Open Play: Ladies, Goals, The Everything System in-between

Chapter 50: [50] "Neji Part 2"

Twenty-nine minutes left. Valois were 2-1 down.

The suspended silence of twenty-eight thousand people waiting to find out which version of their team was about to show up.

Luc had one answer for them.

The version that had come back from worse.

He didn’t call a huddle. He didn’t wave his teammates in for some speech.

He walked directly to Mateo.

"Stop chasing Neji. Every time Cillian or you press him centrally, you leave the pocket behind you. Fresko’s been collecting in that pocket for sixty minutes."

"We press him, he turns us. We don’t press him, he pings the ball through to Fresko anyway."

"No." Luc took his water bottle off the advertising board and drank. "We let him have the ball in the deep areas. We don’t press him at all. We compress the space between our lines and let Neji recycle backward. He can have the safe pass, just not the forward one."

"You want to cut Fresko off from service."

"Fresko has touched the ball six times in this half already. Three of those were because Neji found him in the pocket your press opened."

Luc put the bottle back. "No pocket, no Fresko."

Mateo pointed across at Cillian. He relayed it in shorthand.

Cillian nodded like he understood. Whether he fully did was a different conversation.

---

Minute sixty-four.

Phocéen worked the ball left, their fullback receiving from Neji’s recycled pass.

Mateo didn’t step to press.

The Phocéen fullback recycled it back to Neji. Neji had the ball centrally, thirty yards out, and for the first time all night there was nobody charging at him.

He looked up.

The pocket where Fresko usually operated had Hadj and Ekberg sat deep in front of it, compact, cutting the passing lane entirely.

Neji played sideways instead.

Wide and safe. Going nowhere fast.

The Phocéen possession moved backward for more than 1 minute for the first time in the match. Their right back received it, found no forward option, played it back to their goalkeeper.

Luc was already moving higher up the pitch, positioning himself while Phocéen reset from the back.

"He has the ball with no purpose. First time all night."

---

Minute six seven.

SC Valois forced a corner from sustained wide pressure. Dário had pinned their right-back deep for four consecutive minutes, winning the corner off the defender’s shin.

Henri cupped his hands from the touchline, shouting set-piece instructions.

Demirci stood over the ball on the right.

Luc positioned himself at the near post, not with any intention of winning the header himself. He had the height but a header wasn’t his weapon here.

His intention was to occupy both center-backs.

He dragged both of them to the near post with the threat of his movement. They’d been tormented all night by his lateral pulls, and muscle memory was harder to override than instructions.

Demirci swung it to the far post.

Ekberg rose.

The Phocéen right center-back had tracked Luc’s run to the near post and hadn’t recovered his position. The gap at the far post was three feet wider than it should have been.

Ekberg met it clean, left-side of his forehead, not a hammer header but a guided one.

The ball bent downward, dipped under the crossbar, and bounced off the line before hitting the back of the net.

2-2.

The stadium detonated.

Twenty-eight thousand people releasing sixty-seven minutes of compressed anxiety in one eruption of noise that rattled the advertising boards along the touchline.

Ekberg turned and ran toward the away corner flag, his arms out wide, his usually composed face was completely unrecognizable. The Swedish center-back who read the game in quiet certainty, running across Stade Valois with his mouth open, screaming at the away fans.

Mateo got to him first and wrapped him up like a man collecting a debt.

Luc jogged over and hit Ekberg once on the top of the head with his open palm.

"Again! We need one fucking more. Let’s go!"

Ekberg was still breathing hard from the sprint. "Check again with me at full time."

---

Phocéen’s manager made a double substitution within ninety seconds of the equalizer.

He pulled their right winger and their attacking midfielder, bringing on fresh legs with instructions Luc couldn’t hear but could read from the way the new bodies positioned themselves.

They were going to press higher. Try to catch SC Valois before they could reset from the equalizer’s emotional peak.

Which meant their defensive line was going to step up.

Which meant space behind it.

[System Notification]

[New Objective: Neutralize Fresko by removing the service before it reaches him]

[Reward: 100% guaranteed goal x1]

"Fucking amazing. 100 percent?"

Ekberg turned to Luc, "you say something?"

---

Minute seventy-one.

Phocéen ran up the pitch immediately from their kickoff. Neji launched the ball upfield without a seconds hesitation.

Their two new forwards ran diagonally at Hadj and Ekberg, exactly as Luc had predicted. Aggressive. High-energy. Unsustainable for more than twenty minutes.

Hadj intercepted and carefully played it straight down the line to Aubert on the right.

Neji stepped out of his central anchor role to press the wide area.

That was the gap.

Luc dropped exactly into the space Neji had vacated.

Aubert played it inside first time without thinking, the pass arriving to Luc’s feet twenty-five yards from goal.

He took just one touch to control.

Neji was sprinting back. Five yards away and closing in.

Luc played it square to Cillian with the outside of his right boot, then immediately ran.

Cillian took two touches. Two touches too many. The passing window tightened.

He got the ball out under pressure to Mateo.

Mateo played it back to Luc.

Luc was now twenty yards out. One center-back left in the defensive line.

He played a low, driven ball toward the penalty spot.

Idriss ran with all he had and finally arrived at it.

The finish was not complicated. It wasn’t meant to be.

Idriss had made the run that Luc had pointed at with his movement. He had timed the diagonal perfectly, arriving at the penalty spot with one defender late and the other already committed to tracking Luc.

He struck it first time with his left foot. Low and hard through the near post gap.

The keeper got a full hand to it.

He was lucky, a full hand wasn’t enough this time. It went in anyway.

3-2.