One striker pressing alone is just expensive jogging

A forward closing down two centre-backs on his own achieves nothing except making the crowd feel better and emptying his legs.

It looks like commitment. The striker sprints twenty yards at a centre-half, who takes a touch, plays it square to his partner, and the striker has to sprint another fifteen yards sideways to close him too. By the time he arrives, the ball has gone into midfield. He has covered thirty-five metres at pace and changed nothing.

Then he does it again four minutes later, and by the seventieth minute he cannot get across the front post when the cross finally comes.

A press is a coordinated act or it is not a press. The forward's job is not to win the ball. It is to make one option unavailable, so that the pass goes where his team has decided it should go, into a player his midfielders are already moving toward. Take away the second half of that and the first half is worthless, worse than worthless, because the man he pressures now has a free midfielder to find behind a forward who has committed.

The tell is easy to spot from the stands. When a striker starts a press, look at the two central midfielders behind him. If they step up as he goes, and the ball-side one is closing the passing lane before the pass is made, the trigger has been shared and something will probably happen. If they stay flat, he is on his own, and the sensible thing for him to do would be to stand still and screen the pass into midfield instead.

That, incidentally, is the instruction most forwards find hardest to follow. Standing between the centre-half and the holding midfielder, not chasing, moving sideways with the ball, doing nothing that looks like effort. It is the most valuable defensive work a striker can do and it earns him precisely no credit. Anyone who has played will recognise the pull to just go and press, because pressing feels like contributing and screening feels like standing about.

There is a squad-building consequence here that clubs get wrong. Sides sign a forward for his pressing statistics, drop him into a team whose midfield does not press, and then wonder why the numbers evaporated. He is doing the same actions. They just no longer mean anything, because the second and third parts of the sequence are missing.

Pressing is not an attribute a player carries around with him. It is a property of eleven people agreeing on when to go, and if only one of them agrees, all you have bought is a very tired striker.