Page 37 of Offside

“It’s the tactics one,” he calls back, wounded. “It’s ABOUT tomorrow. It’s practically homework.”

“Volume, Novotný.”

“Volume is how I retain.”

“Retain quieter.”

Polášek opens his door already talking. “I’m asleep.”

“You’re standing up.”

“I sleep standing. Ask my wife.”

“Lights at eleven.”

“They’re off in spirit,” he says, and shuts the door on his own light.

He didn’t need checking. I check because the rounds are the rounds. Damián’s door I pass without knocking. He’s been asleep since ten past, the four-minute discipline in his nervous system. Šíma will be lying in the dark listening to the calmest breathing in the federation.

Mami texts at ten fifteen.

We are praying and I cooked for after. Win or lose, there is food. Sleep, Tomášku.

Sleep, Mami. Keep the horn warm.

She sends back a horn, the Czechia flag, and a dumpling, in that order, which is the whole of my mother in three small pictures.

Kovár’s light is on under the door. I raise my hand and I don’t knock. His match prep is his own country and always has been, and lately the borders are up. I file the light and move on.

Coach is in the corridor holding tea, looking at the parking garage next door like it owes him something.

“All down?” he says.

“All down.”

“You?”

“Going now.”

He nods at the garage. Nobody assigned him the shift. Nobody assigned me mine either.

Eleven o’clock. I’m back in my room.

Film, said the schedule. Gone by twelve, said the schedule, in his coldest grammar, and I said noted, and I’ve hated the word noted for nine hours now.

He comes in with the laptop under his arm like a chaperone. Sets it on the desk. Opens it. Their keeper’s near post fills the screen, the freelancing, footage we’ve both known by heart for days.

We watch it. We actually watch it. Two men on the eve of the biggest match of their lives, sitting a correct meter apart, watching a Bulgarian goalkeeper mismanage his post, at eleven at night, in a locked room, with the whole ocean of the thing pressing between us.

“Their keeper resets slow after a save. If corner one forces one, take corner two fast. Don’t let the ref settle,” he says.

“I never let the ref settle.”

“You gave a referee a lecture in the group stage.”

“It was important civic information.”

The corner of his mouth raises slightly. He kills it and runs the clip again.