The best counterattacks are rehearsed, not spontaneous

What looks like instinct in the six seconds after a turnover is usually a pattern three players have run two hundred times in training.

It is described as chaos. The ball is won, everything opens up, four players break at speed and the commentary calls it a moment of inspiration. Watch the same team do it three weeks running and you notice that the shape of the break is identical each time. Same first pass, same runner going outside, same second runner delaying five metres behind. That is not inspiration. That is a drill.

The reason it can be drilled is that the situation is more constrained than it looks. When possession turns over, the opponent's defensive structure is in a known state of disorder. Their full backs are high, their midfield is facing the wrong way, and there is a predictable amount of space in predictable places. If you know which places, you can rehearse the three passes that reach them without having to look for options in real time, and not having to look is the entire advantage.

The first pass is the one that gets trained hardest and noticed least. It is almost never the ambitious ball. It is a short pass out of the immediate pressure to a player facing forward, and it exists to buy the two seconds in which the runners commit. Sides that try to go long immediately give the ball back most of the time and their counterattacking numbers look terrible for reasons everyone blames on the forwards.

There is a decision embedded here that clubs are not honest about. Rehearsing transitions costs training time, and training time is finite, so it is taken from possession work. A manager who is excellent in transition is usually slightly worse at breaking down a deep block, and the two weaknesses come from the same timetable. I would rather a side chose one and did it properly than split the week and be mediocre at both, which is what most of them do.

The tell is what happens when the counterattack is unavailable. Against a side that never commits players forward, a well-drilled transition team can look completely lost, passing sideways for an hour, and the criticism arrives as if they had forgotten how to play.

They did not forget. They were never taught the other thing.