Your winger tracking back decides more matches than his finishing does

The sprint nobody wants to make is the one that stops a two-on-one becoming a goal, and it usually arrives around the sixty-fifth minute.

Every attacking transition against you starts as a numbers problem. They have four players ahead of the ball, you have three defenders in position. Somebody has to make that four against three into a four against four, and it will not be a defender, because they are all busy retreating and holding shape. It has to be the player who lost the ball, or the winger who was standing on the opposite touchline when it broke.

Sixty metres. Full sprint. Almost always at the exact moment your legs are already gone.

The good ones do not run at the ball. That is the giveaway. A tired player chases the carrier, arrives half a second late, and achieves nothing except being in the picture when the goal goes in. A player who understands the job runs at the free man instead, the one arriving from deep on the far side, because the carrier is already being dealt with and the pass is the actual threat. It is a longer run to a place where nothing is currently happening, on the basis that something is about to.

This is also the real reason for the sixty-fifth minute substitution that annoys everyone. A winger is having a decent game, hasn't scored, gets pulled off, and the crowd groans. What the bench is looking at is a sprint count. He has three or four maximal efforts left in him and they cannot control which moments those will be needed for. A fresh player has twenty. Attacking output is not the calculation. Repeatability of the recovery run is.

Which creates a coaching tension nobody has really solved. You ask a forward to sprint sixty metres backwards, then five seconds later you want him breaking the line at full pace on the counter. Those two things fight each other biologically. Some managers accept a winger who does not track and build the whole rest defence around covering him. That is a legitimate choice and it costs you a midfielder's freedom for the whole match.

My preference is the compromise most good sides use: one winger tracks all the way, the other tucks into a covering position ten yards infield and stays as the counter outlet. Not equal work. Deliberately unequal, decided before kick-off, and rotated by which side the opposition attack down most.

Just do not pretend it is not work. It is the least rewarded running in football.