The five seconds after losing the ball are the most expensive in football

Transition is treated as a phase of play when it is really a scheduling problem, and the schedule is set before the ball is lost.

Everyone films the counterattack. Almost nobody films the pass that preceded it, which is where the goal was actually arranged.

A transition goal looks like a burst of individual speed, and that is why it gets analysed as one. Someone wins the ball, someone runs, someone finishes. What the clip does not show is that the losing team had four players on one side of the pitch, a full back thirty metres up, and a midfielder who had drifted across to help in a moment when he was the only cover. The transition did not create that shape. The build-up did, several passes earlier, and the ball loss simply cashed it in.

Which is why I think rest defence is the most underrated concept in the club game and the least visible on television, because the camera follows the ball and rest defence is by definition happening away from it.

The good sides do something specific and slightly boring. While attacking, they keep a defined group behind the ball whose job is not to join in, positioned not where the ball is but where the opponent's outlet is likely to be. Not deep. Narrow and central, because the counterattack has to go through the middle at some point and the fastest route is a straight one. Cut the straight line and the counter becomes a slow attack, which is a completely different and much more survivable problem.

That is a cost. Committing two or three players to a job that never appears in a highlight means fewer bodies in the box, fewer second-ball wins, fewer scrappy goals. Coaches who insist otherwise are usually the ones losing four away games a season to teams they dominated.

Where I would push back on the current orthodoxy is the automatic counterpress. The instruction to swarm the ball within five seconds is a good default and a terrible rule. Pressing immediately works when the team is already compact around the loss; when it is stretched, the swarm sends players past the ball into empty space and turns a manageable problem into a two-against-two at halfway.

Better teams make the decision situationally. Press if we are close. Drop and get organised if we are not, and accept the twenty seconds of nothing.

Watch the next goal your side concedes on the break and rewind five passes. The mistake will be there, wearing the wrong number.