Page 33 of Offside

I said things in the dark that belong in no file I keep. Then I slept like the dead in the captain’s bed on a training night. The last thing I remember is his hand in my hair and my own voice saying Bucharest.

Getting off a captain’s floor at seven is a different sport from getting out at five. There are staff. There are trolleys. There’s a physio who runs at dawn, and a coach who reads printouts in the breakfast room. I do it clean, service stairs, one pause at thelanding window like a man admiring Atlanta, yesterday’s shirt worn like a decision instead of an accident.

Nobody sees me. That’s not the point. The point is that for six hours the system ran on luck. Luck is not a system. And somewhere out on a road is the man who chose to leave me sleeping instead of waking me, which is either mercy or theft, and I can’t figure out which.

So the day runs on enforcement rules. Somebody has to be the official. The official has been compromised, which is exactly why the whistle gets louder.

At breakfast, the plate is at my seat. Eggs, toast, two bananas. The captain is at the far end talking recovery windows with the physio, back from his run, showered, composed, a man conducting a normal day with a semifinal in it.

“Sleep well?” Polášek asks, because I’m late and look it.

“Like the dead.”

“You look like the dead.”

“The dead have excellent structure.”

Training. Semifinal minus one. You can hear the undercurrent of nerves running throughout the team.

Novotný snaps at Polášek. Actually snaps. Then the apologies start.

“I’m sorry.”

“Noted,” Polášek says.

“I’ll put it in the chat. With a graphic.”

“Please don’t.” Polášek rolls his eyes.

“It’s already rendering.”

“Render it smaller,” Tomáš calls from the next grid, without looking over.

Horak drops two crosses he’d catch in his sleep and stares at his gloves like they’ve been bought off.

“The gloves are fine,” I tell him, passing. “The gloves have done this before. Let the gloves work.”

“Let the gloves work,” he repeats, and catches the next nine, and then keeps catching things the rest of the morning. Balls. Cones. A wasp.

Kovár is the steadiest man on the pitch and the emptiest. Everything at match tempo, first in every line, flawless, hollow, a perfect training session with nobody home in it. Between drills I catch him staring at the fence line, at nothing, at the specific nothing men stare at when the nothing has a name. Then he’s back. On time. Correct.

Damián trains like a man photographing everything with his skin. Last full session before a semifinal, and he keeps grinning at things that aren’t funny. The grass. The bibs. Me.

“What?” I ask.

“Nothing. Counting.”

“Counting what?”

“Everything,” he says, happy and unashamed, and jogs backwards to his line like a man making deposits.

Before the session, the boot ritual. Left before right, always, since my senior debut.

“Left,” the kit man says, holding out the roll. He’s not asking.

“Left,” I say.

Thirty seconds. Left boot. Right boot. Done. Function, not ceremony. Nobody watches, nobody has ever watched, because it looks like nothing, and it is nothing, and today I need the nothing to hold still while I get taped into a man who can run.