Chapter 77: Chapter 76: Egersund II
The next morning they walked to Idrettsparken together in the cold, breath showing in front of them both.
It was not what either of them might have pictured from a club a level below England’s academies but two tiers up from where Jay had last kicked a ball competitively. One main stand ran the length of the pitch, modest and clean, seats bolted in neat rows under a roof that had clearly been replaced more recently than the rest of the ground. Behind it sat a low building with offices, a gym barely bigger than a school hall, and a medical room with two beds and a physio’s table.
Staff moved through it with the unglamorous busyness of a club with four league games still to plan for. Someone wheeled a kit basket past. Two men in club polo shirts argued gently over a laptop screen near the reception desk. Nobody looked up at Jay for longer than a second.
Reception handed Jay a clipboard of forms before Garcia had finished taking his coat off.
Emergency contact. Medical history. Data consent. Insurance confirmation. An acknowledgement of the evaluation terms, printed in both Norwegian and English, that Jay read properly before signing rather than skimming the way most players did.
Garcia checked the parts that were his to check. Accommodation clause, correct. Injury responsibility during the evaluation period, sitting with the club as agreed. Evaluation dates, matching the confirmation email exactly. A line on communication with G11 that named Garcia directly as the point of contact.
He left the medical history page alone. Whatever Jay wrote in the boxes about old knocks and how his body actually felt was between Jay and the physio, and Garcia had never once tried to be in that room.
A physio called Ingrid took Jay through soon after, and it was not the kind of medical that decided a career.
She asked about old injuries, current pain, how the last few weeks of training had felt in his legs. She checked his joints, watched him move through a short set of stretches and single-leg holds, pressed along a few muscles and asked him to say when something felt off rather than just watching his face for it.
It took twenty minutes. At the end of it she wrote something on a form, signed it, and told him he was clear to train.
A full medical, the kind that decided contracts, would only happen if it ever got that far.
While that was going on, Garcia sat down with two men in a small office off the main corridor, coffee going cold in front of all three of them.
Kjetil, the sporting director, did most of the talking. Beside him, a younger man named Sindre, who ran recruitment, said less but wrote more, a notepad open on his knee the whole time.
They laid it out plainly, and Garcia appreciated that more than any warmth would have earned from him.
Jay was there for a one-month first-team evaluation, feeding into the club’s planning for next season. He was not registered for competitive matches and could not be used to patch a squad problem in October, however well he trained. EIK would assess him across first-team sessions, internal matches, and any properly arranged friendly the staff put together. Beyond that, the club’s remaining league fixtures came first, always, and the coaching staff would decide day to day which training group Jay joined depending on what the week actually needed.
Garcia would get a written review after the first week, another at the midpoint, and a full decision at the end of the month. If EIK wanted to take it further, contract talks, work permit, international registration, all of that would open as its own separate process, timed to the next available registration window, not this one.
Garcia was staying for the opening few days. After that, he would fly home and run it from there.
Nobody mentioned a wage. Nobody mentioned a squad number or how long a deal might run, and Garcia did not raise any of it either, because talking numbers before a player had trained a single session was the kind of thing agents did when they did not actually understand the job.
He asked the things that mattered instead. Who to call if Jay picked up a knock. Who would be sending Garcia the reports, and how often. How meals and local transport actually worked day to day, beyond what was written on the sheet. What happened if the training schedule shifted at short notice, since Garcia would not be there to adjust on the fly once he flew home.
Kjetil answered all of it without checking with anyone, which told Garcia the club ran tighter than its size might have suggested.
By the time Jay came through from the medical room, a kit assistant was already waiting with a bag.
Temporary training gear, the club badge stitched on the chest, no name on the back and no number. He was pointed toward an unused peg near the far end of the first-team changing room and left to find his own way from there.
Most of the squad barely looked over.
A couple of players nodded as he passed, the kind of nod that cost nothing and meant nothing yet either. One, a tall winger named Malik who spoke better English than most of the coaching staff, caught Jay looking lost over a set of instructions on the whiteboard and translated the gist of it under his breath without making a thing of it.
Nobody crowded him. Nobody tested him with a joke in a language he could not answer in. They had a match in four days and a table position to hold, and an English trialist on the far peg was not high on anyone’s list of things to think about yet.
The head coach, a compact man named Espen who talked with his hands more than his voice, gathered the group for two minutes before they went out.
He introduced Jay in a sentence, English left winger, in for a few weeks, training with the group. Nothing longer than that. Jay did not say anything back beyond a nod, which was exactly right, because nobody wanted a speech from a man they had not seen kick a ball yet.
Garcia took a seat in the small stand of chairs set aside for staff and visitors, well back from the pitch, and stayed there.
He did not walk the touchline. He did not shout anything across the grass, and he did not try to catch Jay’s eye every time the ball went near him. His job today was to watch the club as much as the player, and neither of those jobs happened from inside the technical area.
EIK still had four matches left to plan around, and the session split showed it.
Players who had started the last league match worked through recovery drills and shape work off to one side, easy running and short passing, voices low. Everyone else, subs, fringe players, anyone carrying load, trained fully in the main group.
Jay went into the full group. Not straight in beside the club’s first-choice attackers. Just in with the players who still had something to prove that week, same as him.
The warm-up was simple, and Jay kept it that way too, no wasted effort trying to catch anyone’s eye with it.
The first rondo told him more than the warm-up had.
The ball moved faster than it ever had with Rafi, sharper first touches, fewer wasted seconds, calls flying across the circle half in Norwegian and half in the kind of shorthand English every football dressing room in the world seemed to share. Jay took a heavy first touch on his second turn in the middle and lost the ball before he’d even decided what to do with it.
Nobody said anything. A senior player was expected to fix that himself.
He did, gradually. By his fourth or fifth turn he was releasing the ball a beat earlier than before, reading the picture before it fully arrived instead of after. Nobody praised him for it. Staying in the drill was the floor here, not an achievement.
They moved into a directional possession game soon after, and the coaches slotted Jay in on the left, exactly the side Garcia had built his whole pitch around.
He kept it simple to start. First touch forward, quick release, nothing that tried to prove anything in the first minute.
The best of it came midway through.
He received with the full-back tight on him, held his shape instead of forcing it, and waited a half-second longer than instinct wanted until the defender’s weight tipped the wrong way. He was gone before the man could recover, out into the small strip of space outside him, and he did not try to beat a second man for the sake of it. He drove a low ball into the arriving midfielder’s stride instead, quick and flat, not a killer pass, but a real one, the kind that made a coach’s eyes stay on a player a second longer than usual.
Nothing came of it directly. It did not need to.
The hard part came not long after.
A stronger defender picked him up on the next phase, older, heavier through the shoulders, and did not go for the ball at all. He used his body instead, legal and unhurried, walling Jay off the ball and putting him on the grass with nothing that would have drawn a whistle anywhere in the world.
Jay was up before the coach had even glanced over. He did not look for a foul that was not there. He got back into shape and kept going, because that was the whole of what Rafi had actually prepared him for, not the answer to every problem, just the discipline not to fall apart when the answer had not arrived yet.
Garcia watched it from the stand and did not flinch either way.
The talent had made the flight. That much was obvious inside the first twenty minutes. But the speed of the information here, the calls he could not fully understand, the bodies that had been doing this at this level for years, all of it had turned a level Jay handled comfortably at home into something that asked real questions of him.
That was not failure. That was exactly why the club had asked for a month and not an afternoon.
Near the end of the session, Espen stopped the small-sided game and reshuffled it.
He watched Jay’s first few touches in the new shape, said something short to one of his assistants, and moved Jay across into the stronger group without much ceremony. Opposite him now stood the club’s first-choice right-back, a broad, unbothered figure who had clearly been told nothing about Jay beyond his position.
It was not approval. Garcia knew that much from a hundred sessions just like it. It was simply the next question, asked a little harder than the last one.
The system opened quietly at the edge of his vision, and this time it did not try to say more than it knew.
[SIDE MISSION UPDATED]
Jay Cole has reported to Egersunds IK.
Evaluation Period: Day 1 / 30 Club Handover: Complete First-Team Assessment: In Progress
No rating. No verdict. One session did not deserve either, and the system, for once, seemed to agree with him.
Garcia closed it and looked back down at the pitch.
The ball was already moving toward the left, toward Jay, and EIK’s right-back was already stepping across the grass to close the space before it could arrive clean.
Garcia stayed exactly where he was, outside the touchline, and said nothing.
On the far side, Espen folded his arms and kept watching.
The ball reached Jay’s feet, and the defender arrived with it.
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