The touchline is the space everyone abandoned

Everybody moved infield at once, which quietly made the oldest position on the pitch valuable again.

For about a decade the instruction has run one way. Get off the touchline. Come inside. Occupy the channel between the centre back and the full back, because that is where the damage is done. Wingers became forwards, full backs became midfielders, and the outside of the pitch emptied out.

The trouble with everybody following the same good idea is that it stops being a good idea. Those inside channels now contain a winger, an overlapping full back, a midfielder arriving late and two defenders who have been coached for years to expect exactly that. It is the busiest part of the pitch. Meanwhile there is an enormous amount of grass along the line that nobody is standing in.

A genuine touchline winger, the old kind, does something that no amount of positional sophistication replaces. He stretches the defensive line horizontally. Every metre he stands wider is a metre the far side has to cover, and defences that are compact vertically are often extremely fragile when asked to slide. You do not even need him to receive the ball. You need the opposition to keep looking at him.

There is a second thing, which is that isolation is a weapon that has gone out of fashion. One attacker, one defender, twenty metres of space and nobody close enough to help. That situation used to be the whole point of having a winger. Now it barely occurs, because we have filled the area with supporting runners in the name of combination play and given the defender three people to lean on.

I am not suggesting anybody rip up their structure. I am suggesting that the market has moved, and the undervalued asset right now is a player who can stay wide, stay patient, and beat a man on the outside. Those players got told to come inside and improve their game, and quite a few of them got worse.

The pendulum will swing. It always does. It would be nice if somebody swung it deliberately rather than waiting to be forced.