Nobody is assigned to stop the cutback and it is the best pass in the game

Defences have a designated response to almost every attacking pattern except the one that produces the highest quality chances.

There is a pass played from near the byline, rolled backwards into the space between the penalty spot and the edge of the area, and defences still have no agreed answer to it.

That is remarkable, because everything else has an answer. Crosses have a designated attacker of the ball and a designated screener. Long balls in behind have the sweeping goalkeeper and the covering centre back. Switches have the far-side tuck. Corners are choreographed to the metre. The cutback, which produces some of the best chances available in open play, is defended by whoever happens to notice.

Why it works is straightforward geometry. Everybody in the box is facing the ball, which means everybody is facing the byline, which means the runner arriving from behind is in the one place no defender is looking. Momentum is going the wrong way for the defenders and the right way for the attacker. He gets the ball moving forward, facing goal, twelve yards out, with the keeper still adjusting from a position taken to cover a near-post cross. The shot is easy. The pass is what did the work.

The reason this persists is that solving it requires somebody to defend space instead of a man, in the box, while a cross is imminent. That is an act of faith. A defender who abandons a body to guard an empty patch of grass and then watches the ball go over his head to the man he left will be blamed publicly and immediately. Guarding the cutback zone and having nothing happen earns him nothing at all.

So the job goes unassigned, and it usually falls by default to a midfielder who has tracked back and arrives out of breath at the moment the decision has to be made.

I would give it to somebody explicitly. Name the player, tell him the byline is not his problem, and accept that once every few matches it will cost you a goal from a cross you might otherwise have blocked. The trade looks good to me, because near-post crosses are recovered by goalkeepers reasonably often and cutbacks are not.

It is a rare thing in a sport this well studied. A known, repeatable, high-value attacking pattern with no standard defensive counter.

Somebody will name a defender for it. Then everybody will.