Press the ball is the cue that quietly ruins a counterpress

Sprinting at the man who just won possession is the most obvious response available and usually the least useful one.

Six seconds. Five seconds. Whatever number a given manager has picked, the counterpressing rule gets shouted from the technical area as though the clock is the mechanism. It is not. The mechanism is that a team which has just won the ball is momentarily disorganised, facing the wrong way, and dependent on one or two outlet passes. Kill the outlet and the ball comes back. Chase the carrier and it usually does not.

The cue does the damage. Press the ball is easy to say, easy to see, and easy to praise, so it is what gets coached. A young forward hears it, sprints thirty metres at the defender who has just intercepted, and arrives half a second after the ball has been played around him. He has now removed himself from the picture and taken his cover shadow with him. The team behind him is a man short in exactly the second when structure matters most.

What I want is the nearest two players closing the two passing options while a third, usually the one furthest from the ball, screens the switch. The carrier gets pressure, not a charge. The pressure is there to force him to take an extra touch, not to win a tackle.

Coaching that requires giving up something coaches love, which is visible effort. Blocking a lane looks like standing still. Sprinting looks like commitment, and commitment is what gets a player picked at eighteen.

There is a fair objection here. Against weak technical opposition, chasing works, because the carrier panics and gives it back. Fine, and if your league is full of teams like that, chase away. But you are training a habit that will fail against the first side whose centre halves can pass, and habits acquired at pace do not unlearn quickly.

The way to test which version a squad has learned is to watch the second wave. In a well coached counterpress, the ball goes sideways twice and dies. In the shouted version, the ball goes over the top and four players are running the wrong way.

Both look intense on the wide camera. Only one gets the ball back.