To say that, now, fast-attacking fullbacks are important is a lie. They never stopped being important, but they became too rare a commodity. No one could find them. They have started to turn up again. If you don’t have two, you must get them, or else.

An opposing team’s defending fullback’s nightmare is the thought of a competent winger, an advanced central midfield creator, and an overlapping fullback because it is too overwhelming to contain. You simply have to brace for the cross or the penetrating through ball into the left or right side of the penalty area.

Football became positional, rigid, and slow. Because of that change there was more need for numbers in midfield. As a “fullback,” you had to know how to either play in the midfield, which few can do because they lack the ability to work in small spaces, or help as an outside center-back, which even fewer know how to do because they are not physically strong enough or good enough defenders to survive as center-backs. Their pace is the only thing that can bail them out. Therefore, traditional fullbacks moved to other positions in the lineup or elsewhere.

Once football shifts back to the transitional game, fast fullbacks are necessary, and now we need them. It is a need, not a want. It is the most game-breaking position on the pitch. It is how you set your team, your attack, apart from the rest. They raise the floor. You must have them on either wing to have a chance at creating a sustainable transitional attack.

The second these managers get their hands on two fullbacks to play on both sides of the field, they will switch their formation, their entire lives, to accommodate them.

It is like surviving on rainwater for several years, and then you discover a water well. A spring. An oasis of overlaps and underlaps was underneath your feet. You no longer have to do all that work collecting rainwater; use the well.

They are necessary because you can’t simply attack with your forwards alone. You need that run on the wing, the overlap, the threat of a cross across the penalty area to open space in the box, and the help to relieve the wingers of their duties of one-on-ones. Now they have partners in crime to tackle them in a two-v-one.

If the winger has no other option than to take on his man every time they touch the ball, all game, they will have to go backwards because the defending fullback will have help from at least one midfielder, and the only outlet out of the challenge is back. And we’ve seen that. It is an awful way to survive. A challenge the winger will likely not win. And that goes against the very nature of a winger. Traditionally, they are the dazzlers. You are not dazzling anyone when all you do is pass backwards every time you receive the ball.

And this starts a domino effect. The box-crashers become more important when there are fullbacks because now you need someone to head in all those crosses. The midfielders need to know how to cover and defend out wide. The center-backs need to know, now more than before, how to defend on their own when the fullbacks get forward.

It will be an exciting time to watch football when we have an overabundance of world-class fullbacks because it will allow the game to become transitional again. Whether the pragmatists like it or not, the game will be more engaging.