God Of football

Chapter 1006: The First Red!

Seven minutes after Kane’s equaliser, and Bayern were doing what Bayern always do when they smell blood.

They were pushing, probing, trying to establish some territorial dominance and to some extent, it was working.

They got close enough and worked off a couple chances, but it was still not enough to rattle the Arsenal defence or the net.

The Emirates was still loud, still behind its team, but there was an edge to the noise now.

The fragility that comes with knowing your lead is gone.

"Bayern, emboldened by the equaliser, are attempting to seize this game by the collar. They want to dictate. They want to control. There is a method to everything they are doing, and it is working. Almost."

Drury paused a bit, letting the broadcast digest his words before he continued.

"Almost, because there is still one rather significant obstacle standing in their way."

The moment he finished, Timber received the ball deep and, finding himself with a half-second more time than he’d expected, swung his right foot through it, making a long and searching diagonal that climbed into the floodlit air above the Emirates turf and dropped toward the halfway line.

Izan didn’t move toward it so much as wait for it.

He read the flight early, shifted his weight, and then, as the ball arrived, he caught it on the instep, killing it dead in that small, impossible space between boot and shin.

The ball never touched the ground.

In all this, the ball never touched the ground, and in the same motion, before it could, he whipped his body around, and Pavlovic, who had been angling around to close, simply had no answer for it.

His feet went from under him, and he went down, as the Emirates rose in one collective movement, building a low roar into something fuller and rampant.

"Pavlovic," Drury said, "undone not by a push or a trick, but by the sheer impossibility of trying to predict what Izan is going to do next. The boy doesn’t just play football. He is becoming what football was meant to be all along, imaginative."

The ball soon found Saka on the right, but Laimer was across, quickly and aggressively, refusing to give the Englishman an inch, and Saka accepted the challenge without flinching.

He opened his body, shaped as if to go one way, and then his leg swung in a clean arc over the ball, into one step-over, singular and unhurried, before pushing the ball to Laimer’s left.

The crowd rose, as it Saka’s inside run looked inevitable, but Laimer matched that inevitability as he got down quickly like a pawn that had been toppled over on a chessboard.

And once on the ground, he swept his leg, extending it at full stretch to divert the ball out for a throw before Saka could centre it, and as the ball rolled into touch, applause came cascading down from the stands.

"That’s some good defending, in the end," Drury offered, "but Saka made him work for every inch of it."

Without lingering about too much, Saka retrieved the ball from the ball boy and launched it long toward Zubimendi, but Gnabry, lurking around all this while, read it perfectly and intercepted it as Drury caught himself mid-sentence.

"Zubimendi — and — oh, Gnabry has it. Gnabry moving forward now, quickly—"

Serge Gnabry pressed into the space that had opened ahead of him, driving toward the Arsenal defensive line with that low, direct urgency that made him so difficult to track.

His head came up, searching for options, and he soon settled on one.

Kane had peeled off his marker to the right, and the pass was on, so Gnabry played it.

The ball moved across the turf toward Kane, and Drury’s voice rose just slightly as Saliba stretched his leg to clip the ball away, but ultimately, the ball reached Kane’s feet.

"Is there a finish here?" Drury bellowed, but then, a leg came from behind.

A sweeping, desperate, last-ditch motion came out of nowhere and clipped the ball cleanly, but Kane was already mid-stride, already committed to the touch, and the contact sent him tumbling.

He hit the turf, and the sound that came from him was raw and guttural, almost like he had been shot instead and in the next moment, the Bayern end was already on its feet.

"Red card! Red card!"

The words came from the away stand, frantic and unanimous as arms rose, pointing toward the culprit.

But they didn’t have to mouth for long because in the next second, the referee’s whistle sounded.

Quien had tracked all the way back?

It had been Izan who had recovered the ground.

Izan, who had made the challenge, and now it was Izan whom the referee was walking toward with his hand moving toward his breast pocket and next came the red card as Drury’s voice, together with the home fans, climbed.

"Oh No! It’s red. A red card was shown to Izan, and if that stands, my goodness, this changes everything. His first dismissal in his relatively still young professional career, and this early in the evening—"

"though I must say, I find myself genuinely unconvinced. From where I’m sitting, all I could see was commitment. I’m not certain there was a foul at all."

On the pitch, Izan was already in the referee’s face, urgently explaining what had happened to the referee.

"I didn’t even touch him," he said, shaking his head while stepping closer. "All I got was a ball. Check it, just check it, please. Ask VAR."

The referee held his ground, pushing the players back with a flat palm but a moment later, his hand went to his ear.

A stillness fell over that corner of the pitch as this went on.

A conversation was happening somewhere in a video room that the rest of the stadium couldn’t hear, and the Emirates held its collective breath for it.

Then the referee made the sign, drawing the box sign with both index fingers before motioning towards the sidelines and then immediately jogging towards the VAR.