The Valencia Match (2)
It is extremely rare for a referee to brandish a red card the moment a match begins.
Rare, however, is not the same as impossible. There is a famous case of a player who, startled by the referee's whistle, reflexively swore and was sent off on the spot.
Lee Won-jun's dismissal was serious enough to force a complete overhaul of our tactics. Dropping from a 4-4-2 into what was effectively a 4-3-2 left us that exposed.
If Jeong Woo-jun, our right-sided midfielder, and I both pushed forward in that situation, only a single player would remain in the middle of the park.
The manager issued a simple order to break the deadlock.
He could have burned a substitution right then, pulling Kang Seong-hyeon out of the two-striker pairing and slotting a midfielder into Lee Won-jun's vacant spot. He chose not to use a substitution card.
Instead, he played a different hand.
"Ian. You're going to have to play midfield."
"…Sorry?"
My positions were wing-forward and attacking midfielder. I operated more often on the left but could handle the right as well—which, if you had to pin it down, made me more of a forward than a midfielder.
The manager planted me in central midfield anyway.
The formation itself stayed a 4-3-2 with Lee Won-jun gone, but in attacking phases Jeong Woo-jun pushed higher while Kang Min-sang, who had been holding midfield, drifted slightly to the right. I covered the vacated left side, and the shape became something closer to a 4-2-3.
The role the manager asked of me was that of a deep-lying playmaker—what the Italians call a Regista.
The player most famously associated with the role was, of course, Andrea Pirlo. Positioned just ahead of the back line, the Regista receives the ball from the defenders or the keeper and threads passes into space. The essential requirements are the ability to escape pressure and the defensive instinct to interrupt the opponent's flow of possession.
Defensive work itself did not need to match a pure box-to-box midfielder. Covering for a teammate who was already doing a full job, or hunting down loose balls that dropped in midfield, was enough.
I had confidence in my passing. My defending, on the other hand, was a liability—so I could not help questioning the manager's call.
In the end, it worked.
"Take it!"
I collected the ball from Kang Min-sang and drove a long pass forward. It landed just short of the last defensive line, into the path of Kang Seung-uk as he made his run. He cushioned it with a soft touch and cut inside to the right.
But Valencia's center-back was already back. A sliding tackle clipped the ball cleanly off Kang Seung-uk's toes.
Valencia CF Mestalla was not a U-19 side.
They were Valencia CF's second team—players who competed in La Liga 2, the division below Spain's top flight. That meant some of them were older than we were.
The production team had tried to arrange a match against Valencia's U-19s. The club declined, citing training commitments, and we were left facing their reserves instead.
Even so, they had stacked the starting eleven with the youngest players available, so we mostly faced nineteen- and twenty-year-olds.
With one exception.
A first-team player for Valencia CF. An Argentine center-back. Arian Martinez.
He was twenty-eight this year—smack in the prime of a footballer's career. So why was he with the second team instead of the first?
Overseas clubs do not throw a player straight back into first-team matches the moment he finishes recovering from injury. The reason is simple. Put him into a top-flight fixture too soon and he might reinjure himself, or fail to produce the performances he had before the injury. A winnable game becomes a draw; a draw becomes a loss. One point short of Champions League qualification, one point short of Europa League—the knock-on effects for the following season are enormous.
So foreign clubs prefer to park recovering players with the reserves, let them regain match sharpness and form in second-team games, and only then call them back up to the first team.
Arian Martinez and Valencia CF had chosen that path. Four matches before the end of the season he had been injured, ruled out for the remainder of the campaign, and thrown himself into treatment and rehab. Now he was training with the second team, clawing back his match fitness.
That process just happened to coincide with our filming date—and so his name appeared on the team sheet.
"That's four already…?"
"Haa…"
Including this one, the long balls I had played had created three attacking chances. Add the one clean header Kang Seong-hyeon had won from Jeong Woo-jun's cross on the wing, and that made four.
Arian Martinez had snuffed out all three of Kang Seung-uk's opportunities. Kang Seong-hyeon's header had skimmed past the post for a goal kick.
The loose ball from this latest attempt fell to the opposition, and Valencia started their attack.
They held a 3-4-3 shape with both wing-backs overlapping in the same phase. Arian Martinez lifted the ball into midfield and took a moment's rest.
Tak—!
Kang Min-sang pressed hard on the midfielder who received it, trying to win the ball back, but a simple turn left him stranded. I closed in from the direction the player was running. Rather than try to beat me one-on-one, he chose to lay it off to a teammate beside him.
Tak—!
Valencia's other midfielder took the pass, fed the wing-back waiting on the overlap, and drifted into the center himself. The wing-back switched positions with the wing-forward and whipped in a sharp cross.
Goalkeeper Han Seung-woo stretched out a long arm, claimed the ball cleanly, and launched the counter at once. A long pass found Seo Jin-yeong. Our left-back carried it forward and played it back to me.
"Ugh—"
Under the heavy press of several Valencia players arriving at once, I held the ball and searched for an option.
The answer is right here.
I nudged the ball through the legs of the Valencia player glued to my back. The direction I chose was empty space—nothing but open grass.
Tak—!
Or rather, it had been empty. Until Kang Min-sang, our box-to-box midfielder, sprinted onto it and claimed possession.
The Valencia midfielders who had been marking me spun and chased after Kang Min-sang as he drove forward. To free up the attack further, I drifted out to the left flank—my original position.
Kang Min-sang scanned the field, barely managed a body feint to hold off the midfielders now stuck to him, and looked around again.
"Hey!"
He spotted Kang Seung-uk cutting inside with the opposing right wing-back trailing him. He did not play the ball there.
"Ian!"
He found me instead.
With the right wing-back sucked into the middle, the left side was open. I received the ball cleanly and had the freedom to choose my attack.
I opted to drive into the box rather than float a cross. Against a back three, two strikers were always going to draw heavy marking and pressure. I considered trusting Kang Seung-uk's height with a cross, but Arian Martinez's presence made that impossible. Aerial duels were his specialty.
If that was his strength, he had a weakness as well: his command of the defensive line was soft.
As the left stopper, he and the right wing-back locked onto Kang Seung-uk with absolute focus. The right stopper tracked toward me. Valencia's sweeper marked Kang Seong-hyeon.
I lifted my left foot as if I were about to whip in a cross.
The right stopper's leg came in. I tugged the corner of my mouth into a smile, planted the left foot again, and shifted my weight to the right. Valencia's stopper was caught completely off-balance, and a lane into the box opened in front of me.
"Don't follow him! Mark the strikers!"
"Ian! Pass!"
Valencia's sweeper started to step out toward me, then hesitated at Arian Martinez's shout and turned back onto Kang Seong-hyeon. That worked in our favor. I made Kang Seong-hyeon screen the sweeper's movement, blocking his path.
I spun and found Kang Seung-uk facing me, two defenders wrapped around him. The foolish sweeper abandoned Kang Seong-hyeon the moment I turned and came after me instead.
That was the gap.
I slipped the ball to Kang Seong-hyeon. The goalkeeper, who had turned his eyes this way to track the ball, had no chance of stopping the shot. Kang Seong-hyeon drilled it low into the left corner of the net.
Shhhk—.
The net billowed.
The first goal of the match, in the thirty-fifth minute of the first half.
A goal scored despite being a man down was more than enough to seize the momentum.
When play restarted, Valencia produced a clean attacking sequence and equalized. The brief interruption in our rhythm did not last. We poured on the pressure again, and the rattled Valencia players began to gift us chances through a string of mistakes.
By the end we had registered eleven shots on target. Two of them found the net.
Arian Martinez worked tirelessly to shut down every attack, but he could not stop Kang Seung-uk's decisive header or my long-range strike.
When the final whistle blew after stoppage time in the second half, the score stood at 3–1.
A thrashing for Valencia. For us, our first victory.