Guglielmo Vicario comments on Italy duty will be music to Thomas Frank's ears at Tottenham

Guglielmo Vicario and his Tottenham Hotspur head coach Thomas Frank share similar views on set pieces

Guglielmo Vicario has been speaking about the importance of set pieces while on duty with Italy, echoing his Tottenham boss Thomas Frank's view on them.

Italy have been facing some problems with defending set pieces in recent games and only just squeezed past Israel 5-4 in their earlier World Cup qualifying encounter under Gennaro Gattuso. Vicario and Destiny Udogie were then unused substitutes for Italy in their next game, a 3-1 win in Estonia on Saturday and the Spurs goalkeeper had spoken about those set piece issues ahead of the game.

"Football requires great concentration now, when attacking and defending. We know that many goals are scored from set plays nowadays, so we have been working on those details to improve,” said the Spurs stopper on the Italy squad.

"Perhaps mentality is the most fundamental thing of all. The lads want to participate, stick together, and we always proved that. This is a group of good guys who care about the Nazionale, and we want to show that to everyone."

Frank is a big promoter of set piece work and took umbrage out in Bodo when it was suggested by a local journalist ahead of the Champions League game in Norway that one player had said it was surprising a team like Tottenham would be so focused on them.

"I personally think that set-pieces are an extremely important part of football. Isn't there a stat that 33 per cent or something like that that all goals are scored from set-pieces?" said Frank. "So I think it's clever to utilise a third of your opportunities to try to score a goal. I'm happy, that's a fine comment. If you think that's a strength of ours, I'm happy with that."

At another later press conference, the Spurs head coach explained about some of the changes he and his set piece coach Andreas Georgson make to set pieces from game to game.

"We have specific principles and also specific routines. No doubt about that. I think it's very important, open play and set-pieces," said the Dane. "It's very important to have those principles in place and then tweak them a little bit towards the opponent, depending on their system, how they defend, let's say corners or wide free kicks. Then we can tweak it a little bit. But we can't change it too much because then we need to be consistent in the messages."