Ask one winger to run back and you have half a counter

Recovery running is the most expensive defensive work in football and it is paid for in attacking output twenty seconds later.

Sixty metres at close to top speed, backwards in the game's logic if not in his own, and then he is expected to turn and provide an outlet the moment the ball is won. This is the standard demand on a modern wide forward and it is close to physically incoherent.

The cost is not the running itself, it is what the running does to the next four minutes. A high-speed recovery run empties a player in a way that a series of short efforts does not, and the deficit shows up precisely when your team wins the ball and needs someone to sprint the other way. So the recovery run that saved a counter attack has often cancelled your own.

This is the honest case for asymmetry, which more teams should embrace and few will say out loud. Pick one side to defend properly and one side to leave. The winger on the strong defensive side tracks everything, the other stays high on the shoulder of the last defender and does not come back below halfway. Yes, it concedes a numerical problem in one channel. It also guarantees that when the ball is won there is a player with fresh legs in a scoring position, which is worth more than the tidiness of eleven men behind the ball.

The usual objection is cultural. A forward who does not track is called lazy, teammates resent it, and the manager spends his press conference defending a decision that looks like indulgence. That resentment is a real coaching cost and it is why the arrangement usually needs a very senior player to hold.

There is also a version that fails badly, which is asymmetry by accident, where the winger simply stops running and nobody has adjusted the full back behind him. That is not a plan. It is the thing plans are supposed to prevent.

The counter-counter, if you are the team facing an asymmetric side, is to attack the flank they have abandoned rather than the one they have loaded, which sounds obvious and is played wrong constantly. Teams keep attacking the side where their best winger happens to be, and their best winger happens to be facing the full back who has been given help all night.

Decide who is not running back. Otherwise the player will decide for you, at the worst moment, on his own.