The best counterpress is often the one a team decides not to make

Sides are drilled to swarm the ball the instant they lose it, and the restraint to stand off is far less coached.

Five seconds. That is the number everybody quotes, and it has calcified into something close to doctrine. Lose the ball, hunt it for five seconds, and if you have not got it back, drop into shape.

I want to argue with the first half of that instruction rather than the second.

Counterpressing works because the team that has just won possession is at its most disorganised. Their receiver is usually facing his own goal, his support has been chasing rather than positioning, and there is a real chance of turning the ball over again in a zone where the defence has nobody set. That is a genuine advantage and it is why the idea spread.

But the same conditions that make counterpressing effective can be entirely absent, and sides press anyway, because the trigger they were taught is the loss of the ball rather than the state of the opponent. If the ball is lost into a midfielder who is already facing forwards with two runners ahead of him, sprinting at him is not aggression, it is donating the space behind. A five-second commitment there does not win the ball. It removes four players from the picture and turns a manageable transition into a three against two.

The teams I trust are the ones that visibly choose. You can see it. The ball is lost, one player closes to slow the receiver down, and everybody else turns and runs backwards without a moment's hesitation or argument. That decision has to be made by somebody in about a second, and the sides that make it consistently tend to have an experienced holding midfielder whose main contribution is a shout the cameras do not pick up.

Speed metrics make this harder rather than easier. If you measure counterpressing by how quickly players close the ball after a turnover, the team that correctly declines to press will look lazy. Its numbers will be worse in exactly the moments its judgment was best. I have seen that used in an argument about a player's application, which is roughly the same error as criticising a goalkeeper for touching the ball less often than his opposite number.

Press when the receiver is trapped. Retreat when he is not.

The five seconds were never the point. The five seconds were shorthand for a read.