The overlapping full back is usually a decoy, not an option

Most overlaps never receive the ball, and judging them by pass completion misses what the run is actually buying.

Count the overlapping runs in a single half, then count how many of them end with the full back actually receiving a pass. The ratio is bleak. On the matches I have charted by hand, and I am not a man with a rigorous stopwatch, it sits somewhere around one in five.

That does not make the run wasted. It makes it a lie told at speed to a defender who has about half a second to decide whether to believe it.

Here is the mechanism. A winger receives on the touchline with the opposing full back square to him. If nobody runs beyond, the defender can jockey inside, show the winger down the line, and wait. The moment a team mate sprints past his outside shoulder, that defender has a second problem, and the two problems pull him in opposite directions. He drops a yard. He turns his hips. The lane the winger wanted, the one cutting back inside onto his stronger foot, opens for exactly as long as the defender is thinking about somebody else.

So the overlap is paid for in the winger's shot, not the full back's cross. Which is why I get twitchy when an analyst says a full back had a poor game because he made nine runs and got the ball twice. He made nine runs and moved a defender nine times.

The underlap has become the fashionable cousin, and I think it is oversold. Running inside the winger asks the centre back to make the decision instead of the full back, and centre backs are generally better at ignoring decoys because they have been trained their whole careers to hold shape and trust the man beside them. The outside run attacks a defender who is already isolated. The inside run attacks a defender who has help.

The other thing nobody says out loud is that the decoy only works if it is sometimes real. A full back who never gets the ball becomes furniture by the seventieth minute. Defenders learn. They stop turning.

That is the actual coaching problem, and it is a rhythm problem rather than a tactical one. You need the pass to happen often enough to keep the fear alive, and not so often that you have become a side that crosses from deep.

Roughly once a half. Enough to be remembered.