Route One Football: The Meaning and England's Long-Ball Era

The contestants were mostly footballers, sitting behind desks in a BBC studio in 1966, and the pitch was a board of lights. A team that wanted to score could build towards goal with four easy questions or get there with one hard one. The second option was called route one, and within a few years English commentators were using the words for something that happened on grass.

Route one football is the shortest way to goal: a long pass from the goalkeeper or the back line straight to the forwards, with the midfield left out. In England the phrase covers a single ball of that kind and also a whole method of playing, the long-ball game that the Football Association's coaching department endorsed in the 1980s, that took Watford to second place in the First Division in 1983 and Wimbledon to the FA Cup in 1988. It is nearly always said as a criticism. For a time it was close to official policy.

What route one means: the shortest way to goal, and what it leaves out

The pass itself is easy to describe. It starts with the goalkeeper or a centre-back, travels fifty or sixty yards in the air and comes down on or near a forward. Between the kick and the landing it crosses the middle third of the pitch without touching anybody.

That omission is the whole idea. Midfield is where the opposition has the most players and where a team passing short is most likely to lose the ball in a place that hurts. A long pass removes the risk by removing the zone. The team's own midfielders are bypassed too, which changes what they are for: they stop being the players who make the attack and become the players who arrive underneath it.

English football uses the phrase in two registers. A "route-one goal" is a neutral description, even an admiring one, of a goal made by a goalkeeper's kick and a single touch. "Route-one football" is the accusation that a team does nothing else. Older supporters will remember "kick and rush" doing the same job in the 1950s; the FA's coaches preferred "direct play"; the terraces now say "hoofball". They overlap, but route one is the most precise of them, because it specifies both where the ball starts and what it skips.

The purest example on record

Occasionally the route is so short that no forward is needed. At the Britannia Stadium in November 2013 the Stoke City goalkeeper Asmir Begović cleared the ball from deep inside his own penalty area in the opening seconds of a match against Southampton. The wind caught it, it bounced outside the Southampton area and looped over Artur Boruc, who had come off his line, into the net. The goal was timed at thirteen seconds.

Nobody would call that a tactic. It does show the logic at its limit, though. Every pass a team adds between its own goal and the other one is a chance for something to go wrong, and the fewest possible passes is one. The method described on this page is an attempt to make a system out of that arithmetic, and the role at the far end of the pass has its own guide: the target man and what he is asked to do.

Quiz Ball, 1966: where the phrase route one comes from

Quiz Ball was first shown on BBC television in 1966 and ran into the early 1970s. Each programme set two teams against each other, representing Football League or Scottish League clubs and made up of players and officials with a well-known supporter as a guest, and the game was played on an electronic board laid out as a pitch.

Before each attack a team chose how to reach goal.

1. 1Route oneA single hard question. Answer it and the team scores at once.
2. 2Route twoTwo questions of medium difficulty, answered one after the other.
3. 3Route threeThree easier questions in succession.
4. 4Route fourFour easy questions, the safest for knowledge and the slowest way up the pitch.

The choice a team made before attacking on the BBC quiz first broadcast in 1966. A longer route meant easier questions and more opportunities to lose the ball.

The longer routes carried a second danger besides the number of questions, because the opposing team had the chance to win the ball back along the way. Route one was over quickly: one question, one answer, and the light at the far end of the board came on.

Nobody recorded who first applied the term to a real match. It was in general use among commentators and football writers during the 1970s, when millions of viewers still understood the reference without explanation. By the time the long-ball argument reached its height in the 1980s the phrase was simply the name of the thing.

There is an irony in how the meaning turned. On the programme route one was the bold option. It needed the most knowledge and it was a gamble: get the hard question wrong and the attack was over. On the pitch the phrase came to describe what critics regarded as the least imaginative choice available, the one a team made when it could not think of anything better. The quiz rewarded cleverness with directness. The football version was accused of using directness to avoid the need for cleverness.

A system, not a hopeful punt: the target, the runners and the second ball

Watch a side that plays long badly and the ball is the only thing that moves. A defender under pressure swings his foot, the ball sails towards a lone forward, the other nine outfield players stay where they were, and it comes straight back. That is a clearance with ambitions.

A side that plays long on purpose looks different before the ball is kicked. It has decided where the pass is going, who will be underneath it and what happens in each of the possible outcomes, and the whole team shifts up the pitch while the ball is in the air.

1. 1The aimThe ball is hit to an agreed area, often towards the touchline side of the penalty area where a tall forward faces a shorter full-back.
2. 2The contestThe target man challenges for it, trying to flick it on, cushion it down or at least stop the defender heading it cleanly.
3. 3The runnersA second forward and the far-side winger sprint beyond the contest before the ball arrives, gambling on the flick.
4. 4The second ballTwo or three midfielders close in ten to fifteen yards short of the contest, facing goal, to collect whatever drops.
5. 5The squeezeThe back four pushes up towards halfway so that a cleared ball lands among their own players and the pitch stays short.
6. 6The restartIf the ball runs out of play, the side has a throw-in, corner or free kick in the attacking third and sets up for it.

The stages a coached long-ball side works through on each forward pass. It describes the method in general and no single club's version of it.

Why the second ball matters more than the first

The header itself is often a coin toss. A good centre-half wins as many as he loses against a good centre-forward, and coaches of long-ball sides knew it. What they could control was who stood where when the ball came down.

A defender heading under challenge rarely directs the ball. It drops somewhere within a dozen yards, and whoever has placed more players in that circle, running on to it and facing the right way, gets it. A midfielder who picks up a loose ball twenty-five yards from goal with defenders still turning has a better position than most passing moves ever produce. The long pass is the means of delivering the real contest to the right part of the pitch.

Territory without risk

The other gain is geographical. A team that loses the ball sixty yards from its own goal has lost very little. One that loses it twenty-five yards out, trying to pass around a pressing forward, may have lost the match.

Long-ball sides accepted that they would give the ball away more often than their opponents and arranged to do so in harmless places. They were also, almost without exception, pressing sides. Graham Taylor's Watford chased defenders in their own third long before the word "press" was fashionable, because a team that has put the ball deep in opposition territory wants to keep it there. The kick and the chase were one policy.

Why the restarts matter as much as the pass

A long-ball team does not expect to keep the ball. It expects to win restarts.

Follow a single long pass through its possible endings and count how many leave the attacking side better off than it was.

What happens to the long ball	What the long-ball side gets
The target man wins the header	A flick-on for the runners or a lay-off to a midfielder facing goal
The defender heads it away	A loose ball contested by midfielders already moving forwards
The defender heads or hooks it out of play	A throw-in or a corner in the attacking third
The defender fouls the target man	A free kick within crossing range of the penalty area
The goalkeeper comes and claims it	Nothing gained, and nothing lost except a possession sixty yards from home

Three of those five outcomes hand over a dead ball near the opposition goal, and a fourth leaves it loose in the same area. Dead balls were where these sides did their most careful work. Set pieces account for a large share of goals in every era of the game, with figures between a quarter and a third commonly quoted, and a side that manufactures twice as many of them as its opponent has tilted the match before any question of open-play quality arises.

So the routines were drilled. Corners were aimed at an agreed zone with blockers and runners assigned. Free kicks from the halfway line, which a passing side would take short, were launched into the box by a goalkeeper or centre-back who had walked forty yards to take them. Throw-ins level with the penalty area were treated as crosses, a subject with a page of its own on long throw-ins and how teams use them.

Wimbledon's most famous goal came this way. At Wembley on 14 May 1988, against a Liverpool side that had just won the league, Dennis Wise swung in a free kick from the flank and Lawrie Sanchez glanced it into the far corner. One delivery, one header, one-nil. Liverpool had most of the ball that afternoon and nothing to show for it.

Charles Reep, the analyst behind much of this thinking, had a word for a ball that arrived in the attacking third by any means: a "reacher". His claim was that reachers predicted shots, and shots predicted goals, more reliably than anything to do with passing. The restarts were simply reachers that the referee guaranteed.

Charles Reep's notebooks and the three-pass finding

On 18 March 1950, at the County Ground in Swindon, an RAF accountant took out a pencil at half-time and began recording every attacking move in the second half of Swindon Town against Bristol Rovers. Wing Commander Charles Reep had been irritated for years by how often attacks broke down and wanted to know exactly how often. He kept going for half a century.

Reep invented his own shorthand for passes, shots, regained possessions and the areas of the pitch they happened in, and by his death in 2002 had logged well over two thousand matches by hand. By his own account the interest went back to talks he heard in 1933 from Charles Jones, Arsenal's right-half, about the fast wing play of Herbert Chapman's team, the side whose system is described in our guide to the WM formation. Clubs noticed him. Brentford took him on as an adviser in 1951 when they were in danger of relegation, and he later worked with Stan Cullis's Wolves, who won three league titles in the 1950s hitting long passes to quick wingers.

In 1968, with the statistician Bernard Benjamin, he published his results in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Two of them became famous. Roughly one shot in nine or ten produced a goal, at every level he studied. And roughly four goals in five came from moves of three passes or fewer.

From the second figure Reep drew a conclusion that would shape English coaching: if most goals come from short moves, a team should play short moves, get the ball forward at once and stop wasting time on the fourth, fifth and sixth pass.

The flaw in the conclusion

His own tables contained the objection. Moves of three passes or fewer made up more than nine in ten of all the moves he recorded.

Share of all moves that had three passes or fewer91.5%

Share of all goals that came from those moves80%

Approximate proportions from Reep and Benjamin's 1968 paper as later re-examined. A move here is an unbroken sequence of passes by one team.

Show the numbers

Short moves in Reep's data: share of play against share of goals

Item	Value
Share of all moves that had three passes or fewer	91.5%
Share of all goals that came from those moves	80%

Most goals came from short moves because most moves were short. Football in the 1950s and 1960s was full of them: a tackle, a pass, a pass, lost again. If short moves supplied over ninety per cent of the play and only eighty per cent of the goals, they were scoring at less than their share, and the small minority of longer moves was supplying one goal in five from under one move in ten.

Two sports scientists, Mike Hughes and Ian Franks, re-examined the question in 2005 using World Cup data and adjusted for how often each length of move occurred. Per possession, longer passing sequences produced more shots than short ones, and the more successful teams were better at turning long sequences into chances. The data had been pointing the other way all along.

Reep was a remarkable collector and a poor interpreter. His ratio of shots to goals anticipated by decades the modern habit of valuing chances instead of counting possession, and his emphasis on winning the ball back high up the pitch reads like a description of pressing. He was right about a good deal. He was wrong about the one thing English football took from him.

Charles Hughes, the FA and the position of maximum opportunity

Reep worked for clubs. Charles Hughes worked for the governing body, and that made the difference.

Hughes joined the FA's coaching staff in the 1960s under Allen Wade, managed the England amateur side and the Great Britain Olympic team, and from the early 1980s was the FA's director of coaching and education. He wrote the manuals, he designed the courses, and for the best part of two decades anyone who wanted an FA qualification learned the game as he described it.

His own analysis, set out in The Winning Formula in 1990, covered a little over a hundred matches at several levels of the game. It reached a conclusion close to Reep's: the great majority of goals came from moves of five passes or fewer. Hughes built a coaching philosophy on it that he called direct play. Get the ball forward early. Get it into the areas goals are scored from. Win it back in the attacking third. Take set plays seriously.

What POMO meant

The phrase that outlived the book was POMO, the position of maximum opportunity. Hughes used it for the zone close to goal from which, on his figures, most goals were scored, and the coaches who taught it usually pointed to the area around the far post. His argument was that crosses which beat the first defender often arrive there with nobody to meet them, and that a team which made a rule of always having a player arriving in it would score goals that other teams were leaving on the pitch.

As a piece of coaching advice it is unobjectionable, and plenty of far-post tap-ins in the Premier League are scored by forwards doing exactly what Hughes recommended. The trouble came from what surrounded it. A method that judges a team by how often it gets the ball into one area encourages getting it there by the quickest means, and the quickest means is a long one.

Hughes always maintained that he had been caricatured. He argued for accuracy and technique, he said, and never told anyone to kick the ball aimlessly. That is fair to the text. It is less fair to the effect, because a doctrine handed to several thousand part-time coaches loses its qualifications on the way down, and what reached the Sunday morning pitch was "get it forward".

The base-rate problem that undid Reep's finding applies equally to his. What matters is where the idea sat. Through the coaching pathway that every English coach passed along, an early version of the FA's ladder of coaching badges, direct play had the authority of the national association behind it.

Watford and Wimbledon: the clubs that made the long ball work

Graham Taylor arrived at Vicarage Road in 1977 with Watford in the Fourth Division and Elton John in the chairman's seat. They won that division at the first attempt and were promoted again the following spring. In 1982 they reached the First Division, and in their first season there they finished second, behind Liverpool and above every other club in England.

Taylor's team was fast, fit and relentless. Two wingers, Nigel Callaghan and the young John Barnes, supplied crosses; a tall centre-forward, Ross Jenkins and later George Reilly, contested everything in the air; Luther Blissett ran beyond him and finished the 1982-83 season as the First Division's leading scorer with 27 league goals. Watford put eight past Sunderland that autumn. A year later they played in the UEFA Cup and reached the FA Cup final, losing 2-0 to Everton.

Wimbledon's rise was steeper and their football blunter. Elected to the Football League in 1977, they were in the First Division nine years later under Dave Bassett, finished sixth in their first season at that level, and under Bobby Gould won the FA Cup in 1988. Dave Beasant, who saved John Aldridge's penalty in that final, also launched most of their attacks, kicking long towards John Fashanu from wherever the ball happened to be.

• 4Division Watford were in, 1977
• 3Watford promotions in five seasons
• 2Watford's First Division finish, 1982-83
• 9Years from Wimbledon's election to the top flight

Divisions and positions from the Football League record. Watford's figures run from Graham Taylor's appointment in 1977; Wimbledon's from their election to the League the same year.

The two clubs were not the same thing, and Taylor disliked being bracketed with what came after. His Watford had wingers and scored heavily. Wimbledon made a virtue of discomfort. Other clubs went further down that road: at Cambridge United around 1990, John Beck's methods reportedly extended to leaving the grass long in the corners so that balls hit there would hold up.

Side	Manager	Years	High point
Wolverhampton Wanderers	Stan Cullis	1950s	League champions in 1953-54, 1957-58 and 1958-59
Watford	Graham Taylor	1977 to 1987	First Division runners-up 1982-83, FA Cup final 1984
Wimbledon	Dave Bassett, then Bobby Gould	1981 to 1990	First Division by 1986, FA Cup winners 1988
Republic of Ireland	Jack Charlton	1986 to 1995	World Cup quarter-finals 1990
Norway	Egil Olsen	1990 to 1998	World Cup finals in 1994 and 1998
Bolton Wanderers	Sam Allardyce	1999 to 2007	Sixth in the Premier League 2004-05
Stoke City	Tony Pulis	2006 to 2013	FA Cup final 2011

The table makes a point that the argument about style tends to bury. Every side in it finished far above where its resources said it should.

The case for route one football: mud, small squads and percentages

Derby County's Baseball Ground in January was brown from one penalty area to the other. So were most English pitches between November and March until drainage, undersoil heating and reinforced turf arrived in the 1990s. A pass along the ground across that surface might stop dead or skid or take off from a divot. A pass through the air behaved the same way in August and in February.

This is the first and most practical argument for the long ball, and it is the one most often forgotten by people judging the 1980s from a seat in a modern stadium. The method was fitted to the conditions. Continental sides who played neat football on firm Mediterranean grass were not obviously wrong to do so, and nor was an English manager who looked at a bog in Plymouth and told his centre-backs to miss it out.

What a small squad can and cannot do

The second argument is about players. A Fourth Division manager in 1978 did not have midfielders who could receive the ball under pressure, turn and find a pass. If he had, a bigger club would have bought them. What he could find were tall centre-forwards, quick runners and footballers willing to cover enormous distances, and a system that asked those players to do what they were good at was sounder than one that exposed what they could not do.

Squads were small, too. English football allowed a single substitute from the mid-1960s and did not permit a second until the late 1980s, so a manager chose his eleven and lived with them. Fitness could be coached in a way that touch could not, and the long-ball sides were, by common consent of the people who played against them, the fittest teams in the country.

The percentages

Third, risk. When a weaker side tries to pass through a stronger one, the ball is usually lost in the weaker side's half. The long-ball manager's sum was simple: his team would lose possession more often than the opposition whatever it did, so it should lose it as far from its own goal as possible. A manager without the players to pass through a better team was right not to try, and the league tables of the period bear that out more often than the critics allowed.

Nor was it dull to watch. Taylor's Watford were among the highest scorers in the division, and the complaint about long-ball football was generally made by supporters of the clubs it beat, which is a different thing from a complaint about entertainment.

There was a ceiling, and the honest version of the case admits it. The method lifted limited squads above their station; it has no record of making a good squad great. No side won the First Division playing this way after Cullis's Wolves, and they had better players than the label suggests.

The case against: technique, Lilleshall and the road to 1994

The charge is not that Watford or Wimbledon played long. It is that a governing body turned a survival tactic for small clubs into a curriculum for the whole country.

If the national coaching manual says that goals come from getting the ball forward early, then the players who prosper in youth football are the ones who suit that game: boys who are big for their age, quick and strong in the air. English schoolboys of the period played eleven-a-side on full-size pitches from an early age, where a long kick and a fast runner beat any amount of passing. The small, clever midfielder who needed the ball at his feet was the one released at sixteen. Critics argue that a generation of English players was coached out of the habit of receiving the ball under pressure, and that the cost was paid in international football, where opponents kept possession for long spells and England chased.

Graham Taylor and the 1994 World Cup

The story usually ends with one man. Taylor became England manager in 1990, went out of the 1992 European Championship without winning a match, and then failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup from a group containing the Netherlands and Norway. England lost 2-0 in Oslo in June 1993 and 2-0 in Rotterdam that October, and on the final night of the campaign conceded to San Marino within nine seconds of the kick-off. A television documentary filmed on the touchline fixed the image of an English manager out of his depth. Taylor's place in the longer run of the job is covered in our history of every England manager and his record.

It became the standard verdict that the long-ball era had finally been found out. The awkward facts are these. Taylor's England did not play like his Watford, and their problem was less directness than confusion. England also failed to qualify for the World Cups of 1974 and 1978, before Hughes ran the coaching department. And the national side reached the semi-finals of the 1990 World Cup and the 1996 European Championship, either side of the Taylor years, with players such as Paul Gascoigne, Chris Waddle and Peter Beardsley who had come through the same system and could plainly pass a football.

So the case against is strongest when it is made modestly. Direct play was not the sole cause of England's failures, and the five-year ban on English clubs in European competition after 1985 did its own damage by cutting coaches and players off from how the rest of the continent was developing. What can be said is that the FA backed one theory of the game with its full institutional weight, on evidence that did not support it, at the age groups where habits are formed.

The correction took a long time. Howard Wilkinson's Charter for Quality in 1997 began moving youth development into club academies and small-sided games. The national football centre at St George's Park opened in 2012, and the FA's coaching philosophy published two years later reads, deliberately, as the opposite of The Winning Formula.

Charlton's Ireland and Olsen's Norway: the long ball abroad

The best argument that route one was a method and not an English delusion is that two other countries chose it on purpose and did well.

Jack Charlton, a World Cup winner with England in 1966, took over the Republic of Ireland in 1986. Ireland had never qualified for a major tournament. Under Charlton they reached the 1988 European Championship, where they beat England 1-0 in Stuttgart, then the World Cups of 1990 and 1994.

His instructions were famously simple. Hit the ball over the opposing full-backs into the corners, turn the defence round, and chase. Charlton's reasoning was that international defenders were comfortable with the ball in front of them and unhappy running towards their own goal with a forward at their heels. He asked players who passed the ball for Liverpool on a Saturday to stop doing so in a green shirt, and some of them said later that they had not enjoyed it.

The results carry their own qualification. At the 1990 World Cup Ireland reached the quarter-finals without winning a match in normal time: three draws in the group, a goalless draw with Romania settled on penalties, and a 1-0 defeat by Italy in Rome. They were extremely hard to beat. They scored two goals in five games.

Norway and the percentages

Egil Olsen's Norway were more theoretical about it. Olsen, a former Norway international and a sports-science lecturer who analysed matches with a rigour Reep would have recognised, took charge in 1990 with a set of rules. Attack while the opposing defence is disorganised. Play forward whenever a forward pass is on. Defend in zones. And exploit mismatches, the best known being a long diagonal ball to Jostein Flo, a centre-forward's build stationed on the right wing against a smaller left-back.

Norway qualified for the 1994 and 1998 World Cups, rose to second in FIFA's world ranking, and beat Brazil in Marseille in 1998. On the way they took a draw and a win from England in the 1994 qualifiers: 1-1 at Wembley, then the 2-0 win in Oslo that did more than any other result to finish Taylor.

An England managed by the man most associated with direct football had been knocked out by a side applying the same ideas with more discipline. Olsen later spent a season in English football himself, at Wimbledon of all clubs, in 1999-2000. They were relegated.

Bolton and Stoke: the Premier League survivors and the science behind them

The Premier League's money and its imported coaches were supposed to have ended the long ball. Two clubs in particular showed that it had only become better organised.

Sam Allardyce took Bolton Wanderers up through the play-offs in 2001 and kept them in the top division until he left in 2007. They reached a League Cup final in 2004 and finished sixth the following season, which brought European football to the club for the first time. The centre-forward was Kevin Davies, as awkward an opponent in the air as the league contained. The goalkeeper kicked long to him, and midfielders gathered underneath.

Described like that it could be 1983. What sat behind it could not. Allardyce was among the first managers in England to build a large backroom department, with performance analysts using tracking data to measure where second balls dropped and which set-piece deliveries produced shots. He hired sports scientists and nutritionists at a time when many clubs had neither. One result was that players other clubs considered finished, among them Youri Djorkaeff, Fernando Hierro and Gary Speed, had productive seasons in Lancashire in their mid-thirties. A team with that much technique in midfield was hardly crude. It chose where to be direct.

A cold night in Stoke

Tony Pulis's Stoke City came up in 2008 and stayed for ten seasons, the first five of them under him. They reached the FA Cup final in 2011 and played in the Europa League the season after.

Stoke were more openly physical than Bolton had been. The pitch was kept tight, the side was full of tall men, and every throw-in within range of the penalty area was treated as a corner. Visiting teams with far larger budgets regularly left with nothing. The phrase about whether a gifted foreign player could do it on a cold, wet night in Stoke entered the language as a joke and survived as a tribute.

Both managers complained, with some justice, that they were judged on the label. Allardyce observed more than once that the same methods under a foreign name would have been called innovative. He had a point. The analysis departments that every leading club now runs, and the specialist set-piece coaches they employ, descend more directly from Bolton's training ground than from any passing academy.

Direct is not route one: how to tell planning from panic

In 2019 the Laws changed so that a goal kick was in play as soon as it was kicked and clearly moved, with no need to leave the penalty area first. Teams began taking them short to a centre-back standing a few yards from the goalkeeper. Opponents answered by pressing high, sending five or six players into the attacking third to trap the ball there.

And the long pass came back, played by the very sides that had done most to discredit it.

A goalkeeper facing six pressing opponents has, by simple subtraction, only four between himself and the other goal. If he can kick accurately over the press, his forwards are attacking a back line with no protection. Manchester City's Ederson set up a goal for Sergio Agüero in exactly this way against Huddersfield Town in August 2018; Liverpool's Alisson did the same for Mohamed Salah against Manchester United in January 2020. Each was one pass from the goalkeeper and a finish. On Quiz Ball it would have been route one.

It was not route-one football, and the difference is worth stating carefully, because the two get confused every weekend.

Question to ask	Route one as a system	A panicked clearance	A direct pass by a possession side
How often does the team do it?	Most times it has the ball at the back	When a defender runs out of options	Occasionally, when the press leaves a gap
Where is the ball aimed?	At an agreed target in an agreed zone	Away from danger	Into space behind the defensive line
What do team-mates do?	Close in for the second ball and squeeze up	Stay where they are	Run beyond the ball at speed
What is the team trying to win?	Territory and a restart	Time	A shot within a few seconds
What happens if it fails?	The side is set to contest the loose ball	The ball comes straight back	The side presses to recover it

"Direct" describes speed and intent: forwards, quickly, in few passes. A side can be direct along the ground. Route one describes a route, from back to front in the air, with the middle missed out. A possession team that goes long twice a match because the opposition has overcommitted is exploiting a specific weakness. A team that goes long forty times has made it the plan.

One law change made the modern version possible. Since 1992 a goalkeeper has been forbidden to pick up a deliberate pass back from a team-mate's foot, which forced goalkeepers to become competent with the ball at their feet. Thirty years on, the best of them can drop a seventy-yard pass on to a winger's chest. Dave Beasant kicked long because it was the percentage option. His successors do it because they have seen a particular defender two yards out of position.

The clearest test is to stop watching the ball. When it goes long, look at the other nine outfield players on the kicking side. If they are already moving, to the agreed places, the pass was a decision. If they are standing with their hands on their hips, it was not. More guides to roles and systems in the English game are gathered on our football pages and in the England hub.