Two pressing triggers are enough and most teams carry nine

A long list of pressing cues does not make a side sharper; it makes eleven players hesitate at slightly different moments.

I once saw a team's pressing sheet with nine listed triggers. Back pass to the keeper. Ball to a weak foot. First touch heavy. Receiving with back to play. Square pass along the line. Ball travelling more than fifteen yards. Full back with no forward option. And two more I have forgotten, which rather makes the point.

Every one of those cues is defensible in isolation. Together they are unusable, because pressing is a collective action executed in under a second, and a collective action requires everybody to identify the same moment. Give eleven people nine possible starting pistols and you will get a press that begins in three waves, which is the same as no press. The front man goes, the midfield reads a different cue and holds, and now your striker is isolated and your line is stretched forty yards.

Two cues. Maybe three. They should be the ones easiest to see from the furthest away, because the player at the back of your structure has to recognise the trigger as fast as the player nearest the ball, and he is reading it side-on from sixty yards.

The one everybody picks first is the back pass to the goalkeeper, and I would argue it is now the weakest of the standard cues. Keepers are selected for their feet. A press launched at a modern goalkeeper is often a press into a rehearsed escape, with the centre backs splitting wide and a midfielder dropping, and you have committed your whole shape to attack the one player in the opposition who has been drilled specifically for this. Sometimes it works spectacularly. It also produces the clearest concessions you will see all season.

The better cue is unglamorous. Ball travelling backwards or sideways at slow speed to a player who has to control it facing his own goal. That situation cannot be rehearsed away, it is visible from anywhere on the pitch, and it removes the opponent's forward passing options for the fraction of a second the press needs.

Cut the list. Whatever you keep, make sure the last defender can see it. A trigger that only the striker can read is not a trigger, it is a private decision, and private decisions are how a press turns into a counterattack against you.