Praising the recovery run rewards the wrong player

A forty yard sprint back into your own box is a highlight, and usually the correction of somebody else's mistake or your own.

The clip goes round every week. A winger tracks sixty yards, slides in at the far post, the commentary calls it heart. It gets more views than the goal.

I like the effort as much as anyone. But a recovery run is by definition a run you had to make, and the interesting question is why you had to make it. Somebody was out of position. Sometimes that is the winger himself, caught upfield after a loose pass he made. Sometimes it is the full back who stepped and missed. Sometimes it is the whole team's rest defence, which was never set. Applauding the sprint without asking the question is like praising a goalkeeper for a save from a shot he should never have allowed the angle for.

There is a measurement problem sitting underneath this. Tracking systems love recovery runs because they are easy to detect. High velocity, direction towards your own goal, ends near the ball. Clean signal. So they get counted, they end up on a work-rate dashboard, and a player learns that the way to look committed to a manager reading a dashboard is to be out of position and then run hard. That is a genuinely bad incentive and I do not think clubs have thought about it.

The comparison I would want is the one nobody logs. How often did this player prevent the situation. Did he delay the pass, did he angle his body so the ball had to go backwards, did he simply not go on the overlap in the ninetieth minute at two goals down when the game did not need it. All invisible. None of it produces a clip.

There is also the small matter of what the sprints cost. Maximal decelerations towards your own goal are among the hardest actions a footballer performs, they cluster in the last twenty minutes when tissue is already fatigued, and a squad that leads its league in recovery sprints is usually a squad with a hamstring problem coming.

So watch the run by all means. Then rewind ten seconds and find out who put him in the position of having to make it. Nine times out of ten the answer is more useful than the highlight.