A slower pass into the striker is often the better one

Weight of pass gets coached as a virtue of speed, which ignores that a forward with his back to goal needs time.

Drilled passing looks impressive and frequently ruins the situation it was meant to create. The ball fizzes into the centre forward's feet, arrives before he has resolved which shoulder his marker is on, and bounces off him into the space where a midfielder is not standing. Everyone blames the touch.

The pass was wrong. A forward receiving with his back to goal is doing three things at once, shielding, reading the pressure behind him and deciding which way to release, and the only currency that helps him is time. A ball rolled in at three quarters pace gives him perhaps half a second more, and half a second is the difference between turning and losing it.

The counterexample is real, so let me deal with it. A slow pass into a congested area is an interception waiting to happen, and the reason coaches shout about weight is that soft passes get read. Correct, and it is why the actual skill here is not slow passing but appropriate passing, which means recognising two entirely different situations. Into a lane with a defender able to step across, hit it hard, because speed beats his reaction. Into a striker who is already sealed in front of his marker, take the pace off, because the defender cannot get there anyway and the only opponent left is the forward's own control.

Nearly all passing analysis ignores this distinction, since completion percentage treats both the same and nobody records whether the receiver was able to use the ball. A completed pass that leaves a forward facing his own goal with three men around him is filed identically to one that lets him turn.

What I would like to see, and doubt anyone will build, is a measure of what the receiver's first touch was permitted to be. Turn, lay off, or survive. Three categories, watched by a person, applied to one player for one season. It would tell you more about a midfielder's judgement than every progressive pass count ever compiled.

The old coaching phrase is to pass into the correct foot. That is half the instruction.

The other half is at the correct speed, and it is the half nobody drills.