God Of football

Chapter 1016: All This Noise For A That Hasn’t Started Yet!

Spain hadn’t kicked a ball yet, and the country was already losing its mind about it.

It wasn’t unique to Spain.

Every nation with a team in the tournament was going through its own version of the same collective anxiety but there was something specific about the Spanish experience of it, which was that Spain had watched days of football involving everyone else and had spent the entire time being told, by pundits and newspapers and strangers on the internet, that they were the best team in the tournament.

For some, it was probably true, but for others, it was debatable.

And that somehow made the waiting worse rather than better.

On Spanish Twitter, or whatever it was called this week, the dominant mood on the fourteenth of June was a particular flavour of restless.

Al menos juegan mañana.At least they play tomorrow.

It appeared in some variation approximately every thirty seconds, posted by people who had clearly been refreshing the same feeds for days and had arrived at a state of impatience so advanced it had looped back around to something almost serene.

In a bar in Seville, three men who had been watching every game of the tournament so far, every single one, including Uzbekistan versus Colombia at one in the morning, sat with their drinks and said very little to each other, which was its own kind of communication.

One of them had a Spain shirt on while the other two hadn’t bothered yet, saving it for tomorrow, as though putting the shirt on too early was a form of jinx they weren’t willing to risk.

"Tomorrow," one of them said.

"Tomorrow," the other two also muttered as if not saying it would push the game further away.

In Madrid, a woman walking her dog past a sports shop stopped to look at the Izan shirt in the window.

The off-white with maroon and gold detailed Spain away kit that had his number on the back.

She stood back, watching a bit, and only moved after she felt a tug on the leash.

"Sorry, Bebe," she muttered as she glanced at the kit one last time before walking away.

The feeling across the country was the same.

They had waited, and now that tomorrow was finally, actually, almost around, they still felt like it was taking too long.

......

For some four people though, they each had their problems.

Walking into the hotel, Miranda couldn’t help but feel like she had done well.....again!

Behind her walked the other three women, each in their own moods.

Olivia had been quiet in the car from the airport, though it wasn’t her usual quiet when Izan wasn’t making her break her ribs from laughing.

She stood in the hotel lobby with her bag at her feet and looked at Miranda with an expression that she was clearly trying to keep neutral and wasn’t entirely succeeding at.

Hori spotted it immediately, because Hori spotted everything immediately.

"Miranda," she said as she glanced back at her phone.

"Mm."

"You might want to sleep with one eye open tonight."

Olivia turned and looked at her with an expression that communicated, clearly and without ambiguity, that this was not helpful.

"I’m just saying," Hori said, entirely untroubled. "She looks like she’s planning something."

"I’m not planning anything," Olivia said, in the tone of someone who was absolutely not planning anything.

Miranda laughed at that as the concierge came up.

"Olivia, I can drive you to Chattanooga if you want. It’s only two hours, normal traffic."

"Nobody," Olivia said, "should be driving two hours just to see someone."

"You drove four hours to see Izan in Valencia once."

"That was different."

"How."

Komi, who had been standing slightly apart from all the exchange, looked at Olivia and said simply: "You’ll be fine."

Olivia exhaled and picked her bag back up, while Miranda, on the other hand, was sorting the last task of their accommodation.

After speaking with the concierge for another half minute, the room key cards appeared, a porter materialised, and soon, whatever needed doing was done.

The four of them made their way to the elevator, where Hori pressed the button for the wrong floor immediately, realised, and pressed the right one before the porter could.

"Safe," she said while bringing her arms across each other, causing Komi to smack her on the back while Olivia laughed.

.........

An hour later, this time in Chattanooga, Izan sat in the bleachers, overlooking the pitch they had used during the day, where the Floodlights rained on it.

He didn’t do anything in particular, aside from sitting.

His phone was in his pocket, and he hadn’t looked at it for forty minutes, which, for someone his age in this particular era of human existence, was a kind of achievement.

He stayed still and quiet for a while, and before it looked like he could leave, the interface materialised.

"What the hell-" he muttered as the glassy interface appeared in his vision.

"You can do that now?" Izan questioned, even though he wasn’t expecting an answer.

’The system was unable to respond without being called upon, or something like that was what it had said after Izan turned off a feature when it got too chatty, but now?

[What are you thinking about?]

The system said first as Izan stared.

This kept on for another second before he shook his head like he was too tired to even question anything any more.

[What are you thinking about?] it asked again.

He exhaled.

"I’m thinking," he said with a thought, "that I might stop enjoying this."

[You won’t.]

The system said after a while.

Izan smirked at the thought of something, possibly just a line of code comforting him before he could respond, the interface shifted towards an image.

A visual that assembled itself in his vision with a clarity that caught him off guard.

It was set on a pitch, a grass patch in places with goals at either end that was slightly crooked in a way that told that it had been set up by people rather than installed by groundsmen.

"Alboraya," he muttered, recognising it instantly.

And there on the pitch was a kid.

It was him.

Fourteen years old, slight for his age, running around with a ball at his feet and a determination that his body wasn’t entirely equipped to execute yet.

The touch was heavy.

The first step was a half-second late, and a moment later, even without anyone to defend against him, the kid lost the ball and slid a few metres after he tried to turn.

Izan watched himself as the system zoomed in on the face, on the eyes specifically.

And there it was, the thing he’d forgotten about that version of himself, the thing that these last few years of winning and records and magazine covers had gradually buried under everything else.

The kid’s shoulders were down.

His body language was the body language of someone who had just been told that he wasn’t going to be able to do what he loved in life.

But his eyes, they were doing something else entirely.

The eyes showed strength, hunger, and above all, fascination with the round object he had been kicking around.

[That],the system said, [is not a kid who is ever going to lose his love for the game.]