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

Chapter 83: [83] "The Locker Room Cohesion Problem"

They were on a drive home, Juliette sat in the passenger seat with her medical bag on her knee.

Luc drove with both hands on the wheel.

"How bad was the headache?" Juliette asked.

"Manageable."

"That’s not really a medical answer I can work with."

"Maybe it was a seven out of ten."

She turned to look at the side of his face. The look had nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with diagnosis.

"Your blood pressure was completely normal this morning, hydration levels too were fine. A sudden headache that severe in the middle of a tactical drill has no physiological explanation I can account for."

"Stress, from when an old fuck breaks a pattern I spent months building."

Juliette pressed her lips together and looked back at the road.

She had been the club physio long enough to know when an athlete was lying about the source of a symptom and when they were just choosing not to explain it.

She knew he wasn’t totally lying but since he didn’t want to say the complete truth, she let it go.

---

January 2nd.

Only after the second full training day of the second half of the season, Klaus Becker was already fracturing the locker room.

"He’s going to be a problem," Luc said.

Juliette put a mug of tea on the counter for him. "You thought that about Mateo too."

"Mateo earned the right to be difficult, he also earned my respect. He had years at this club before I arrived. Klaus has been here for less than forty-eight hours."

"He won the Champions League, right? Maybe he thinks it counts for respect."

"Three years ago." Luc picked up the mug. "In a system built around him by a coaching staff that had eight hundred million euros to work with. He’s not in that system anymore. He’s in mine."

Juliette sat on the counter stool. "Valérie bought him to secure a Champions League spot. She didn’t buy him to fit neatly into your system."

"Then Valérie and I are going to have a very direct conversation about what the team’s chemistry is actually worth."

"That conversation won’t go the way you think it will."

"It will," Luc said. "Because she knows how this team fights when we fight together. The system works. Klaus walking out of position twice in one session is a liability."

Juliette drank her tea and said nothing to that because he was correct.

Luc’s phone was on the counter. Three messages.

Hugo:

Klaus tried to tell me where to position my free kick delivery today. I told him to concern himself with his own positioning and he looked at me like I’d slapped him.

Cillian:

Lads, the German keeps calling me "the Irish one." My name is on the back of my training bib. It’s seven letters. CILLIAN. You’d think a Champions League winner could read.

Idriss:

He told me my runs were too predictable. I’ve been racking up g/a in the last few matches. I’ve been waiting for him to say something stupid enough to justify not passing to him ever.

Luc put the phone down.

The problem with Klaus wasn’t technical. The man’s technical quality was beyond dispute. Luc had watched enough footage to know that. The problem was that Klaus was operating inside a set of assumptions built on a completely different footballing culture, a different tactical language, and three years of accumulated elite privilege that had never been challenged by anyone below Champions League level.

He didn’t know SC Valois yet.

More critically, he didn’t know what SC Valois had become.

---

Thursday morning.

Luc arrived at the complex at six forty-five.

Klaus was already in the gym.

Not because he was dedicated. Because he had a personal training regimen that predated SC Valois by eight years and he wasn’t going to adjust it for the club’s scheduled start time. He had his own trainer, a professional Austrian woman named Loretta, who was counting reps in German.

Luc changed into his training kit, laced his boots, and walked into the gym.

Loretta counted. Klaus pressed the barbell without looking up.

Luc sat on the bench opposite and watched.

Klaus finished the set. Sat up. Finally acknowledged Luc’s presence with a brand of condescension that only truly elite athletes could produce without any physical effort.

"The American captain," Klaus said. "Up before seven. I’m impressed."

"Like you I value fitness, the difference is I didn’t bring a hot private trainer to the club’s facility on my day three."

Loretta blushed

Klaus took a towel from her and dapped his forehead. "Loretta understands my regimen better than any club physio."

"Juliette is the best physio in this league. She’s now the head physio even."

"She’s never worked with a Champions League athlete."

Luc stood. "She worked with me. I’d say that’s even better."

Klaus laughed. The sound it produced was approximately the same noise Mateo used to make when Cillian said something naive. The sound of a professional identifying a gap in the other person’s understanding.

"Your current tactic won’t work in the Champions League. It doesn’t work against sides with real possession quality. Once this league adjusts to you, you’ll be back in the bottom half by March."

Luc picked up his water bottle from the floor.

He drank from it and put it down

"The tactical approach you’re calling small-club football produced the best results this club has ever seen."

"Not being first position is highly unacceptable. You’re still jokes to me, all of you"

"We’ll get there," Luc said. "What you did in training yesterday and the day before broke the line between the midfield and the attacking third. When you left your position to press, you left Hugo with no cover. In a real match that gap gets exploited very quickly."

Klaus pulled on a fresh training shirt. "Hugo is seventeen years old. He needs tough moments, not protection."

"Hugo is the most complete midfielder in this league under the age of twenty," Luc said. The temperature in the room hadn’t changed. His voice hadn’t risen. "He doesn’t need your ’tough moments’. He needs you to hold your shape so the system functions."

Klaus looked at him properly for the first time. "You can’t be serious."

"I’m always serious."

"He’s a child. That shows how shitty this league is if a seventeen year old is amongst the best midfielders."

"He played important minutes at Parc des Royals with a ligament that had been in a brace for three weeks earlier and never once lost positional discipline," Luc said. "Call him a child in front of me again and I’ll make sure the only minutes you see are the ones the referee adds at the end."

Luc picked up his water bottle and walked out.

Juliette was in the physio room when he passed the open door. She was reviewing something on her tablet.

"How did it go?" she asked without turning.

"Fuck that guy."