There's a certain kind of pundit reaction to a tap-in. "He's done nothing there." "My gran could have scored that." "Right place, right time." All of which are technically defensible and all of which miss the point spectacularly.
A tap-in is the visible one percent of a sequence that involved eight or nine deliberate actions. Working backwards through one is a genuinely useful exercise, because it shows you where goals actually get created, which is almost never at the moment of the shot.
The finish itself
Let's be fair — the finish is easy. A ball across the six-yard box, an empty net or a keeper on the ground, and a player putting his foot through it. Conversion rate from that position is very high, often above 80%.
The one skill involved is not missing, which sounds like a joke but isn't. Players do miss these, and they miss them for a specific reason: they take their eye off the ball to look at the goal, because the goal is empty and the shot feels already scored. The strikers who never miss them are the ones who keep their head down and treat it as a normal contact.
The delivery
Now go back one step. Somebody put the ball across the six-yard box, low and hard, into the space between the goalkeeper and the last defender.
That's a technically precise pass. Too high and it's a header rather than a tap-in. Too soft and the keeper gathers it. Too hard and it goes through everybody. And the passer is usually doing this at full sprint, near the byline, with a defender closing.
The other thing about it — and this is the bit that separates good crossers from great ones — is that the pass has to arrive in front of the runner, not at him. A ball played to where the striker is means he has to check, which lets the defender recover. A ball played to where he'll be in half a second means he's arriving onto it at pace.
The run that made space for the delivery
Back another step. Why was there a gap between the keeper and the defence for the ball to travel through?
Usually because somebody attacked the near post. That near-post run is one of the most selfless actions in football — the runner almost never gets the ball. What he does is drag a defender towards the near post and force the goalkeeper to commit to covering it, and the resulting hole is where the cutback goes.
You can watch entire matches and never notice these runs, because nothing happens at the end of them. But remove them and the delivery has nowhere to go.
The moment that created the byline situation
Back again. How did the crosser get to the byline in the first place?
Two common routes. Either he beat a full-back one-versus-one, which is its own skill and typically involves an earlier moment where a teammate isolated that full-back deliberately. Or he was played in behind by a pass into the channel, which required somebody in midfield to see the run and execute a difficult pass through a defensive line.
Either way, this is the phase where the defence actually broke. Everything downstream is the consequence.
The build-up that pulled the defence out of shape
One more step, and this is where it gets hard to trace because it involves eight or nine players doing small, unremarkable things.
Perhaps the ball was switched from one side to the other, and the defence shifted across, and the full-back on the far side was fractionally slow to close because he'd been narrow. Perhaps a striker dropped deep and pulled a centre-back with him, opening the channel. Perhaps the whole thing came from a turnover in midfield that caught the opposition mid-transition.
This phase is where the vast majority of the actual work happened and it's completely invisible in a highlights package. It's also where the coaching lives — you can't coach a tap-in, but you can absolutely coach the sequence of movements that produces the situation.
Why this matters for how we judge players
The practical consequence is that goals are a terrible way to evaluate individual contribution, and assists are only slightly better.
The near-post runner in that sequence contributed enormously and gets nothing. The midfielder whose switch of play created the overload gets nothing. The striker who tapped it in gets a goal, and if he does it thirty times a season he gets a large contract.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that finishers are overrated. Being consistently in the right place to receive those cutbacks is a genuine and rare skill — it involves reading the crosser's body shape, timing an arrival, and resisting the urge to go to the ball too early. Players who look like they do nothing are often doing the hardest invisible thing.
But the next time somebody says a striker did nothing for the goal, it's worth remembering that seven other players also did nothing, in a very specific and rehearsed order, and that's how the ball ended up two yards from an open net.