The counterpress brought back the long ball and nobody wants to admit it

If losing possession means six players swarming you inside five seconds, the sensible reply is to not be there at all.

The logic of counterpressing is beautiful and it has always been slightly self-defeating. Lose the ball, swarm it immediately, exploit the fact that the team who has just won possession is disorganised and facing the wrong way. Win it back in three seconds in the opposition half and you are attacking a defence that has not reset.

So what does a well-coached side do when it wins the ball against a team like that?

It does not try to play out. It launches it. Straight away, first touch, into the channel behind the pressing side's full-back, because every one of those pressers has committed forward and there is fifty metres of grass behind them. The pass is not pretty. It is often to nobody in particular. It does not need to be accurate, it needs to be immediate, because the whole value is in going over the top of a press rather than through it.

Which means the most aggressive counterpressing sides in the world have, between them, resurrected a version of the long ball, and half the analysis pretends this is not happening because it does not fit the story about modern possession football.

You can see the counter-adaptation too. The pressing side's response is the rest defence, keeping two centre-halves and a holding midfielder deliberately deep and unhurried while everybody else swarms. That is why so many teams now have a centre-back whose primary attribute is recovery pace rather than heading, and why the deep midfielder position has quietly become the hardest one to recruit for. He has to press, cover, and start again, and he has to read whether the ball is about to be launched over him.

There is also a fatigue argument nobody wants to make out loud. Counterpressing for ninety minutes is not physically available to most squads. What good sides do is choose their moments, usually by zone: press hard if we lose it in the middle third or in their half, drop off instantly if we lose it near our own box. The six-second rule that gets quoted so often was always a heuristic rather than a law, and applying it everywhere is how you end up with a back four sprinting backwards in the eighty-fifth minute.

Beautiful idea. Genuinely changed the sport. Just do not let anyone tell you it eliminated the hoof, because it is the single biggest reason the hoof came back.