Everyone moved inside and left the touchline empty

The obsession with occupying inside channels has produced teams that cross from worse positions than their predecessors did.

Look at where crosses come from now compared with twenty years ago. Deeper, more central, more often with the outside of the foot from a standing position, and considerably less often from a player who has got to the byline with a defender beaten.

That shift is a direct consequence of a good idea taken too far. Occupying the channel between full back and centre back is genuinely valuable, because a ball received there faces goal, forces a decision from two defenders at once and opens both the shot and the cut back. Everybody teaches it. Everybody has moved a winger, an eight and sometimes a full back into it.

Here is the problem. Those channels are narrow, and a defensive line that knows you want to be there simply compresses. Three attackers in inside channels against a compact five is not an overload, it is a crowd, and the effect is that the widest attacking player is often standing eight metres infield of the touchline with a defender comfortably able to cover both him and the space outside. The pitch is seventy metres wide and a lot of teams are playing on forty of them.

What has been lost is the stretch. A genuine touchline winger, standing on the chalk, does something no inside player can do, which is to force the defensive line to be wide, and a wide line has gaps in it. He also creates the one situation defenders hate most and which no amount of structure solves, which is being isolated one against one facing his own goal.

The counter argument is that a wide winger is easy to double up and takes himself out of the game for long periods. Yes. That is the price, and it used to be considered obviously worth paying, because the payoff is a cross from the byline, which is the single most dangerous delivery in the sport and which the current fashion has almost eliminated.

I would keep one. Not two, one. Somebody who stands on the line all afternoon and does nothing until the moment the ball comes and there is grass in front of him.

The rest of the team is welcome to keep passing in the middle.