Page 1 of Offside

Chapter 1: Šíma

The table is not rated for this. I stand on it anyway. Somebody has to deliver the post-match report. The federation has never once sanctioned one, and that is why I exist.

“I’m going to say something controversial,” I say.

Thirty men boo me. It’s the happiest booing in the western hemisphere.

“Tonight. Against Italy. In a World Cup quarterfinal.” The noise crests, so I wait. It takes a while. Someone is beating a tactics board like a drum. “We were sufficient.”

The boos come back around. Novotný throws a sock at my head.

“Item one. The corner.”

“PERFECT ball,” Tomáš yells from the middle of a six-man hug.

“A tolerable ball. It arrived on schedule. Like a bill.”

“PERFECT.”

“The record will show the delivery landed where it was aimed, which is the job.” I hold up two fingers. “We do not hand out medals for doing the job. Item two. The goal.”

Our center-half rose over their line tonight like a man taking a box down from a high shelf.

“I have watched the replay four times on the physio’s phone,” I say. “I want it played at my funeral. The evidence also includes one horn in the family section that has not stopped since the fourth minute.”

“That’s my mother,” Tomáš says, with enormous pride.

“The horn or the woman?”

“Both.” The room laughs.

“That horn has been to more matches than the keeper,” Polášek says.

“The horn tracks back,” Novotný says. “I have seen it.”

“Item three. The save.” The room makes a different noise for this one, lower, the noise for the thing that almost happened. “Their winger got behind us once in ninety minutes. Once. He’s a very good player, so he shot early. And our keeper saved a World Cup one-on-one with his legs. His legs. Hands are for amateurs.”

The keeper, Horak, takes a bow from inside a towel.

“Item four.” I point my protein bar at the bench, where Kovár sits with a towel around his neck. “The best winger in the tournament touched the ball nine times tonight. Four of those were backward. That is not defending. That is taking custody.”

The room chants his name. Kovár grins at the floor.

“Verdict,” Polášek says over the din of the room. “Some of us want to shower this decade.”

“Verdict.” I let the room go quiet, because it will. I trained the room myself. “Semifinal.”

The word detonates. Damián upends a bottle of blue electrolyte over Tomáš’s head, and Tomáš wears it like a title. Horak is crying. The kit man dances with a cone.

That is the broadcast. Under it, the feed runs anyway. I stand on a table with my arms out like a man conducting a symphony, and I log the room.

I log Kovár doing everything correctly. Hug received, hug returned. Grin at the correct setting. He says semifinal when the room says it, and the word comes out of him the same shape it went in. That is the tell. Nothing is sticking. A man played the match of his life and it weighs nothing on him. I have no finding yet.

I log Damián lit up like a man with no baggage to collect. He told this squad the truth about himself, and the ceiling did not come down. Tonight he looks like the proof of something, and I decline to write down of what.

Tomáš is loud and happy in the middle of everything, chanting semifinal again to men who played in it, blue drying at the ends of his hair. When he laughs, his eyes shut all the way. They have always done that. He’s my best friend. That is the label on the file, and it is the one file I never audit. There has never been a reason.

By midnight the party has moved back to the hotel and annexed the lobby bar. Somebody’s phone is the DJ and the phone is having a bad night. Coach came down, said one drink, had one drink, and left at the exact moment the singing started, which is the most tactically aware thing he has done all month.