Nobody coaches the striker's run back and it is the one that saves you

Midfielders are drilled on tracking runners; forwards are usually told to stay high, and the counter goes straight through where they were.

Possession is lost on the edge of the opposition box. The camera follows the ball. Behind it, out of shot, a centre forward has stopped running and put his hands on his hips, and forty metres of central grass has just become a motorway.

That striker is not lazy. He has been told, correctly, that the team needs an outlet if the ball comes back, and that sprinting sixty metres to arrive fourth in a defensive situation helps nobody. Both instructions are defensible. Together they produce the single most common counterattacking picture in the sport: a ball carrier travelling through midfield with nobody within touching distance until he reaches the defensive line.

What I would ask of him is not the sixty metre sprint. It is eight metres, immediately, at an angle, into the lane the carrier wants to use. Not to tackle. To make him take one extra touch, or turn his shoulders, or pass sideways. One extra touch is roughly a second and a half, and a second and a half is a midfielder getting back and a defensive line getting square.

The reason this goes untrained is that it belongs to a job description nobody wants to write. Forwards are recruited on goals, coached on finishing and movement, and reviewed on chances. Their defensive clips are usually about the first press, which happens when the team is set. Nobody makes a montage of a striker jogging diagonally to inconvenience a carrier for one second, because it is unwatchable and you cannot put a number on it.

I would also accept the physiological objection, which is that a striker who does this eight times a match will be flat in the last twenty minutes, and a flat striker misses. Fair. Ration it. Do it only when the loss is central, which is when it matters, and stay out of it when the ball is lost on a flank where the sideline is already helping you.

The thing that convinces me is watching sides who do it, usually not the celebrated ones. Their counters conceded look calm. Somebody was always in the way for a moment, and the moment was enough. It is the least glamorous eight metres in football and it is worth more than most of the sprinting we count.