A low block without an out-ball is a slower way to concede

Deep defending only works if the team can keep the ball for thirty seconds once it wins it, and most cannot.

Eleven behind the ball, two banks of four, everything narrow. The opponent works it side to side, gets nothing, and eventually shoots from twenty-five yards into the wall of bodies. A defender heads it clear. It goes forty yards and comes straight back.

That is the loop, and the loop is the problem. A deep block does not lose because it is badly organised. It loses because it never gets a rest.

Defending in a low block is much more taxing than it looks, and the taxing part is repetition. Each attacking wave costs the block a set of slides, jumps, blocks and challenges. Do that ninety times and concentration goes, and concentration going is how a marker loses a runner at a corner in the eighty-fourth minute. The only thing that stops the counter is keeping the ball somewhere else for a while.

So the question that decides whether a defensive plan works is not how you defend. It is what you do with the ball for the fifteen seconds after you win it.

The classic answer is a big striker who can hold up a long clearance, take a foul, and let forty yards of the pitch come up to him. Unfashionable, and enormously useful. The modern answer is a fast forward who makes clearing into the channel a threat, which forces the opponent's centre-backs to stay honest and stops them squeezing to the halfway line. Either works. What does not work is a front three of small technical players who want the ball into feet in the final third, because they cannot receive anything that arrives at head height under pressure and the ball comes straight back.

Plenty of teams have exactly that mismatch. They set up to defend deep and then leave forwards up the pitch who have no way of keeping a clearance.

I would make this the first question for any promoted side or any team playing a much better opponent away from home. Not who marks whom at set pieces. Who keeps the ball when we get it, and how.

Answer that badly and you can defend perfectly for eighty-nine minutes and still lose, and the highlights will show a defensive error that was actually an attacking one.