Page 35 of Offside

“How is the squad handling the pressure?”

“We don’t handle it. We gave it a bib number. It trains with us now. Decent first touch.” The room laughs. First deflection is a success.

“Damián Mareš is coming to the states to play for the Atlanta United. You’ve noted he’s one of your best friends. A word?”

“Several. We have shared hotel rooms at these tournaments many times. He snores in two languages, and tomorrow I’d still pick him first. Next question.”

And then, from the third row, the one that earns its lanyard.

“You and the captain have played together more than a decade. Describe the partnership.”

The room waits. The feed goes very quiet, the way a stadium does between the whistle and the kick.

“He runs, I talk,” I say. “It’s won us a lot of restaurants.”

Laughter, clips, everyone eats, next question. The broadcast doesn’t miss. On the way out I price the answer and find itaccurate, complete, and missing everything, which makes it the best work I’ve done all tournament.

The physio tapes my ankle at three.

“Hip flexor?”

“Cooperating. It signed a statement.”

“The rest of you?”

“Match fit.”

“Sleeping?”

“Like the dead,” I say.

“Mm,” she says, and moves on, because it’s the eve of a semifinal and everything in this building is match fit.

Dinner is eve-of-match dinner, carbohydrates and ritual, the squad performing the version of normal for each other.

“If we win, I’m buying the horn a drink,” Novotný says.

“The horn doesn’t drink,” Polášek says.

“After tomorrow it does.”

“And if we lose?”

Nobody answers that. Novotný throws a roll at him, which is the correct answer, and the table moves on.

“What time do we leave tomorrow?” Horak asks, for the third time today.

“Four fifteen,” Tomáš says, no edge on it, a man who would answer a fourth time and a fifth. “Bus won’t go without you. Eat.”

The nutritionist confiscates the dessert tray on schedule. “It’s fuel, not decoration.”

“Decoration won us the group round,” Tomáš says, and eats the confiscated pudding anyway, captain’s privilege, and the table laughs the eve-of-match laugh, short and grateful.

After dinner, coach stands up for his eve-of-match meeting. It lasts forty seconds and twenty words.

The chat gets its curfew at ten.

Hájek