The rondo teaches almost nothing about finding a passing lane

It is the most protected drill in football and the one furthest from the problem a midfielder actually has to solve.

Every session starts with one. Circle of players, two in the middle, quick feet, laughter, a bit of chirping when somebody gets nutmegged. The rondo has become the badge you wear to show you belong to the modern coaching church, and I think it is close to worthless for the thing it is supposed to build.

Here is the mechanism. In a rondo the receiving options are arranged around a circle, which means a lane exists in every direction and the passer chooses between roughly equivalent ones. In a match there is no circle. There is a direction of attack, a defensive line squeezing one axis, and lanes that open for perhaps half a second in a wedge maybe forty degrees wide. The skill is not passing through a gap. The skill is recognising which gap is about to exist, and moving your own body a metre so that it does.

The rondo trains the pass. The game demands the scan before the pass, and the rondo removes the scan by putting everything inside a single field of view.

What I want instead costs nothing. Take the same nine players, put them in a rectangle with a target line at each end, and now every possession has a direction. Suddenly the pass backwards has a meaning, the third man run has a meaning, and the player receiving with his back to the line has a genuine problem to solve.

There is a version of this argument that goes too far, and I do not want to make it. Rondos are good for warming joints, for touch under mild pressure, for the social business of getting a squad talking before hard work starts. Keep them for that. Just stop calling them technical development and stop protecting the fifteen minutes they eat.

The tell is what happens when a midfielder gets pressed from behind in a match. Players who have lived on rondos take the safe square ball, because in a rondo the square ball is always right. Players who have trained in directional games take the touch across their body first, buy the angle, and play forward.

Same technique. Different education. One of them wins you the ball back at the halfway line and one of them does not.