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

Chapter 68: [68] "The Channel Gives and the Channel Takes"

Piii.

Second half.

Sartre was the right central midfielder Coach Henri identified at halftime.

Demirci went straight to Sartre’s shoulder the moment the second half kicked off. Not aggressively or with a tackle waiting to happen. Just as an extension of the man’s movement, everywhere Sartre went, Demirci went.

Sartre received a pass in the forty-eighth minute from Brémont and turned to find Demirci already between him and the angle of a shot he wanted.

He played it backward.

Brémont recycled.

Demirci returned to his position.

First time all match that Montclair’s midfield triangle had produced a forced backward pass from Sartre’s position instead of a shot. Colbert didn’t react on the touchline though.

----

Minute fifty-one.

Bastien drove the ball wide left, the Montclair right channel opening exactly as Henri had predicted it would in the second half.

Montclair’s right center-back had stepped in to cover Luc’s movement during the previous phase and hadn’t fully recovered his line.

So the channel was a four-yard gap between Bastien and the displaced right center-back. It lasted a few seconds before the defensive shape corrected.

Bastien played it through.

Idriss met it at full pace, overlapping down the left still as the right center-back was scrambling across.

The cross from Idriss came early, skipping across the penalty area.

Luc arrived at the penalty spot, the Blind Side Run Timing triggering as Montclairs right center-back ran across to Idriss.

He hit it first time with his left foot. Clean connection, the ball driven through the narrowing gap between Prost’s diving body and the inside of the near post.

Goal.

2-1.

The massive crowd of SC Valois supporters behind the far goal, produced a noise that cut clean through the Montclair silence.

Luc nodded continuously towards the Valois supporters.

"Let’s go!"

"Let’s fucking go!"

Idriss jogged over and hit Luc once on the chest with the palm of his hand. Their link up yet again.

[System Notification]

[Objective partially complete: Scored from the Montclair right channel]

[Remaining: Create another goal from the channel OR score a second yourself]

[Wager Tally updated: Open Play Goals — Beaumont 12 | Fontaine 14]

[Fontaine has not scored yet tonight. His match is still live.]

"Two more to level. One goal at a time."

Montclair responded to the goal the way disciplined sides always did.

They tightened the midfield triangle. Brémont dropped half a yard deeper. Their right fullback stopped pushing as high. Colbert on the touchline made one gesture with his hand, and the entire structure collectively shifted down three yards.

They were protecting the lead. Not panicking.

Which made them harder to break... and easier to predict in the same way.

---

Minute fifty-seven.

Sartre arrived in his late run position, Demirci half a stride behind him.

The pass from Brémont came anyway, played slightly earlier than usual to stay ahead of Demirci’s tracking.

Sartre received. Demirci committed to a sliding tackle immediately.

He got the ball.

Clean tackle! The ball went out wide to Aubert(right side), who played it crossfield to Bastien(left side).

The Montclair crowd was absorbing a minor disruption. You could tell from the way their level of noise reduced.

The tackle changed something in the midfield’s rhythm. Sartre’s next run, two minutes later, was tentative. It was half a yard shorter. He was checking for Demirci’s position before committing to the movement.

"He’s adapting," Mateo said during a dead ball. "He’ll find a new way soon."

"He will," Luc agreed. "We need to score before he does."

---

Minute sixty-two.

Montclair won a corner.

Their two previous corners had been dealt with cleanly, Hadj and Ekberg commanding the air, a defensive partnership that had learned to function under pressure across several matchdays.

The corner was different this time.

The delivery went to the near post, a flater, faster ball rather than the slow, more floated variety that they had used previously. Hadj attacked it correctly, arriving to head it out.

But the header sent the ball backward over to the second post rather than out to the side.

Alvarez was waiting on the penalty spot. He hadn’t announced his run. He had just stood there, positioned correctly, waiting for the corner routine to deposit the ball in the one place everyone else was too committed to defend properly.

It was calmness in the eye of a storm.

He didn’t head it. He chested it down and hit it.

Blažek got no where near it.

3-1.

The away fans rose. A thousand voices in one wall of sound.

Luc walked back to the center circle.

3-1 with twenty-eight minutes left.

The TES wager tally had him at twelve, Fontaine at fourteen. If Fontaine scored tonight, the gap widened to three. If Luc scored two more here, he pulled level.

Neither scenario could be controlled simultaneously. He could only control the pitch directly in front of him.

"Again," he said to Idriss as they passed in the center circle.

Idriss hit the restart.

---

Minute sixty-five.

Hugo received the ball at the edge of the Montclair half, Brémont’s press not reaching him in time.

He turned immediately, his recovered ankle played a disguised pass through the gap between Montclair’s right center-back and their right winger, the exact corridor Luc had identified in the video room.

Bastien had already started his run. The late diagonal, the one Hugo had described in the video room as harder to track than Dário’s wide movements.

Bastien arrived inside the penalty area with the right center-back a full yard behind him.

His shot was straight at Prost, who saved it comfortably with both hands.

But the rebound fell loose to the left side of the six-yard box.

Luc was going to reach it before Idriss.

He had started the run, cutting from Montclairs right to left, off Bastien’s shot, reading the trajectory of the save before Prost’s palms had even connected with the ball.

The rebound dropped to him at a half-awkward height, bouncing just above the ankle, the kind of ball that required a quick, instinctive decision rather than a measured finish.

He improvised.

He brought his right knee up slightly and stabbed the ball with the outside of his right boot, redirecting it across the face of goal, low and spinning away from Prost’s desperate dive back across the line.

Goal.

3-2.

The home crowd erupted for the second time, louder this time, belief layered on top of disbelief, the sound of supporters who understood they were watching something that wasn’t supposed to happen.

Luc ran toward the corner flag, celebrated with his arms out, came back quickly because there was no time. The goal hadn’t been clean. It had been instinct and chaos. He’d take it.

[System Notification]

[Objective complete: Two goals from or created by the Montclair right channel]

[Reward: 100% guaranteed goal x1]

[Wager Tally updated: Open Play Goals — Beaumont 13 | Fontaine 14]

[Fontaine’s match update: He has scored a penalty in the sixty-eighth minute. It does not count toward the Open Play wager tally.]

[Gap remains: Fontaine leads by one Open Play goal. One matchday remaining before the December deadline.]

"A penalty. Doesn’t count. We’re still one apart."

He jogged back to the center circle, breathing hard through the December cold, his chest rising fast.

One goal behind in the wager.

One goal behind in the match.

Twenty-five minutes left.

---

Montclair’s response to 3-2 was immediate.

Colbert made two substitutions inside sixty seconds of the restart. Fresh legs in the wide positions. Their new left winger pressing Aubert immediately on first contact, not allowing SC Valois to build from the right side.

The pressing intensity went up like five levels.

Brémont started arriving into forward positions for the first time all match, abandoning the deep recycling role to provide an extra man in the transition.

Montclair were going for four.

SC Valois were chasing four.

Both teams fans knew they were watching a completely different match from the first half.

---

Minute seventy-one.

The new Montclair left winger drove at Aubert and beat him on the outside with pure pace, the first time all match a Montclair player had gone outside a Valois fullback instead of cutting inside.

The cross came in high and hard.

Hadj arrived and won the header, clearing to the edge of the box.

The clearance fell to Sartre.

Demirci was still tracking him. But half a stride ahead because Sartre had found new positioning, arriving two yards further away from goal than his usual position, outside Demirci’s range at the moment.

The shot was from twenty-three yards. Bent. Hit with the outside of his right foot, curling away from Blažek.

As Blažek guessed wrong.

4-2.

The stadium settled into the sound of a crowd that had found its result. Both home and away.

Thirty thousand people who had watched their teams absorb comeback, keep their composure, and produce goals at both ends that ended the argument.

Luc stood and watched the scoreboard change.

4-2. Minute seventy-one.

Nineteen minutes left.

Not enough time for two goals against a team that had just tightened their shape behind the advantage.

He knew it. The math was clear.

---

The last nineteen minutes were honest and draining.

SC Valois pressed for a third goal because that was the only thing this team could do now. Not because the current numbers guaranteed a bad performance, but because conceding the game while the whistle was still silent wasn’t in the DNA of the team they had become.

Idriss drove at the Montclair center-back twice and was stopped both times by clean defending, the kind that earned no applause but deserved it.

Hugo manufactured a chance from a position nobody had asked him to be in, arriving at the right side of the box after a recovered throw-in and delivering a low ball across the face of goal that Bastien couldn’t quite reach at the far post.

Mateo had a shot from outside the box in the eighty-fourth minute that Prost caught with two hands and held like it was the most important ball of the evening.

The four minutes of added time produced nothing.

Piii Piii Piiii.

4-2. Final score.

---

The Montclair crowd acknowledged both teams.

What had happened in the second half wasn’t what they had expected from Valois.

It was an insult to SC Valois.

Colbert shook Henri’s hand at the touchline and said something that Henri nodded at without disagreeing.

The dressing room was quiet. The Valois players were processing the same information at the same time.

Luc sat on the bench between his locker and Idriss’s.

He was one behind in the wager with one matchday left. Fontaine hadn’t scored from Open Play in this round.

That was the picture.

[System Notification]

[Final result: SC Valois 2 — AS Montclair 4]

[Wager Tally: Open Play Goals — Beaumont 13 | Fontaine 14]

[Fontaine’s penalty tonight: Confirmed not counted toward Open Play tally]

[MD17 incoming: AC Nord. Home. The final matchday before the December deadline.]

[AC Nord are bottom of the table]

[TES notes: The easiest fixture remaining on paper]

"Bottom of the table teams with nothing to lose." Luc corrected.