The overlap has become a decoy and everyone knows it

Full backs still sprint outside the winger every week, and defences stopped being fooled by it several seasons ago.

The move is beautiful and it is mostly theatre now. Winger receives the ball facing the touchline, full back runs around him on the outside, the defending team is supposed to be pulled apart by the question of who takes whom.

Except the defending team has watched this too. Modern back lines defend the overlap with a simple rule: the full back stays with the ball carrier, the near-side midfielder drops to cover the runner, and the whole unit shuffles across a few yards. It costs them nothing. The run happens, the cover arrives, and the winger ends up crossing from a wide position with three defenders in the box and no chance of a good ball.

What the overlap does still achieve is occupation. The runner has to be respected, so somebody has to go with him, and that somebody is now out of the middle. The value has moved from the run itself to the space it vacates. Which is precisely why the underlap has taken over as the actual weapon. The runner goes inside instead, into the channel between full back and centre back, and the defence's rule does not cover it cleanly, because the man assigned to track wide runners is now watching someone disappear behind him into the box.

I would go as far as saying that a team whose full backs only overlap is a team you can defend with a whiteboard. The pattern is fixed and fixed patterns are solvable. The sides that hurt you alternate: the same player runs outside twice and inside on the third, and the centre back has to make a decision rather than execute a rule.

There is a defence of the traditional version. Against a very deep block, where there is no channel to run into because everyone is already inside, going outside is the only way to get behind the line at all, and a good early cross from the byline remains a genuinely difficult thing to defend. Fine. Against a low block, overlap.

Against anything else, the overlap is a question the opposition has already answered. Watching a full back sprint fifty yards to deliver a cross that a centre back heads away without moving his feet is one of the more depressing sights in the modern game, and it happens roughly six times a match.