A Shattered Dream
After Kaká’s equalizer, the match only grew fiercer.
Gennaro went down clutching his leg and made a show of the pain, but the referee decided it wasn’t worth the theatrics and told him to get up. Hearing that, Gennaro rose with a sheepish look on his face.
“It did hurt, though.”
“Right.”
Gennaro took the referee’s hand as he said it, and the official gave him a sympathetic nod.
Once that little drama was over, the whistle blew and Gennaro rolled the ball backward, and the match kicked off again.
From the restart, neither side could quite recapture the movement they’d shown through the thirtieth minute of the first half.
This is hard.
That was what happened when both teams had cranked the tempo to the absolute limit from the opening whistle.
Having burned through huge stores of stamina in a rush, both sets of players slipped into a quieter stretch, trying to conserve what they had left. The first half wasn’t even over yet, so that was the only sensible call.
And so the first half ended without another goal.
It had been a first half that made even the people watching break a sweat.
Barcelona’s locker room.
“We’ve only just finished the first half, all of you. So don’t dump your stamina in one go—save it and spend it carefully.”
The players answered Frank, and as he listened he sank into a deep frown of thought.
The stamina drain was worse than I expected. Only forty-five minutes gone and they’re sweating like this. In the second half we have to keep a sensible tempo. That’s the only way we last the full ninety—and it might even go to a hundred and twenty.
Frank’s worry was justified. On the flow of the match so far, both teams had been burning through their legs at a high tempo, and if it kept vanishing that fast they might not even make it to ninety. Barcelona had solid options on the bench, true enough, but they still couldn’t match the best eleven, and unless the rules let you swap all eleven men, most of the squad were going to hit the wall. Knowing that, Frank had told them to conserve.
Of course I don’t think saying it out loud means they’ll actually save it. But if we change the tactics as well, we can stockpile enough.
Frank had no intention of only talking about saving energy. Empty words without action were hollow, and he knew it, so he planned to shift the system to protect their legs. In the first half it had been a free-swinging slugfest, punch for punch. In the second he meant to drop the line a little, defend, and only break when the moment was right—saving stamina that way.
If you just keep attacking, you’re going to tire out. That’s obvious.
It would have been a different story if they’d sat deep and defended from the first whistle. But AC Milan’s players had already spent heavily trading blows with Barcelona in the first half, so if they kept holding the ball and charging forward after the break, their tanks would empty fast—that much was plain.
Jorge. You’re going to have to deliver.
The plan had one lethal flaw, though: if they couldn’t hold AC Milan’s attacks and conceded, there would be no answer. Dropping the line was meant to make the attacks more efficient, but if they fell behind first they’d have to push up to chase the game, and then Barcelona’s players would be thrown into chaos. The dilemma of needing to sit deep yet also needing a goal—and therefore having no choice but to push up—was exactly the kind of thing that could produce a disaster.
A desperate Barcelona would raise the line, and at that point AC Milan would almost certainly drop theirs and park the bus. That made Jorge’s role at the very back impossible to overstate. If Jorge got beaten, the balance of the match would tip in an instant, and Frank could only pray.
Show me, Jorge!
He needed Jorge to come through.
Locker-room time ran out, and the second half began.
The two sides’ strategies for the restart were complete opposites. AC Milan came out thinking, Let’s keep the slugfest going, and lined up even more aggressively than in the first half. Barcelona, with one eye on the possibility of extra time, dropped their line from the first-half shape and took a more defensive stance.
With those plans at cross-purposes, the early winner of the second half was AC Milan.
“You’re not pushing up?”
“Nah. We’re defending.”
“Fine. Then you’re getting hit.”
Ninth minute of the second half.
Kaká’s long-range shot put Barcelona behind.
Dropping the line hadn’t been a bad choice in itself. It cut the risk of conceding and let them save some stamina, so Frank’s call was perfectly defensible on paper. But in any sport—no, in most things in this world—what matters isn’t the process. It’s the result.
If Barcelona had sat deep and not conceded, the world would have praised Frank for trying something different from the first half. Because they had conceded, he was going to take the abuse.
Of course, the people who actually thought and knew the game would say:
“Frank’s choice wasn’t bad. The result just didn’t go his way.”
But if the world had been full of people like that, would results still matter more than process?
“So what? You still let AC Milan score, didn’t you? That means Frank got it wrong.”
Most people never looked at the core of the thing—only the shell on the outside. So Frank’s judgment was doomed to be called a mistake.
Frank decided fast.
Screw defending. All-out attack.
And really, there was no other option. They were about to hit the tenth minute of the second half. Even if the referee was generous with stoppage time, they weren’t getting more than five extra, which left them with roughly forty minutes.
“Forty minutes…”
Forty minutes was a long time in football, sure. Sometimes five goals went in inside ten minutes—that was football too. But that was rare. So Frank had no real choice.
Push the line up. Get the equalizer as fast as possible.
Whether that call was right or wrong barely mattered; they had to do it. Leading 2–1, AC Milan had stopped forcing attacks and simply parked the bus in front of their own half. Of course the side doing the attacking had to be Barcelona.
Knowing that, Frank and the Barcelona players shoved the line high and threw everything into the attack—but even as regulation time crawled toward the ninetieth minute, the equalizer wouldn’t come.
“Fuck… why won’t it go in?!”
I couldn’t hold the anger in and spat the curse. The rest of the Barcelona squad felt the same. For thirty-five minutes they had hammered AC Milan and hit the woodwork three times without producing a goal.
“Ref, give us ten minutes of stoppage! They were time-wasting forever!”
The Barcelona fans were no different, roaring from the stands for the referee to add plenty of time. Fair enough—AC Milan’s players had dragged things out by a good ten minutes.
Listening to those voices, I let go of any real hope.
“Five minutes? We’ll be lucky if we get that.”
The rule that would one day add every second of time-wasting into stoppage time hadn’t been brought into football yet, so I never expected the referee to give us ten.
“Please, just be a human being and give us seven!”
The fans knew that too, and they were praying for something around seven minutes. Maybe that desperation reached the man in the middle.
I’d thought five would already be a gift—but the referee announced seven, longer than even that hopeful number.
“I love you, ref!”
Someone in the crowd shouted it at the official who’d given them seven, and the Barcelona players let out a collective breath of relief.
“Whew. That’s something, at least.”
“Seven minutes is plenty for a goal.”
Seven minutes. Unusually long for stoppage time—especially in this era. I knew that, and the fire in me flared again.
“Yeah. Seven minutes? Forget the equalizer—we can take the lead.”
That was the hope Barcelona’s players and I carried into it. It didn’t last long. It was smashed without a trace left behind.
One minute into stoppage time, AC Milan scored.
As joy and despair flipped with AC Milan’s goal, the clock kept running on, indifferent to either side.