The Tuesday session is where most seasons quietly go wrong

Midweek is the only day a coach fully controls, and most staff spend it on the wrong kind of hard.

Saturday to Saturday, a coach has one day that is genuinely his. Sunday belongs to recovery, Monday to the massage table and the video room, Thursday and Friday to sharpening and set pieces. Tuesday is the day you can actually teach something and actually load the squad. And an enormous number of clubs waste it.

The classic waste is the running day. Somebody decides the group looked flat, so Tuesday becomes shuttles and blocks of extensive running with no ball. The players get tired in a way that has almost no relationship to what tires them in a match, which is repeated accelerations from a standing start while making decisions. You cannot buy that with straight line volume.

The second waste is subtler and more common. Tuesday becomes tactical, which in practice means walking through shape at jogging pace for fifty minutes. The information is good. The intensity is a fraction of match demand. Do that three weeks running and the squad arrives at the end of the month having been told a great deal and having been stressed almost not at all.

What Tuesday should look like is large sided games with real consequences and short rest, positioned so that the tactical message and the physical stimulus are the same object. Eleven against eleven on three quarters of a pitch, four minute blocks, specific restart rules that force the pattern you want. Players get their high speed metres inside a shape that means something. The coaching happens between blocks, not during them.

Here is the part staff resist. This requires the fitness coach and the tactical coach to agree on the same session rather than each owning their own day, and in a lot of buildings those two people are quietly competing for time. The compromise, half a running day and half a walkthrough, gives you the fatigue of one and the learning of neither.

Squad rotation policy gets blamed for a lot of what goes wrong in March. I would look earlier. Look at what the group did on twenty six Tuesdays, and whether any of them asked the players to run at the speeds the game will ask for.

Most of them did not.