The cover shadow is the most undercounted defensive act in football

A striker who stands in the right place removes a passing option without touching the ball or appearing in the data.

A centre-back has the ball and four options. He plays the safest one, sideways, to the other centre-back. On the stat sheet the pressing striker has done nothing. No tackle, no interception, no pressure event depending on whose definition you use. He was six yards away and he never moved.

He deleted the pass into midfield. He did it by standing on the line between the ball and the pivot, and by staying there while the centre-back scanned, which meant that of the four options only three existed. That is a cover shadow, and it is the reason the modern striker is judged on things that have nothing to do with scoring.

The mechanic is simple geometry and it is unforgiving. A defender's shadow widens the further it stretches from him, so a striker pressing from close range blocks a narrow slice, and one who holds his ground ten yards back blocks a wide one. Press too eagerly and your shadow shrinks to nothing at the exact moment you need it. This is why coaches spend so much time telling forwards to slow down. The instinct is to sprint at the man on the ball. The instruction is to arrive curved, at three-quarter pace, with your body angled so the pass you most fear is behind you.

I would argue this is now the single biggest gap between what a good striker does and what the numbers say he did. We have squared this circle for defenders, more or less, because interceptions and duels are countable. We have not squared it for the forward who spends ninety minutes making a team play backwards.

There is a cost, and it is worth being honest about it. A striker holding a shadow is not sprinting in behind. He is not occupying the centre-backs. Some teams have decided that trade is not worth it and have gone back to letting the striker do nothing defensively at all, which looks lazy and is often the right call if he scores twenty.

What annoys me is the middle ground, the forward who presses hard and blindly, arriving flat and fast and shutting off nothing. He looks committed. He costs his team the game. Effort without an angle is just running, and running is cheap.