Page 44 of Offside

let the gloves work. copy

Novotný

what is the plan if they score first

Hájek

then we are losing early with the whole match left to fix it. that is the plan. eat your breakfast

Polášek

the families have organized. forty-one relatives in one section and a shared flag the size of a tram. customs has questions. the flag is not answering

Šíma

item four. the record has nothing to add this morning. it will be on the bus at four fifteen with everybody else. play the match, gentlemen. the rest is filing

Hájek

four fifteen. eat real food. see everyone on the other side of the whistle

Chapter 14: Tomáš

Iwake at six forty to a room that has been walked backward.

The kit folded. Mine squared to the chair edge, the way I square things, which means he did it my way on purpose. Towels hung. Glasses inverted. No water bottle on the nightstand.

Every trace of last night collected and corrected. A room where nothing happened, curated by the best in the world at rooms where nothing happened.

Match day, he said, at the door, at five fifty-eight.

Match day. I file the room, because there’s no time to feel a room today. There’s a semifinal where the feelings go.

Breakfast is a squad eating fuel in silence. Horak is not crying yet, saving it. I set the plate at Šíma’s seat because my hands run on their own schedule. He comes down at nine to nine and eats it. Neither of us looks at the other longer than the roster requires. Both of us are flawless.

I hate how flawless we are.

coach says eleven words at the morning meeting. Each of them the right ones.

We bus to the stadium through streets full of both flags.

In the tunnel, the noise comes through the concrete like weather. I wear the armband the way I’ve worn it for four years, and behind me twenty-two men breathe in the dark, and Šíma leans in from my left, and for once there’s no bit anywhere in him.

“Ninety minutes. Everything you have. I’ll be four meters left.”

“You always are.”

Here’s the match, the way I keep matches.

Hot. Stadium hot, the kind that gets in your lungs by warm-up and lives there. Sixty-two thousand. Their end is louder early. Ours has a horn in it, section one fourteen. When we walk out for the anthem I find the flags but not the sound of it. I file that under later.

The first half is an engine test. They keep the ball like they own it. We chase in shifts, organized, disciplined, the shape holding the way we built it to hold. I run. That’s my job, so I do my job. I press their pivot until his passes get shorter.

I put two corners on the near post, onto the coat rack, exactly as drawn. Their keeper punches the first and smothers the second. The plan is right. The margin isn’t.

Kovár is immense. That’s the only word the first half leaves for him. Their winger, the quick one, tries him four times and gets nothing. In the thirty-eighth, Kovár clears one off the line and our whole bench comes up screaming. He jogs back out of the goalmouth like a man returning a library book.

Šíma is everywhere the ball isn’t yet. Reading it, arriving early, keeping us stitched. Four meters to my left, where he’s been for ten years.