Chapter 32: Chapter 32: The Blank Field
They overloaded his side one more time, and for a moment it worked.
Dylan O’Connor pulled wide and stayed high. Tyler Grant moved inside off him. Aaron Pike came steaming up on the extra run outside.
Three White shirts, one lane.
Jamie got dragged a yard narrow as Tyler moved, and that was all it took. Dylan slipped out behind him on the touchline, free, and the ball was already on its way to his feet.
For half a second it was gone. Dylan was behind him with the ball, Isaac Monroe was charging the near post for the cutback, and Jamie was facing the wrong way.
Beaten.
Then Jamie exploded back.
His recovery had always been the quickest thing about him, and it answered now when it mattered most. Two strides, three, eating a gap that should not have been closeable, his legs turning over faster than anyone in white had managed all day.
Dylan steadied and slid the low cutback in toward Isaac at the near post.
Jamie got there first.
THUD.
He threw his body across the line of it and blocked the cutback dead before it could reach Isaac, the ball cannoning off his shin and rolling through to Enzo’s gloves.
Nobody clapped. It was not a goal. It was a thing that did not happen, which is the hardest thing for a crowd to notice.
But the men with the notebooks noticed.
One of them looked down at his team sheet, found the number, and checked it. Another wrote for longer than he had written all morning.
Beside Garcia, Alan’s hands closed tight around the top of the rope.
Rafi had been halfway into a complaint about the marking. He stopped in the middle of it and said nothing.
White still won it, and they won it from the other side, which Garcia was glad of for one cold reason. It meant nobody could pin the defeat on Jamie.
Callum Price got at Mason Clarke on White’s right with pure pace and went past him to the byline.
But his final ball was a mess. He took a touch too many, delayed, and tried to cut it back when the angle had already closed. The ball clipped a Blue leg and spun loose into the middle of the box, neither a cross nor a clearance.
Tyler Grant reacted to the loose ball before anyone in blue did.
He took one touch and finished it low.
2–1.
It was a scrappy goal off a poor decision, the kind that wins real matches all the time, and there was nothing clean about it at all.
TWEET. TWEET. TWEET.
The match ended 2–1 to White.
Jamie walked off with his hands on his head, then dropped them, staring at the grass. He was not proud. He was angry.
Miles fell into step beside him. "You were better second half. Way better."
"We lost," Jamie said.
"Yeah." Miles bumped his shoulder. "Still."
The coaches gathered the players in before anyone could drift, and Jamie stayed with the group, because the camp still owned the pitch until it said otherwise. Garcia, Alan, and Rafi stayed where they were behind the rope.
Nobody ran onto the grass. That was not how this worked.
The scouts did what real scouts did, which was talk to the organiser and the coaches and nobody else.
Garcia stood close enough to the table to catch the shape of it.
One of the club men leaned in toward the organiser. "The Holt lad. Forty-seven." He nodded out toward the players. "Keep the family contact open for us, would you."
The organiser checked his file. "Guardian’s the father, Alan Holt. No representative recorded."
"Pass it through the programme properly, then. We’ll come the right way."
A different club man, further along, asked about the White right-back instead. Garcia heard the organiser’s answer plainly enough.
"Mallory? Crownbridge handle him."
Two players. Two answers. One of them had a name behind him and one of them had a blank field, and every man at that table understood the difference without it being said out loud.
When the coaches finally released the players, Jamie came toward the rope where his father stood.
Oliver moved before he got there.
"Mr. Holt." He stepped into Alan’s path with the easy, professional line, hands open. "A word?"
Alan heard him.
He did not stop. He did not insult him, did not look at Garcia, did not explain himself to anyone. He stepped around Oliver and kept walking to his son.
Oliver pulled up near the rope.
Charlotte, a few feet back, saw all of it.
Oliver stayed calm. He did not raise his voice or follow. But the easy smile he wore at these things was not there anymore, and this time it did not come back.
Alan reached Jamie and put a hand on the back of his neck.
"You alright?"
"We lost," Jamie said.
"You did enough."
Jamie looked at him, and his face did not believe it. He was soaked through, legs gone, sixteen years old and certain he had let it slip.
Alan did not push that. He asked the only question that mattered instead.
"You want Garcia handling this properly? Making it official?"
"Yeah," Jamie said.
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
That was all of it. No speech. The boy was too tired and too disappointed for one, and Alan did not try to make the moment bigger than it was.
Alan came back to the rope and stood in front of Garcia.
"Send the agreement," he said.
Garcia did not pretend it was something he could pull out of the folder and have signed against the back of his hand by the pitch.
"I’ll prepare it properly," he said. "Every term written out plainly. I’ll bring it to you tomorrow so you can read it, Jamie can read it, and we go through all of it before anyone signs anything." He held Alan’s eye. "You’ll know exactly what you’re putting his name to."
Alan nodded once. "Tomorrow, then."
"Tomorrow."
They drove back south once the programme wrapped up, the four of them in Garcia’s car, the motorway dark and wet by the time Salford was behind them.
Jamie sat in the back and barely spoke. He watched the lights go past and kept his head against the window.
Alan checked on him once, then again twenty minutes later, a quiet "you eaten enough today?" both times, and let it go when the answers came back short. He did not force a conversation his son did not want.
Rafi broke the quiet only once, from the front seat.
"He was rough," he said, eyes on the road ahead. "Bit all over the place." A pause. "But he was better. The block was real."
Garcia drove and said little.
He knew what the match had done. It had put Jamie in front of the right people and made at least two of them write his number down. That was everything he had been working toward for two weeks.
But he also knew the door he had pushed open did not only let G11 through. It let everyone else see the same thing he had seen, and Crownbridge had already started counting the paperwork.
He dropped Alan and Jamie at home, then Rafi, then drove the last stretch to his own place alone.
He let himself in, dropped the folder on the table, and the panel was already waiting for him before he had taken his coat off.
[SIDE MISSION COMPLETED]
Mission: Prepare Jamie Holt
Objective Complete: Jamie Holt completed the two-week development block and final trial programme evaluation.
Final Evaluation:
— Match Performance: Positive
— Scout Interest: Detected
— Player Trust: Increased
— Guardian Trust: Increased
Rewards:
— Skill Points +300
— Scouting SP +20
— Client Management SP +20
— Network SP +10
[AGENT STATS UPDATED]
— Skill Points: 1000 → 1300
— Scouting SP: +20
— Client Management SP: +20
— Network SP: +10
Garcia read it standing up, coat still half on.
Then the panel changed.
[NEW SIDE MISSION GENERATED]
Mission: Sign Jamie Holt Into G11
Objective: Secure Jamie Holt as G11 Sports Management’s first represented player with guardian consent.
Reward:
— Skill Points +500
— Contract Knowledge SP +20
— Client Management SP +20 — Reputation +5
Failure Penalty: — Competing agency interference risk increases.
Garcia read the new mission once.
Then he opened his laptop.
