Somebody has to not press, and it should be your best forward

Teams that send everyone at the ball win it back higher and then have nobody left who can hurt anyone.

Six players arrive at the ball inside four seconds. Superb. They win it, and the pass forward goes to a striker who has run forty metres backwards and is now standing still with two centre backs on him.

Counterpressing is sold on the first half of that sequence, which is the exciting half. Win the ball high, opponent disorganised, short distance to goal. All true. But the value of a high turnover is entirely conditional on there being someone available to attack the disorganisation, and a side that commits every attacking player to the press arrives at the moment of possession with nobody in a position to use it. The turnover count looks superb. The chance count does not follow.

That is the case for leaving one player out of it. Not resting him. Positioning him, deliberately, on the shoulder of the last defender or in the channel behind the pressing action, so that the instant the ball turns over there is a forward pass that goes somewhere. It costs a body in the press, which means the press has to be smarter about angles rather than more numerous, and most coaches would rather have the extra body because the extra body is the thing that makes the pressing statistics look right.

There is a squad building consequence too. The player who does not press has to be trusted to make the right run without the ball for ninety minutes while doing very little else, and modern selection culture is brutal towards forwards who appear to be loafing. Any manager who tries this will spend the season defending the selection to people counting sprints.

I would still do it, and I would pick the best finisher in the squad rather than the quickest, because the ball arriving from a high turnover usually arrives in a rush with a defender closing. That is a finishing problem, not a footrace.

The teams that press hardest and score least are all making the same mistake, and it is not intensity. They have organised the winning of the ball beautifully and left nobody to spend it.