Transitions are decided by the third runner

The break that ends in a goal was not created by the man who won the ball or the one who carried it forward.

A team wins the ball in its own half and goes. The carrier takes it thirty yards, the winger sprints outside him, and everybody watching is looking at those two. The transition will be decided by whoever is arriving fifteen yards behind them, and whether he set off at the right moment.

The reason is arithmetic. A counter attack starts with a numerical advantage that decays every second as defenders recover. The carrier and the first runner threaten immediately, which is exactly why they are tracked immediately, and within four seconds the advantage is usually neutralised by recovering midfielders. The player who arrives late is running into space the recovery has just vacated, unmarked, because the defenders who might have picked him up are running the other way and cannot see him.

That late arrival is expensive. It is a sixty metre sprint made on the chance that the ball survives long enough to reach him, and it fails perhaps four times in five. Which is why players stop making it, particularly late in matches and particularly in sides where the coach has not explicitly demanded it, and why a lot of promising breaks end with two attackers against two defenders and a hopeful cross.

The counterpressing conversation has the same shape and a similar blind spot. The famous instruction to win the ball back within a few seconds gets treated as a rule about intensity. It is really a rule about who is nearest, and the reason good sides can do it is that their positional structure in possession left three players close enough to matter. Teams copy the aggression without the structure and get carved open.

Noise plays a part that analysis mostly ignores. In a full stadium during a transition, verbal communication is gone. Nobody hears a shout at seventy yards. What replaces it is a set of shared expectations built in training, which is why counter attacking is one of the most rehearsable things in football and why the sides that do it best look almost telepathic away from home.

So the coaching instruction I would give is unromantic. Make the run that probably will not pay. Do it in the sixtieth minute.

The goal, when it eventually comes, will be credited entirely to somebody else.