The half space is a moment and we turned it into a parking spot

A useful piece of vocabulary became a place to stand, and standing there is the least dangerous thing you can do with it.

Somewhere between the coaching courses and the graphics packages, a description turned into an instruction. The half space started as a way of naming where good things kept happening on a pitch. Now it is a zone on a laminated sheet with a player assigned to occupy it, and I think the assignment has ruined most of what the observation was pointing at.

The original point was about timing. A player who arrives in the channel between centre back and full back at the instant the ball is played is a nightmare, because two defenders each have half a claim on him and neither has a full one. Arrival is the whole mechanism. Ambiguity of responsibility exists only while somebody is moving into a gap.

Park a ten there permanently and the ambiguity evaporates. The centre back has had eleven seconds to look at him, point at him, and tell the full back he has got him. He is now marked, statically, by a defender who is comfortable, and he is also clogging the exact lane a runner would have used.

You can see the difference in what happens to the ball. A team that occupies half spaces circulates sideways at a nice tempo and gets praised for control. A team that attacks them plays two dull passes, waits, and then three players move at once. The second is harder to coach and much worse to defend.

There is a decent reply to this, which is that permanent occupation pins defenders and stops them stepping into midfield, and pinning is real. I would say pinning is a job for a striker on the shoulder of a centre back, where the threat is genuinely constant, not for a midfielder in a channel where the threat is a run he is not making.

What I would ask any coach who uses the term is a simple question. When your side is in that zone, is anybody late? Somebody has to be late on purpose. If all five attackers are in position when the ball arrives, you have built a photograph of a good attack rather than an attack.

Fashionable words do this. They describe a moment, get adopted, get simplified into a position, and end up producing the opposite of what the person who coined them was watching.