It only took Everton manager Ronald Koeman two minutes and 36 seconds of his weekly media conference to use the word of the moment. ‘We need to press,’ he said.
‘That’s the way we play football.’ Press. It will have its own sub-definition in the English dictionary soon. To run fast in the direction of a man with a football.
Teams have always done it. Football has been around too long for coaches to claim they have suddenly reinvented a very old wheel.
But perhaps coaches such as Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool, Pep Guardiola at Manchester City and now Mauricio Pochettino at Tottenham can claim to have taken it to a new level of intensity and endurance.