Sometimes the right thing is to stop running

Chasing every hopeless ball back looks like commitment, and it quietly costs a team the sprint it needed ten minutes later.

A ball is played over the top, the striker is five yards clear, and a midfielder sets off after him anyway. He will not get there. Everyone in the ground can see he will not get there. He runs sixty metres at full tilt, arrives as the shot is taken, and the crowd approves of him.

I would like coaches to say the unpopular thing out loud, which is that this run was a waste and that a professional should be allowed to decline it. Not out of laziness. Out of budgeting. A player has a finite number of maximum efforts in an afternoon, the number is smaller than people imagine, and every one spent on a hopeless chase is unavailable later, when there is a fifty-fifty ball or a genuine recovery to be made in the eighty-fifth minute.

The obstacle is not physiology, it is optics. Effort is the one thing supporters can reliably judge from a distance, so it is the thing they judge hardest. A player who jogs while his team is broken on will be booed even if his decision was correct, and he knows it, and so he runs. Managers know it too, which is why very few of them will publicly sanction the alternative even when their sports scientists are begging them to.

There is a smarter middle path and the best defensive midfielders already use it. Do not sprint at the ball. Sprint to the place where the attack is likely to end up, at whatever speed gets you there in time and no faster. Take the angle, not the race. If the cross is coming, be in the box, balanced, rather than arriving three yards behind the striker having run twice as far. Arriving usefully is not the same as arriving quickly, and it is much cheaper.

There is a second, harder version of the argument concerning the score. At three nil down with fifteen minutes left, the marginal value of a recovery sprint is close to zero and the marginal cost, in a week with a match on Wednesday, is real. Every serious person in the building understands this. Nobody will say it into a microphone.

Effort is not free and it is not a virtue in itself. It is a resource with a price.

Spend it where it changes something.