“Their fullback’s not the problem.”
“No. He isn’t.” He doesn’t pretend to misunderstand. Davide never pretends. “Go at him anyway. Make him earn every minute of it.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Enzo.” He waits until I look at him. “Whatever this is today. Leave it in here. Pick it up after. The pitch doesn’t want it.”
“The pitch is the one place I’ve never brought it.”
“Good. Keep it that way for ninety minutes.”
I see him three places back in the red line. Kovár. Match face, which is no face at all. We don’t look at each other. We are professionals, and this is the most professional either of us willever be. Both of us know exactly what the professionalism is covering.
Then the light at the end of the tunnel. The wall of sound. We walk out into it, and everything that isn’t the match falls off me like a coat I don’t need in this weather.
The pitch is clean. Out there is exactly one question. It gets asked ninety times over the course of an afternoon, and the question is only everCan you?
I have spent my entire life answering it the same way.Yes. Watch me. Yes.
The whistle goes.
I get the ball in the seventh minute with space to run into, so I run into it. The joy arrives right on schedule. It always has since I was six years old on a concrete pitch with a ball my brother swore up and down I was not allowed to touch. I take the outside and I’m gone, and for two long seconds the whole stadium is mine and the cross is sitting up on my foot.
Then Kovár is there.
Of course he’s there. He read it off my hips before my hips had finished deciding, and he doesn’t dive in, because he never dives in. He closes the angle and makes the cross worse and forces the ball back, and the two seconds end. That’s what he does. He doesn’t stop me; he costs me. Every duel with him is a negotiation where the price of everything I try goes up.
“Dai,” I tell myself, jogging back.Again. Come on. Again.
Someone screams at their left-back, and it’s Kovár, because it’s always Kovár, running the whole back with ten words a minute.
“Switch it,” Davide calls, drifting inside. “Make them slide. They hate sliding.”
“Then slide them,” I say, and we do.
We do. We make them slide all half. This is the best I’ve played in a year, because there is no defender alive who makes me better than the one who knows me completely.
He forces me to invent because I can’t do the thing I’ve done a thousand times when he’s seen it a thousand times. So I do new things instead. Some of them work, and the ones that work are the most alive I have ever felt with my boots on.
In the thirty-first minute, I nutmeg him. Clean, through the legs. The crowd loses its mind. For half a second, his head turns and I see something cross the match face. Not anger. Closer to delight. The appalled delight of a man watching someone do the exact thing he spent all week planning to prevent.
“Lucky,” he says, chasing after me, already recovering.
“Twice, then,” I tell him, and mean it.
Nobody scores in the first half. We come in level, and I’m soaked and grinning and furious in the good way.
The mister crouches in front of us at the break. “The left is working. Keep going there. Ricci, you arrive late every single time. Arrive earlier.”
“He’s doubling the winger,” Ricci says. “There’s a free man every time Enzo draws two.”
“Then find the free man. Enzo. You hear that?”
“I hear it.”
“You’re playing beautifully. And you’re playing at one man instead of at the space. The person wants you obsessed with him. Don’t give him the gift.”
“What person?” I ask.