Soccer Supremo - A Sports Progression Fantasy

7.

Thursday, August 5

Emma wasn’t in bed; I found her down in the kitchen, leaning against the island, reading a document on an iPad while sipping coffee. I slipped my arms around her waist and nuzzled into her neck and it felt so good I decided to treat her to a song, which I delivered in a falsetto.

”You’re smoking hot in the morning sun; I squeeze your bewbs in the pouring rain.”

”I think you might have misheard the lyrics, babe.”

I turned her around and cupped her face in my hands. ”And the moment that you make yourself a coff, I wanna hear the kettle boil again.”

She twisted her lips. ”I didn’t know you were up. Do you want tea or coff?”

”Er, tea. I’ll do it, though. You get back to your briefs. I know you love working on briefs.”

Her eyebrows twitched. ”Why is that word so funny to you? There are so many good lawyer jokes.”

”Like what?”

She sipped her coffee, put it on the counter, and gave me her full attention. ”A man’s in an interrogation room and the police want to get started. The guy says, I won’t say anything without my lawyer present. The policeman says, but you are the lawyer. He says yeah, and I want my present.”

I scoffed. ”Okay, not bad.” I gave her a smooch and started to brew a tea.

”You’ve got a busy day, today, right?”

”Yeah,” I said. ”Gonna have brek at Bumpers, train at Saltney, do some admin. Then it’s a big video analysis sesh with the whole gang, plus Pradeep is going to sit in.”

”Is that his first time?”

”Yeah.”

”Aw, he must be really excited.”

”It’s Pradeep. He’s always really excited. We’re going to be watching clips from loads of games. Chester are away to Coventry City this weekend, so we’ll start there. Any of the coaches who want to dip out can leave, but I’ll be staying with Well In to watch Celtic and some of the other teams. He’ll give me a second opinion about Pafos.”

”That’s the team that Henri are playing tonight? In the Europe League?”

”Europa League, yeah. They’re from Cyprus, pretty new team. They’ve got Brazilians, Swedes, loads of guys from Africa. From the outside it looks like someone there has got themselves a Pradeep and they’re bringing in much better players than their budget would suggest. They’ve been in Europe a few times in recent seasons so presumably they’re making a decent profit. They seem really, really dangerous, and Henri’s banned for the first leg, the clown.”

Emma frowned and turned her coffee cup around so she could warm her hands better. ”Sandra, Peter, Colin, Jay Cope, all your coaches. They’re gonna watch the team that College are going to play? To help you? Give you ideas? What do they get out of it?”

I shrugged and stirred my tea. ”It’s just interesting, isn’t it? We look at the challenges and if we see anything interesting, I can call the head coach and point it out. If you’re Peter and you make a suggestion and it wins a match a thousand miles away, that’s fun, isn’t it? Plus we’ve got two of our current players there and we want them to do well.”

”Doesn’t Sandra want them to get knocked out so she can have them back?”

I laughed. ”Did she say that to you? She’s joking. Yeah, and when Chester get into Europe we’ll be playing these teams and we’ll need to know about fucking coefficients and how you arrange training in a week where you fly to Kazakhstan and all that. Better to start now and get a sense of the challenges, right? It’s like I said, they can dip in and out as they want.”

A small suitcase was open on our living room table. In a few hours, Emma would be flying over to Denmark to watch her dad’s team play against FC Midtjylland. I spotted the precise moment her train of thought was derailed by the random assortment of letters in the middle. ”How do you say the name again?”

”I call them Copy/Paste FC because no way am I trying to type that.”

”Maaaax! I’m not like you. I don’t want to travel Europe pissing people off for the lolz. How do you say it?”

”Mid-yee-lan. Mid at the start, lan at the end. The sounds in the middle don’t exist in English so do a round, wobbly mouth and make any noise you want. The Danes will love that you made an effort.”

”Mid-yee-lan,” she repeated. ”Are you going to get the coaches to watch them, too?”

”Yeah, but just quickly. The Magpies should put up a good fight but Midtjylland are a couple of levels above them. That was an unkind draw we got. If Banksy gets off to a good start, it could be close, but if he throws one in early on, it could get messy.”

”Don’t be defeatist! Banksy’s a ledge.”