Rise of long balls marks latest trend in frenzied evolution ...

To see a world in a grain of Wayne Rooney, an eternity in a robot‑voiced YouTube tactics clip. To find yourself submerged in a vast rolling wave of information in the course of only seven rounds of Premier League games.

As English football enters its latest international break it is a little startling to think we have had only 70 Premier League matches to this point, with 310 more still to go through the slog of autumn into spring. Seven rounds of games? Really? Is that all?

If it feels like more, this is to some extent a function of the Bald Fraudification of English football, the acceleration of the narrative arc. Careers must now rise and fall at alarming speed. The dominance of social media has created this relentlessly overstimulated hive-mind, a networked conversation that must always happen, that rewards and promotes the loudest and most scandalised voice.

As an example – and in fact the source of the original term – it is now axiomatic that there must always be at least two Bald Frauds operating in the Premier League at any given time, a non-negotiable that created its own lovely moment of synergy at Stamford Bridge on Saturday as Enzo Maresca literally passed the Bald Fraud Baton – an actual baton – to Arne Slot in the course of their post-match handshake.

One obvious consequence is that nobody seems to like an international break much these days. This is logical. The product is designed to be consumed in constant rotation, an addiction fed to a strict schedule. But it is still a timely moment of cold turkey, with the league frozen at an unusually interesting point. Liverpool are off the top, having dominated since last September. Bournemouth, Crystal Palace, Everton, Sunderland and Tottenham are among the top nine.

So what is the story of the season so far? At this early stage it is perhaps more useful to identify what isn’t. Some narrative-busting first (disclaimer: narrative may turn out to be true; short-term crisis meter can go up as well as down).

Most notably Manchester United are in a terminal state of freefall. Ruben Amorim is no more than a pair of trainers and a spiffy zip-up jacket that has somehow worked out how to do a sexy cackle.

Or … Manchester United are also six points off the top. They fielded an actual reliable goalkeeper on Saturday and kept a first clean sheet. Benjamin Sesko has two in two. Exiting the Carabao Cup plus no European games may turn out to be quite handy from here.

Other myths that may or may not be myths. Ange Postecoglou is the victim of a media narrative. Reality: Postecoglou is the victim of numbers, mainly losing 30 of his past 49 league games. Bournemouth are doomed‑adjacent, but actually not doomed at all. Brentford were doomed then became not doomed, then may be doomed again, a fitting state of paradox for a club coached by a man with the brow, the curls and the limpid blue eyes of a romantically doomed Celtic poet but who is still called Keith Andrews, rather than, say, Kavan Bismarckius De La Gallway.

The main takeaway, and an object of genuine interest, is the prominence of set pieces, not just as a source of goals but as a dominant tactical note. This has become fixed as a story of the season so far, the idea that after several years of ground-level possession fixation the English top tier is embracing the potential of airborne set plays.

There was a good discussion about this on the Second Captains podcast recently involving the tactical writer Jamie Hamilton, a high priest of “relational” football as the opposing pole of “positionism”. For those not already engaged with this debate, relationism is the idea of creative, inventive attacking play, a licensed freedom. Positionism is control, strict patterns, eliminating variables in player movements. It’s Miles Davis using musical scales as a platform to noodle versus unsmiling men with quiffs fiddling with synthesisers.

There is a theory the prevalence of set-piece moves derives firstly from the increased volume of matches, and a lack of time to implement more complex patterns. And another that it comes from the death throes of Pep-derived positionism, the fact there is simply not much left to control, just some last remaining apples on the tree to dice and slice into orderly shapes. We’ve done 60% possession, which seems to be the human ceiling. What have we got left? Corners and throws? Chuck ’em in the hay bale machine.

Is this actually true? Do we really have not just more goals from set pieces, but set-piece-centred patterns in the average game? There are some false notes in this. The touch-finder kick-off routine is surely a gimmick, one that makes very little difference under the eye test. Brentford have been held up as a key driver of this tactical shift. Brentford have also scored one goal from set pieces all season. Manchester City have scored none.

But there are obvious shifts. Goals from set pieces have increased overall, according to stats from WhoScored. So far they account for 45 of 182 scored, or 26%, up from 18% last season and 19% the season before. Goals from corners, Opta stats show, are up to 0.49 per game, from 0.36 last season and about 0.41 on average across the three seasons before that.

Throw-ins are the big growth area. Last season total goals from throws more than doubled on the recent norm, up to 20 from a flat eight or nine. So far this season eight have been scored, on target to hit a giddy 32 if that rate is maintained.

It isn’t hard to see why. Long throws direct into the opposition penalty area are running at two and a half times as many per game compared with the previous four seasons. Will people stop being surprised and work out how to defend them? Probably. Will arms get tired, distances drop, fast bowler-style back injuries become a new problem?

Is this even surprising or significant if people are simply throwing the ball into the box more in any case? Is the uplift in goals scored this way really meaningful, given the amount of additional time spent coaching it? Would you just score more in breakaways if you coached that instead?

As ever, lumping all 20 teams into the same trend is simplistic. There is variation within any group. And here the overall number is boosted by a few outliers. Of possession‑based teams only Arsenal and Chelsea (seven and five) have really scored a lot of set‑piece goals this season. Had Arsenal and Chelsea scored set pieces at their usual rate the league would be running at 20% of all goals, its usual ratio. These two are, so far, skewing the headline number.

But two things do stand out from those seven rounds of games, and the blizzard of maybe-yes-not-sure numbers. The more powerful, top‑of-the-table teams are using this tactic more, which also explains why Thomas Tuchel is so attuned to it. These are the games he watches more, and with which he wishes to associate his England team.

More broadly, and the second point here, is that the bigger, more possession-based teams are going long more often. Overall long balls are up after a brief lull, although the combined per-game total of the 20 clubs is 997 compared with 969 last season. City, Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs and Liverpool are playing on average a combined 226 long balls per game, compared with 203 last season.

Anecdotally, on the neck-crick test, less time is being spent staring at the penalty area of the dominant team while a goalkeeper does Cruyff turns, or watching centre‑backs act as playmakers. There is more willingness to go forward quicker, to attempt to score from two or three passes.

This is something Brentford really have excelled at, transforming a phase of open play into a set piece in itself, the moment their opponents push on to them the trigger for a sudden long pass in search of quick‑breaking forwards. Erling Haaland is still scoring most of Manchester City’s goals, but doing so from different angles, breakaways, goal-bound charges with the ball at his feet.

The addition of more direct transitions is a fun note of variation. It also reflects other elements at the top of the league. The signing of Florian Wirtz has raised some tremors, an apparently ill-fitting player in the current structure. But this is deliberate, as Arne Slot has pointed out, an attempt to find new angles and patterns as the league evolves.

So there you have it: what may or may not be happening, a series of maybe-stats and vibe-based hunches on the outline numbers. It remains a key part of the game’s indissoluble appeal that it remains so hard to read, a set of endlessly complex variables that will no doubt have shifted again by the time the next international break swings around. But England’s manager is right in one obvious sense. Even getting it launched seems to have found a fresh angle in the mini-age of the throw-in, the intrusion of the hand, now, into the game of feet.