Culture
Why deep runs are “probably the most important thing in football”
When watching a game of football, we only truly consume a snippet of the action.
We are naturally drawn to the fun stuff occurring on the ball, but zoom out a little and there is beauty laid out in the carefully choreographed off-ball movements across the pitch.
You might not notice a lot of runs. Some of them will not even get picked up by the television coverage, but when a player receives the ball in space, you can be confident that it was their team-mates’ movements elsewhere that dragged the opposition out of shape.
Runs beyond the defensive line are crucial to a team’s attacking potency, particularly in a Premier League that is increasingly physically demanding.
“Deep runs are probably the most important thing in football,” said Liverpool manager Arne Slot on Amazon Prime after their 3-1 victory over Leicester City.
“You don’t even always have to play to a player who makes the deep run — but then you can maybe create a bigger one-v-one situation for your winger, so the more deep runs you make, the more chance you have of winning a game.”
The Athletic identified a similar trend in Slot’s side earlier this season, with the underlapping runs made beyond the opposition defensive line allowing Liverpool’s wingers to come inside to cross — as shown by Mohamed Salah’s assist for Curtis Jones against Chelsea.
Runs beyond the ball remain a key theme of Liverpool’s campaign under Slot.
As well as the obvious candidates of forwards Salah, Cody Gakpo and Luis Diaz, Slot’s midfielders have shown a notable propensity to break beyond the opposition last line with those runs from deep.
For example, in their recent Premier League game against Manchester United, Jones is desperately trying to catch the attention of Ibrahima Konate as he identifies a gap in the defensive line.
While the ball does not reach Jones, Harry Maguire’s attention is drawn to the 23-year-old as the ball continues to be circulated.
Five seconds later, that space is exploited with another deep run from fellow midfielder Alexis Mac Allister, with Salah’s clipped ball struck first time by the Argentina international.
Using SkillCorner’s Game Intelligence model — which extracts contextual metrics from broadcast tracking data — we can measure the number of off-ball runs made by each team when they are in possession, focusing on runs made in behind.
For those unsure, this type of run simply logs when a player is attacking space behind the last defensive line — like the example below. Crucially, the player does not have to receive the ball for the run to be logged.
When looking across all Premier League teams, Liverpool’s 4.1 runs in behind per 30 minutes in possession — adjusted to control for each side’s share of the ball — is the third-most this season, with Crystal Palace topping the charts, edging ahead of Aston Villa.
There is no right or wrong method here, but the graphic above highlights the stylistic approach taken by each team in attack.
For example, Arsenal and Manchester City are comparably low by this measure, which reflects their desire for a more patient, possession-based build-up that looks to squeeze the opposition back — gaining territorial dominance, which often leaves less space behind the opposition defensive line.
As for Southampton, well, let’s not compound their misery.
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Measuring off-ball runs by Premier League wingers
For league-leading Palace, the runs of Jean-Philippe Mateta are crucial to Oliver Glasner’s attacking approach and they can have a dual benefit for the team.
The first is the typical threat of a striker receiving the ball beyond the opposition last line, but the second is the space that such a run can provide for others to exploit between the lines — namely Eberechi Eze.
For example, in their most recent Premier League game against Chelsea, Ismaila Sarr finds right wing-back Daniel Munoz in space on the right flank, with Mateta occupying Chelsea’s centre-backs with a run in behind, towards the front post (see frame 2).
That run makes space for Eze to drift into, with Munoz’s cutback allowing Eze to shoot first time — albeit missing the target.
There was a near-identical pattern 20 minutes later. Sarr’s ball finds an onrushing Munoz, with Mateta’s run in behind to the near post allowing Eze to hold back and receive the cutback — which is blocked on this occasion.
Conversely, Mateta’s improved link-up play has allowed Sarr to thrive as a No 10 by making runs from deeper.
This is shown in his Premier League goal against Aston Villa in November, with Mateta dropping to receive the ball in his own half before releasing Sarr, who has made the run in behind.
It is a part of his game that Sarr has been actively working on in training since his summer arrival.
“We showed him the space where he can show his strength,” Glasner said in his press conference last month.
“We wanted to have pace, a player who can make runs in behind. (To find) the perfect profile we are looking for, we can’t spend (a lot of) money, so we have to find players with most of the profile, then it’s our job to teach them where they can show their skills and talent.”
GO DEEPER
If Eze has his confidence back, Palace have a true triple threat up front
At Aston Villa, the midfield runs of John McGinn and Morgan Rogers — alongside the wide runs from left full-back Lucas Digne — are key to Unai Emery’s system. However, Ollie Watkins is one of the leading candidates across the Premier League for runs made in behind.
While he is capable of dropping deep to receive, Watkins has developed his game in recent seasons, staying on the last line between the width of the six-yard box and conserving his energy — having pulled into wider areas in seasons gone by.
He picks his moments carefully, but the muscle memory of his channel runs in behind when Tyrone Mings has the ball continues to be effective — as it was against Leicester last weekend.
It was a similar run made for his Premier League goal against Crystal Palace in the aforementioned fixture in November. Before McGinn received the ball between the lines, Watkins was already looking for the space he could exploit in behind (see frame 1).
A perfectly weighted pass and a calm finish duly followed.
When breaking down Watkins’ run types by category, more than two-thirds of his total tally are runs in behind or ahead of the ball — with a notably small share coming short or pulling into the half-space to receive.
When a team-mate gets the ball in space, you can be sure Watkins will be on his bike heading towards goal.
Crucially, this aligns with Emery’s method of attack to pierce through the opposition’s back line when they can. No Premier League team has logged more than Villa’s 53 through balls this season, which shows that they often take the opportunity to play the pass when those runs are made.
Breaking down our SkillCorner dataset by player, Watkins is out in front alongside Leicester’s Jamie Vardy in the highest volume of runs in behind as a share of their total tally, in a list made up largely of No 9s who spearhead their team’s respective attack.
Below Watkins on the list? The previously discussed Mateta, of course.
Like Mateta, the runs made by Watkins and Jhon Duran don’t always need to be met with a pass from a team-mate. However, these movements are still vital for pushing the defence back and creating space for Villa’s No 10s to exploit.
This was particularly notable in Villa’s recent victory over Manchester City — as The Athletic has previously analysed — with Rogers and Youri Tielemans benefiting from Duran’s relentless forward running.
GO DEEPER
How Tielemans and Rogers’ ability between the lines helped Villa beat City
While our post-match debrief will largely focus on the events that occurred on the ball, the key to unlocking a defence might often occur elsewhere on the pitch.
Whether you’re Nottingham Forest or Forrest Gump, running matters — and now we can measure its impact in context.
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
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