I've just got back from a few days away to find this thread. Excellent work again PoP.
Just to throw a different spin on this, I thought I'd add something which relates but is often overlooked.
As has already been discussed, creating time on the ball (which is an extension to the concept of space, as it is possible not to have time when playing into space as it can disappear in the time it takes to get there, and time on the ball can be achieved in limited space by skillful payers), provides the player in possession with greater opportunity to make correct decisions and accurately execute the necessary skill(s).
Conversely, providing a player with lots of options slows down decision making. Hick's Law states (in simple terms) the more choices someone has, the longer it takes to make a decision (it's a logarithmic function, not linear, so it plateaues at a set number of options). Therefore, throwing players on the field and saying 'go and play' is a fundamentally flawed idea. By having predictable patterns (as PoP has so clearly illustrated), it helps players to make quicker decisions, as does the set of underlying principles that a team plays with. Essentially, this reduces the number of choices the player has.
At the same time, defenders of the opposition can be overloaded with choices by the movement of our players. Slowing down their decision making while speeding up our own leads to a greater speed of play from us and gives us the advantage.
A lot of this comes through experience. The analogy I've used before is this... A novice chess player looks at a chess board at the start of a game and can see that they have 20 possible moves. An expert will allready know the one move they want to play, so can move quicker. If the opponent (playing white) opens King Pawn to KP4, an expert will already have their response 'ready'. The further into a chess game a player goes, the slower the move-time as there will often be less familiarity with the positions of the pieces.
The more we play this system, the more our players will recognise the attacking patterns, and the more complex they can become, and the more time the players will have as their decisions will be more quickly made.
