Doesn’t your long tail keywords include ‘short tail versions’ of those ?

In my opinion, short tail or long tail is all BS.

What is the ‘context’ of your content vs what is the ‘intent’ of the user. If that matches, your page will be in the search results. It also matters, how far you have covered your subject in context. If you have covered extensively, that should probably include all the possible combinations of keywords user ‘intends’ to search/read.