Defending deep is a skill, not an admission of fear

The low block gets discussed as though it were a moral failing, usually by people who have never tried holding one for an hour.

There is a tone that creeps into commentary whenever a smaller side sets up deep. Negative. Anti-football. Parking the bus. As though the only respectable way to lose four-nil is to have a go.

I find this genuinely irritating, and not only for the obvious reason that a team with a tenth of the wage bill has to do something. Holding a low block properly is one of the hardest collective skills in the game, and the sides that do it well are doing something far more technically demanding than the sides who press high and hope.

Consider what it involves. Two banks, usually five and three or five and four, occupying about twenty-five metres of depth in front of your own box. You cannot press, because pressing means leaving the block and the block is the only thing keeping you in the match. So you shuffle. Every pass the opposition make sideways, all ten of you move three or four yards together. Sixty times. Eighty times. And the whole thing collapses if one player moves half a yard further than his neighbour, because that half yard is a passing lane into the box.

The specific things that break a low block are worth knowing. Overloads on one side then a switch, which is why the ball-far wingback has to tuck in and not watch the ball. Runners from deep arriving into the space between the last line and the keeper, which the midfield three has to track and the back five must not step to. And crosses from the byline pulled back to the penalty spot, which is the single most dangerous ball against any deep defence, and the reason the low block's real job is to stop the opposition getting to the byline in the first place, not to defend the box once they have.

The endurance question is not physical, either. It is attentional. Concentration for seventy minutes with the ball never coming to you, knowing one lapse ends it. Strikers do not have to do that. Nobody praises it.

And it works, often. Deep defending plus a fast forward and two set-piece takers has been beating better teams for as long as football has existed, and it will keep doing so, whatever the people with the tactics podcasts think of the aesthetics.

Win the ball on the edge of your own box, one pass, race away. That is a plan. It is not cowardice.