Substitutions are the most conservative decision in team sport

Coaches were handed extra changes and mostly kept making the same late, cautious swaps they were making when they had fewer.

A side is chasing a goal with twenty-five minutes left. The coach waits until the seventieth minute, makes a like-for-like change, waits again, then throws on a forward at eighty-four. It is so common that it reads as normal rather than as a choice, and it is a choice.

Think about what a substitution actually buys. Fresh legs against tired ones, a different set of abilities against a defence that has spent an hour solving the previous set, and a tactical change that the opposition coach has to react to. All three of those are worth more with time left to use them. A player brought on with six minutes remaining will touch the ball a handful of times.

So why the delay? Partly because a change made early cannot be undone, and the coach loses the option to respond to whatever happens next. That is a real cost and it deserves weighing. Mostly, though, it is because an early substitution that fails is visible and personal. The pundits will name it. A late one that fails looks like the game simply running out, and nobody gets blamed for the clock.

Larger squads and additional permitted changes were supposed to shift this. In practice a lot of coaches used the extra slots the way they used the old ones, only more of them, and later. The triple change at the eightieth minute is not a plan. It is three separate small interventions bundled together to look decisive.

I would also question the like-for-like habit. Replacing a tired winger with a fresh winger changes the energy and nothing else, and the opposition full-back has the same job he has been doing all night. If a structure is not working, replacing a component of it with an identical component is an odd response.

There is a fitness argument for the caution and it is not nothing. Bring your options on at sixty and you have no answer to an injury at seventy-five, and you finish the game with a defender at centre-forward.

Fine. But that risk is a known quantity, and losing is a certainty if nothing changes. Weigh them honestly and the hour mark starts looking late, not early.