1.46 - Soulmates

46.

Brandy is borderline disgusting, but it's what heroes drink in action movies when they've taken damage and want to keep fighting. My situation was more complicated - I wanted to get on my feet and watch the rest of the first half, but I needed to keep my foot elevated. So I lay there, head on the disgusting passageway, listening to the match, smelling the scene. Down at foot level it was all artificial smells - container ship plastic and deodorant spray and spilled Powerade.

One oddity: I’d picked up 1 XP per minute for the time I’d played. I suppose playing counted as watching.

XP balance: 1299

But the real point of today was hoping my client would impress Jackie. "How's he doing?" I asked.

Ziggy replied. "Raffi? He's really good. But we're struggling. The Vikings are all over us." He was itching to get on the pitch and help his mates. No way I was going to allow that. There are times in life you have to put your foot down.

I heard two cheers, and both times the mood in our little camp cooled.

2-2.

The alcohol, though, warmed me up. I slipped into my brain pool, swam around, pushed myself back into memories of the first half. That first goal. The anticipation, the dribble, the shot. There was nothing particularly hard about any of it. I'd scored a lot of goals like that growing up. Perhaps this time it was a little sharper, a little more angular, a little... faster. I rewound the memory and pressed play. I found no emotion. There was the goalie, there were the defenders, there's the ball, so I take it, move that way, shoot. It was all inevitable.

The next goal was similar, but with added pizzazz. It looked like I was taking the piss, but it was simply the most efficient way to score from that particular scenario. I tried to replay the injury scene, but it was unavailable. Blocked.

I wouldn't let me watch.

The pain and the boredom equalised. I spaced out.

***

The lads came off for half-time. They saw me lying there and discussed abandoning the game. "Don't talk shit," I said. "How long's the half-time break?"

I'd been to tons of these matches in recent weeks, but I'd also been to tons of others, all with slightly different timings and rules. "Five minutes."

"Great," I said. "Eat your bananas or whatever. Wake me up 30 seconds before the second half and we'll talk strategy."

I closed my eyes and was immediately startled to feel someone shaking my left knee. "What?"

"It's time."

"Pull me up." I held my hand out and waited for it to be gripped. Someone pulled me upright and I latched onto the nearest wooden perimeter board while standing on one leg. The Jokers gathered round to hear my thoughts. I suppose Ziggy had told them I was Tommy Tactics. Raffi was right in front of me, looking worried and interested. Maybe that's why he looked lopsided - because each half of his face showed a different emotion. "Lads. Here's the plan. Deck in goal. Hugh, Graham, Musa, two of you will be in defence at all times. Run hard, sub often. Pass to Raffi. Raffi. You're my omni-half. That's a new position I've just invented. I need you to do everything, be everywhere."

I brought my right foot down onto the floor with all the care of someone sliding nuclear rods into a new power plant. It hurt. Raffi spoke in his usual abrasive style. "That's only four. Who's up front?"

I pushed the gate open and stepped onto the pitch. Hobbled onto the pitch.

"Oh, no fucking way," cried Jackie. "Get back out here."

"Maaaax," whinged Ziggy. "Come onnnnnnn."

***

The second half kicked off and I just pottered around for a minute. Every step was painful. Shooting with my right was out of the question. I could maybe use it to pass if I sort of locked my ankle and hit the ball close to the heel. As long as it didn't twist the foot, it should be all right.

Then I saw the thug who'd attacked me go into a challenge with Raffi. Raffi turned sideways, let the guy bounce into him. No big deal for a specimen like Raffi. But seeing it got my blood pumping. Big adrenaline spike. As Raffi stepped away with the ball, I found myself dashing towards him. He passed to me. I stopped the ball with my left foot, stopped it dead, left it there for Raffi to come on to, sprinted off towards the right of the goal. Two defenders tracked me. Four metres away from the goalie's D, I veered left, and found that Raffi had passed it exactly into my path. I struck the ball left-footed into the near post.

3-2.

My momentum took me to the side boards in the corner of the goal. I held onto one. Something was happening to me.

It wasn't the surreal waking nightmare of the first twenty minutes. That was all long gone. No, this was something else. I looked at Raffi. He was grinning at me. I grinned back. I hobbled back to my own half so that the game could restart.

It went about the same. The blues attacked, tried to get into position to shoot. The whites closed down the spaces until Raffi got the ball. But when he got it I'd already moved and was ready to collect his pass. I shaped my body as though I'd pass it back to the keeper, but instead did a little backheel flick, spin, and sprint forwards. The ball rolled perfectly into Raffi's path and he pushed it hard, diagonally, to where I met it and smashed it with extreme prejudice at the top-right of the goal. The goalie spread his arms out like a starfish, and actually got a good chunk of his upper arm onto the ball, but it barely changed the direction.

4-2.

The contact I'd made with the ball was so perfect that it didn't hurt in the slightest. I barely felt it.

And again, there was that feeling. While the blues bickered with each other, I tried to identify what was going on. It was something barely within the realms of my comprehension.

Football is a team game, but it's one that I've always played solo. It's normally easy to spot an egotistical player. They are the ones who always shoot and never pass. They are total dicks. Me? I like passing and making assists. You'd need a very, very specific curse to notice that I, the great provider, the ultimate team player, was, in fact, utterly disconnected from the other guys. But that's how I'd felt my whole life. Pass me the ball and I start making calculations. There's a guy running on that path, so if I pass the ball there he'll have a chance to shoot. Football as mathematics. One guy called me out on it once, at school. Accused me of turning the sport into an exercise in trigonometry. I gave him a harsh look because I was astonished that he'd discovered my secret, but he apologised and took it back.

What was happening here with Raffi was nothing like maths. It was... it was a true synergy. My movements, Raffi's movements, my vision, his vision. Intertwined. As one. I dropped deeper. Desperate to get more connection with him. We passed to each other a couple of times. Each pass was an affirmation of my existence, my place in the world. Our vectors, the only vectors.

Disgusted by our unity, sickened by the beauty of our process, one of the thugs darted towards me. Furious that the spell had been broken, I faked that I would sprint down the line, while Raffi made the same movement on the other side of the pitch, but for real. The thug adjusted his line of attack to account for my new trajectory. I nutmegged him. Oops. And before I'd even looked up, I was playing a dream-swept left-footed pass that arced around and in front of Raffi, so that at the last moment he could clip the ball with his right foot, doop!, low into the net. Absolute perfection from start to finish.

5-2.

The warmth was incredible now, and it wasn't the brandy. Raffi turned and beamed at me. Jogged back, smiling broadly, gave me a fistbump.

Graham came over, laughing, smiling, frowning. This was sport on a level he'd never seen so close at hand. "Bloody hell! How long have you two been playing together?"

"First time," said Raffi.

"Maybe in a past life," I said.

"Matthews and Mortensen," he said, and that pushed me so far past smitten my knees nearly buckled.

***

1953.

The FA Cup Final, when that was the biggest game in world football. 100,000 in Wembley Stadium. The first game watched live by a huge television audience. Millions of people up and down the UK had bought TVs to watch the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Now they were using those TVs to watch one of the most incredible sporting events in history.

Bolton Wanderers are leading 3-1 against Blackpool. Their first goal was scored by Nat Lofthouse. Calling him a giant of the game reduces the word 'giant' to pathetic, meaningless proportions. In some sports, the jersey numbers of famous players are 'retired'. In a just universe, the very name Lofthouse would be retired. There is nowhere else for it to go.

Nat Lofthouse.

Type his name and choose any font size you want, the bigger the better. But leave yourself somewhere to go. Because there were two better players in that cup final.

Stan Mortensen scored a hattrick. The only player to score a cup final hattrick at the old Wembley. (He also scored 4 goals on his debut for England, amongst countless other achievements.) You'd think the game would be known as the 'Mortensen Match'. Not so. To find this match report, you need to type 'the Matthews Final'.

Remember Bolton were winning 3-1?

Enter Stanley Matthews. He'd been on the losing team in the two previous finals, and he was in no mood for the hattrick. He put in a personal performance so monumental that Mortensen's three goals faded into the background. It finished 4-3 with ten million watching, including millions of kids who would run outside and try to dribble like Stan. '53 was the Matthews Final. End of.

Matthews kept playing at the top of English football until he was 50 years old. The first winner of the Balon d'Or. The best player in Europe. Despite being hacked to pieces, he was never booked or sent off.

If Rafii and I were Matthews and Mortensen, I wanted to be Matthews. But I was Mortensen.

The real joy was knowing that Raffi was a student of the game. Interested in its history. Normally, the only people who cared about the OGs of the sport were octogenarians. Dudes who'd been around at the time or heard their dads going on about them. Hearing a guy younger than me say those names made me dizzy. I felt drunk; it wasn't the brandy.