Pure-Blood Youth (2)
In the blink of an eye the K League had already reached Matchday 22.
Away from home, Jeonbuk was taking on Daejeon, and both Shin A-yoon’s family and Baek Yi-an’s family had gathered under one roof to watch the match together. It wasn’t simply because Yi-an was playing; the two households had always been close enough that weekends often meant sharing a meal. With a Jeonbuk game on the schedule, they figured they might as well eat while they watched.
By now the league table had taken on a clear shape. The fixture was top-of-the-table versus mid-to-lower, so neither family seriously entertained the idea of a Jeonbuk defeat. Yet premature confidence has a nasty habit of inviting disaster. The match had barely begun when a foul atmosphere began to creep across the living room.
“Ah! The referee sprints over to Baek Yi-an and shows him a yellow card. Looks like he’s judged there was a foul in that aerial duel just now.”
“Yes. The collision between Baek Yi-an and Lee Chang-woo is being treated as a foul. Looking again: Yoo Jae-min slipped his marker and lofted a long ball, Baek Yi-an jumped first to cut it out, and Lee Chang-woo immediately drove his head into the space right after.”
“And right there—ah! Lee Chang-woo takes Baek Yi-an’s elbow. It’s honestly pretty ambiguous. You can’t really call it a deliberate foul.”
“Exactly. From Baek Yi-an’s line of sight Lee Chang-woo was behind him, so he probably never expected anyone to come flying in.”
“Just bad luck, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yeah. The referee almost certainly didn’t base the foul solely on that contact. He seems to have decided Baek Yi-an used his body to snuff out a clear counter-attacking chance… but the situation is so borderline that the only fair description is that Baek Yi-an was unlucky.”
“Unlucky my ass! What kind of nonsense is that?!”
Shin A-yoon’s father yanked the ice-cream stick out of his mouth and bellowed at the television. Even someone who knew nothing about football could see the challenge had not been intentional. An elbow had caught the opponent, sure—so a talking-to would have been fine—but a card? Really?
“Even so, how’s he supposed to see the guy coming from behind… good grief.”
“What’s that bastard ref’s name? Yoon Yong-taek? Let me check… look at this, look at this! Does this guy have some disease where he dies if he doesn’t hand out cards every match? Whoa—he once dished out thirteen yellows in a single game?”
“Thirteen? Even a burger with thirteen slices of cheese would get roasted for that.”
Gathering to watch a match only to have a baffling call ruin the mood naturally brought out the curses. The fact that the victim was their own son—or practically their son-in-law—poured gasoline on the fire. The adults jabbed furious fingers at the screen as if the injustice had been done to them personally. Shin A-yoon was every bit as furious.
Is this guy insane? Seriously? Ugh… our Yi-an is soft-hearted; what if this messes him up…
She wanted nothing more than to flip the dinner table right then and there. With the adults flanking her on both sides, and with her younger sister still shoveling pig’s trotters like a starving beggar after a twenty-four-hour live stream, she could only clench her jaw and endure. She couldn’t explode openly, yet simply letting that shameless referee’s face go unpunished felt impossible. The rage finally forced her hand.
I really didn’t want to do this…
No choice. That son-of-a-bitch referee had thrown the first punch.
Jeonbuk fans… you know what to do, right?
Bzzzzzt! Bzzzzzt! Bzzzzzzzt!
The phone started vibrating without pause.
“Hm? A-yoon, is that your phone going off? Did someone call?”
“Huh? Oh. It’s nothing. Just an alarm I forgot to turn off.”
Shin A-yoon’s mother grabbed her shoulder, curious, but A-yoon only snorted and muted the notifications.
Huh? What’s up with Ji-yoo? She’s not the type to come right out and say she’s struggling. Did she fight with a friend or something?
Another notification arrived almost immediately. The uncharacteristic fragility in her friend’s message sparked a flicker of worry, but without more information A-yoon decided not to overthink it.
I’ll just meet her later when I take Poppy for a walk.
If you asked me to name the greatest defensive midfielders, my name used to come up alongside Rodri and Busquets without anyone batting an eye. And if you forced me to pick the absolute peak of my own career, the answer would always be the 2036-37 season.
Some people might argue that the 2037-38 campaign—when I made the Ballon d’Or podium—was greater. But strip away the individual awards and look only at pure performance, and nothing touches 36-37.
The numbers alone made the case: forty-nine appearances, eleven goals, twenty-two assists. The media made such a racket about it that the line is burned into my memory.
That’s a defensive midfielder? The stats were so absurd the question practically asked itself. One assist every two games is already ridiculous, though how a manager deploys his double pivot can make the impossible merely improbable. What really made experts and fellow players crown that season my prime, though, was the goal tally.
Nobody expects a defensive midfielder to bang in eleven goals—maybe an attacking mid or a box-to-box guy, but not a pure holding mid.
Even I look back and wonder how the hell I pulled it off. But if I dig a little deeper, the absurd numbers start to make a twisted kind of sense.
That was right around the time I was raging about being job-scammed.
After physically conquering Serie A with Juventus, I took the oil-money owner’s grand offer and moved to Newcastle. The roster I was promised when I signed bore zero resemblance to the one that greeted me. Overnight I was stuck playing president’s football. They’d told me not to worry, that they already had top-class full-backs and centre-backs lined up for the Premier League—then I arrived to a bunch of academy call-ups and scrap-heap signings from relegation scrapers and nearly had a stroke.
Looking back it was a glorious era, but if anyone asked me whether I wanted to relive it the answer would be an automatic “fuck off.” I came within a whisker of writing off an entire season. Still, the lesson I took away was priceless.
That president’s football taught me something crucial: if your teammates are dead weight, it’s better to just do everything yourself.
Self-directed football isn’t exactly easy when you’re getting zero help from the rest of the side… but what choice did I have? I proved it worked. While the kids whined that it was impossible, I finished that season as a roaring success. People still say that without Baek Yi-an carrying a log on his back, Newcastle’s Champions League qualification would have been pure fantasy and they’d have been fighting Manchester United for the right to be the league’s doormat.
I did it with that half-baked Newcastle squad… so why couldn’t I do it here?
Of course I could. The Jeonbuk described in the original novel had been dead last among dead-last teams, but after my hands had reshaped it, the side was unrecognisable. There was no reason this time would be any different.
Peeeeep!
The referee’s whistle yanked me out of my thoughts and back into the match.
My earlier collision had snuffed out a promising counter for Daejeon, yet they kept coming—long balls and late runs, over and over. They clearly believed that with a yellow already on my name I wouldn’t dare contest as hard as usual, and that their other players could win the physical battles. Thinking about it, a 5-3-2 side that used an anchor midfielder had every reason to break-dance with joy the moment I got booked. Their formation made midfield fights almost impossible; all they could do was wait for gaps and stab through them. Now they had a variable that raised those odds.
I had zero intention of dancing to their tune.
“Chun-jae hyung! Just give it to me!”
“Huh? You’re taking it? Bro, you’ve got a yellow.”
“Just give it! Play it forward!”
The second I finished speaking I exploded out of position. The thud of a boot and the ball rolled across my path. I accelerated, collected it, and immediately the defenders started closing the space.
“Hey! Get on him! Both of you just rush him—don’t give him any angle at all!”
“Forget the back! If you can’t stop Baek Yi-an the whole thing collapses! Just smash into him first!”
Daejeon’s defenders decided that even knowing a duel was coming they still had to commit. They’d seen me glide through half-hearted pressing traps too many times. Two of them closed me down at once, narrowing every exit—except this time I had no interest in dancing past them with fancy feet.
Thump!
“Han Gang-rok! Play it forward again!”
“I’m not going?”
“Just play it! I’ll read the angles and give it back!”
Leaving a teammate standing uselessly behind you when you can use him is pure stupidity.
“Ah! Behind! Track the full-back overlapping! No—one of you stay on Baek Yi-an!”
I rolled the ball to Han Gang-rok. Daejeon’s midfield froze, clearly never expecting the pass to squeeze through that tiny window. I kept accelerating, recovered the return ball, and drove straight into the final third. The moment their back line started sliding across to cut off my options among my teammates, I flicked a glance at Yoon Seung-hwan.
“Huh? Me? If I go this way…”
I hadn’t even said I was going to pass, yet his face lit up and he quietly shifted into a new pocket of space. Watching that pure, simple grin always made me wonder how someone could be that naive. Still, a smiling Seung-hwan beat a sulking one any day of the week.
I’ve seen him cry and I’ve seen him laugh, but no matter how many times I think about it, the smile is better. There’s a reason people say that. After watching him constantly break into that dumb little grin, I’d finally learned the truth: smiling really is better.
And if I’d learned that, then maybe it was also time to teach Yoon Seung-hwan that the world wasn’t nearly as kind as he thought.
A crooked smile tugged at my lips as I watched the space open the instant Seung-hwan’s head vacated the area. I struck the ball immediately.
BOOM!
“Whoa! Hey! Baek Yi-an, even with a headguard that would—”
Thwack!
“What? That wasn’t a cross?!”
Seung-hwan stared at me with the face of a man whose birthday present had just turned into a brick. I smirked back at him, then turned and strode straight toward the Daejeon supporters’ end.
Time to do what I’d planned from the start.
What would make our Jeonbuk fans lose their minds with joy?
I’d considered a few options. Something that would shred the Daejeon fans’ hearts into confetti. Or just a pure, stylish celebration. But no matter how I turned it over, nothing comforted fans who were already fretting over a transfer that was never going to happen quite like this.
Still smiling, I stopped in front of the Daejeon supporters who were already wearing the “why the hell is he coming over here?” expression. I locked eyes with their cheerleader and roared at the top of my lungs:
Silence.
The cheerleader and the entire Daejeon end froze, stunned by the completely unexpected declaration. Looking at the stunned sea of quiet faces, I allowed myself a small, satisfied smile.