Pressing intensity dies after the hour and nobody changes the plan

Almost every high press is a first-half strategy being run for ninety minutes because the substitutions come too late.

Watch the first fifteen minutes of a game between two aggressive teams and it is the best thing in football. Turnovers everywhere, defenders panicking, the crowd on its feet for a throw-in in the corner.

Now watch minutes sixty to seventy-five. Same players, same instructions, and the striker is trotting at a centre-back who has all the time in the world, the midfield is ten yards behind where it was, and the press is now just a man running at a man with nothing behind him. That is the worst possible state. A press that does not arrive does not slow anything down, it only pulls the shape apart.

The physiology is not controversial. Repeated maximal efforts with short recovery deplete you, and the specific thing that goes first is not top speed, it is the ability to produce a high effort again soon after the last one. So a forward at minute sixty-five can still sprint once. He cannot sprint, jog back, and sprint again forty seconds later, which is what pressing requires.

The tactical response should therefore be automatic. Around the hour, either the trigger changes and the team presses only in specific situations, or the line drops ten yards and you defend a mid block, or fresh legs come on in the front line.

Most teams do none of these until the eightieth minute, and by then the goal has usually gone in.

Why? Partly because a manager watching his own team sees effort and reads it as intensity, and effort and intensity are not the same thing. Partly because dropping the line looks like giving up and the crowd hates it. Partly because the substitution decision competes with attacking substitutions, and if you are drawing at home you would rather bring on a striker than a runner.

There is a decent counter-argument, which is that telling a team to press less is very hard to do halfway through a match without the whole thing collapsing into passivity. Fair enough. Then rehearse it. Teams rehearse pressing triggers endlessly and almost never rehearse the moment they turn the press off.

The best sides I have watched have a clear second gear, a version of themselves that defends deeper and holds the ball longer, and they switch into it deliberately rather than falling into it exhausted.