The far-side winger decides how wide your block really is

The most thankless defensive job in football belongs to an attacker on the opposite touchline, and it is where blocks fail.

Ball on the left. The camera follows it, the crowd follows it, and the analysis follows it. Somewhere out of shot on the right, an attacking player is deciding whether to tuck in twenty metres or stay near his touchline, and that decision is the one that determines whether the defensive block actually holds.

He is the one who has to sprint back into a central position he does not enjoy, defend a zone he was not brought to the club to defend, and then, if the ball is switched, cover the whole width of the pitch to get back out to his own full back. It is the least rewarding job on the field. It is also the load-bearing wall.

If he tucks properly, the block has no soft middle and the opponent has to go all the way round to hurt you. If he stays wide, guarding a switch that may never come, the defensive midfielder has a zone and a half to cover on his own and the first through-ball into the space between the lines will go straight through where the winger should have been. Everyone will then discuss the midfielder's positioning.

Which is the injustice at the centre of this. Blocks are analysed as if they were built by defenders. They are not. Modern defensive shape is largely built by forwards agreeing to do unglamorous work in areas that never appear in their own statistics, and the sides that get it right almost always have at least one wide attacker with a genuinely strange combination of qualities, quick enough to threaten in transition and dutiful enough to spend an hour twenty metres from where he wants to be.

You can see the failure in slow motion when a side signs a brilliant one-against-one wide player and immediately becomes worse defensively without anyone being able to say why. The back four look the same. The midfield is the same. The block is simply eight metres wider than it was, all game, and eight metres is a pass.

Coaches know this and mostly cannot fix it with instructions, because the far-side tuck happens when nobody is looking and the player knows nobody is looking.

Watch the man off the ball. That is where the discipline is or is not.