A passing lane is opened by the man who is not passing

Lanes get credited to the passer, but most were created a second earlier by a receiver moving the wrong way on purpose.

The through ball gets the replay. It usually deserves it. What the replay never shows, because the camera is following the ball, is the movement three seconds earlier that made the gap exist, and that movement almost always belongs to somebody who never touches the ball at all.

A lane is not a fixed feature of a defensive shape. It is a temporary hole created when a defender moves, and defenders move because attackers make them. So the striker who drops five yards short, drags a centre back with him and then spins is not asking for the ball. He is manufacturing the corridor that the winger will run into. If the pass then arrives, the passer looks like a visionary. He was reading a map that somebody else drew.

This is why I find raw progressive pass counts a slightly hollow statistic. They reward the player at the end of the causal chain. In a team of good movers a fairly ordinary midfielder will accumulate impressive numbers, because the lanes keep opening in front of him and all he has to do is see them, and seeing them is the easy half.

The harder version of the argument is about disguise. A defender reacts to what an attacker's body says, so the best decoy runs are the ones made at full commitment, because a half hearted run does not move anybody. Which means the players doing the most work here are running seventy metres in games where they will finish with fourteen touches and get substituted to polite applause. Their contribution is invisible in every number the broadcast puts on screen.

There is a fair objection. Some passers genuinely create lanes on their own, by carrying the ball at a defender until he commits, which is a different mechanism and belongs entirely to the man in possession. Carrying is underrated for exactly this reason. A ten metre dribble that forces one defender to step is worth more than three sideways passes.

But the ordinary case, the one that happens twenty times a match, is collaborative and gets credited to one man.

Watch a match once with your eyes off the ball. Pick the striker, follow only him, and count how many of his runs end with nothing coming. Then go back and see where the goal came from. It is nearly always the run before the run.