Most teams have no plan for the second wave

Coaches rehearse the first pass after a turnover in enormous detail and then leave the following ten seconds entirely to instinct.

The first three seconds of a transition are heavily coached now. Everyone has a rule for the first pass, everyone knows whether to go forward or to secure, everyone has watched the clip of the striker checking to the near shoulder. What happens after the first pass is where the sport is still improvising.

Here is the situation I mean. You win the ball in midfield, the outlet pass is good, your winger is away down the left with two defenders recovering. Textbook so far. Now count the bodies arriving. Very often there are two. The winger and one runner in the middle, both moving at full speed, both looking at the ball, arriving into a box where there are now four defenders because the opposition full back has got back and the holding midfielder has dropped in. The counter dies in a low percentage cross or a shot from a bad angle, and the highlights package calls it a good chance created.

It was not a good chance. It was a moment of superiority that got wasted by arriving too fast with too few.

The second wave is the fix and hardly anybody drills it. Somebody has to arrive late, deliberately late, at the top of the box, and somebody else has to occupy the space square of the ball for the cutback rather than sprinting past it. Both of those runs feel wrong to players, because they involve not sprinting when the crowd is screaming. That is exactly why they need rehearsing.

There is a counter argument I have some sympathy with. If you commit runners to the second wave you are, by definition, committing fewer to your own rest defence, and a counter that breaks down with six players ahead of the ball is how you concede the goal that loses the match. True. But most sides are not choosing between three runners and five. They are choosing between two and three, and the third is nearly free.

The teams who do this well look slower on television. Their counters do not always end in a shot inside eight seconds. They end in a settled attack against a disorganised defence, which is a far better thing to own, and it is why a possession phase that begins with a turnover is worth more than one that begins with a goal kick.