The throw-in is the last unrehearsed set piece

Teams drill corners for hours and then hand the ball to whoever happens to be nearest the line.

A team will spend a full session on eleven variations from a corner and then concede possession from a throw-in on the halfway line because the left back turned round, saw nobody moving, and hoofed it up the touchline into a crowd. This happens perhaps forty times a match, at every level, and almost nobody treats it as a problem worth solving.

The numbers are not obscure. A side takes somewhere in the region of twenty to thirty throw-ins a game. That is more restarts than corners and free kicks combined, by a wide margin, and unlike those the opposition is not allowed within two metres of the taker. You are being handed the ball, unpressured, two dozen times, and the standard response is to give it away within four seconds.

What makes it worse is that the failure is invisible. Lose the ball from a throw and it is recorded as a misplaced pass by a defender, if it is recorded at all. Nobody says the throw-in was bad. The clip does not go in the review because it does not look like an event. It looks like the game continuing.

The clubs that have taken it seriously did something quite boring. They decided in advance who takes it in each third, they gave the nearest two players a fixed movement, and they made it acceptable to throw backwards. That last one is the hard part, because throwing backwards looks negative and gets booed, and a coach has to be secure enough to absorb that for a few weeks.

I would also argue the long throw has been dismissed too fast. It went out of fashion with the physical era it belonged to and got filed under crude, which is a bad reason to abandon anything. In the right area, against the right defence, it is a free delivery into the box that nobody is allowed to contest before it is thrown.

None of this is glamorous and none of it will be a talking point. It is just a very large number of free possessions that most teams are choosing to throw away, in the most literal sense available.