Page 34 of Offside

No football to report. The football is tomorrow. Today is a team trying to walk normally next to the very big thing.

The apology graphic hits the chat at noon.

Novotný

[image] formal apology, notarized, with crest

Polášek

this is worse than the offense

Novotný

the crest stays

Hájek

training film at four. delete the crest.

The text lands at twelve fifteen.

Šíma. Film at mine tonight?

I stand in the corridor outside the video room and read it seven times. I count the reads, because counting is the last honest instrument I own.

It’s not the words.Film at mineis the rule, the routine. It’s the mark at the end. Five years of imperatives from a man who announces everything.Film at mine, fifteen minutes, bus at nine. And tonight, for the first time in the historical record, the sentence turns up at the end and asks.

A question mark. One character. One degree of warm, from a man who either doesn’t know he turned the dial or couldn’t stop himself, and I stand in a corridor reading a punctuation mark like a ransom note, seven times, which is exactly the behavior the rules were built to prevent.

The rules. Somebody has to enforce them. Look what happens when nobody does. A peephole. Eleven minutes in a video room. A hand on a neck. A man asleep at seven in enemy territory with a question mark sitting on his chest.

I type the reply.

noted. eve of match. early one, gone by twelve

I read that seven times too. It’s perfect. Regulation grammar, curfew logic, professional, and cold as a January pitch, and I know exactly what it is because I built it to be that. Earlier checkout, stipulated in code. A wall repaired at the exact spot where the man who lives behind it has been tapping.

Send.

Forty seconds later. No marks on it at all.

noted

The wire between us goes formal again. I stand in the corridor having successfully defended a system I would burn down tomorrow if either of us ever said so out loud. The officiating in my head is very loud now. Statute and subsection. Because the alternative to loud is listening.

“Anything good?” Damián says, passing.

“Logistics,” I say.

“Your favorite.”

“Somebody has to love the timetable,” I say.

I put the phone away with the wire still formal in it.

Media day for a semifinal means the big room, and the federation sends coach and one player, and the player is me, because early on, somebody discovered I make journalists write down jokes instead of problems.

Coach takes four questions and spends eleven words on them. Then me.