The switch of play is the cheapest way through a block

Narrow defences leave one enormous piece of the pitch unguarded by design, and most attacking sides refuse to use it.

A compact block is compact because it has decided the far side of the pitch is not worth defending yet. Everybody shuffles toward the ball, the far-side full-back tucks in almost as an extra centre-half, and the whole unit occupies maybe forty metres of a sixty-eight metre width. That is not a mistake. It is the trade the shape is built on, and it works because most attacks never test the other side of it.

The cost of shuffling back across is enormous. A defensive unit sliding twenty-five metres sideways takes around three seconds to be organised again, and it takes longer than that if the far-side attacker is already high and wide rather than starting from deep.

So the antidote is a long diagonal, struck flat and hard, from a central player to a winger standing on the opposite touchline. Not a lofted ball for someone to chest down, which gives the defence the three seconds back. A driven pass that arrives at chest height or below so the receiver can attack immediately, one on one, against a full-back who has spent the last minute tucked inside and is now sprinting out to him with his body facing the wrong way.

Done properly it is the highest-value ball in football that is not a through pass. Done badly it is a throw-in, which is why coaches are so nervous of it.

And this is where I think a lot of possession sides go wrong. They circulate the ball across the back four, side to side, at a speed that lets the block shuffle comfortably with them, and they call it patience. It is not patience, it is telegraphing. The block only breaks if the ball crosses the pitch faster than eleven humans can. Four short passes along the back line at a comfortable tempo is slower than the shuffle. One long one is not.

The practical obstacle is the personnel. To play that pass you need a centre-back or a deep midfielder who can hit a sixty-yard ball flat with the outside of the foot under pressure, and there are not many of those. It is a rarer skill than a fancy turn and it is coached far less, largely because it looks unglamorous and because five out of ten of them will go out of play in training and someone will decide it is a risk.

On the other side, the winger has to hold that touchline for long stretches doing nothing. That is a personality trait as much as a tactical instruction, and the players who can do it are worth more than their numbers suggest.