maybe didn’t know” had a playing career at all.

Set pieces under the microscope

One area needs no translation. Liverpool’s set-piece record last season was a problem, and Iraola has moved quickly to define who does what.

Only Bournemouth (26), Crystal Palace (25) and Leeds (24) conceded more set-piece goals than Liverpool’s 23 in what turned out to be Arne Slot’s final campaign as head coach, a season that still brought a title but exposed a soft underbelly at dead balls.

That cannot continue.

“They are very good coaches,” Iraola said of his staff. “We kind of understand the game similarly and they have different roles in the coaching staff, they help with set pieces also. That’s the reason I continued with them.”

The division of labour is clear. Elphick takes charge of defensive set plays. He will be the one poring over body shapes, starting positions and second-ball reactions, trying to erase the lapses that cost Liverpool so heavily. Cooper is handed the other side of the coin: offensive routines, the creative schemes designed to turn corners and free-kicks into a weapon rather than a worry.

And they will not be working alone.

Analyst in the engine room

Inside the club, Lewis Mahoney has already built a reputation. The set-piece analyst impressed in the second half of last season, and Iraola has no intention of disrupting that momentum. Instead, he is folding Mahoney into his new structure.

“We are working very well here with the set-piece analyst,” Iraola said. “He is already with the club, so they are working on some stuff.”

That “stuff” will soon be visible. Training-ground drills will change. Responsibilities will shift. The small details Iraola obsesses over – starting positions, triggers, blocks, decoys – will be drilled and redrilled until Liverpool look very different when the ball is placed on a quadrant or a white line.

On Saturday in Nashville, against Sunderland, the first hints of this new order may appear. For Iraola, it is not just a first game in charge. It is the first glimpse of whether his carefully assembled inner circle can turn Liverpool’s dead-ball weakness into a defining strength of his reign.