Defending a low block is the hardest coaching job in the game

Sitting deep is treated as the lazy option when it demands more rehearsal than any pressing scheme.

Somebody will tell you this week that a team parked the bus, and they will mean it as an insult, as if eleven men behind the ball were a refusal to play rather than a plan that has to be built.

Try building it. You need every player to know, without looking, how far to slide when the ball moves five yards across the pitch. You need the centre-back who steps to the striker's feet to know that his partner drops as he goes, automatically, or the ball over the top ends the game. You need the wide midfielder to understand that his job is not to press the fullback, it is to stay in the passing lane to the winger, which feels wrong to every attacking player who has ever been asked to do it.

None of that is instinctive. High pressing, for all its complexity, works with a player's instincts. The ball is there, go and get it. Sitting in a low block asks a player to stand still while an opponent has the ball ten yards away and do nothing, over and over, for an hour. The discipline is the hard part and it is a psychological problem before it is a tactical one.

Then there is the bit that actually decides the result, which is what happens when you win it. A low block that clears every ball into touch invites the next attack immediately, and you get seventy of them, and eventually one goes in. So the block needs an out-ball, a striker who can hold it, or a winger fast enough that clearing into the channel is a threat rather than a surrender.

That is the honest test of a deep defence. Not whether it holds. Whether it can breathe.

I would argue the pundits have this exactly backwards. Coaching a possession team is largely a matter of buying better players and giving them a structure to move in. Coaching a low block that wins a game away from home with thirty percent of the ball is a genuine craft, taught in unglamorous places, and it is the reason cup upsets happen.

The insult should be reserved for the sides that sit deep with no plan for the ball once they get it.

Those teams are not defending. They are queueing.