I Have Unlimited Potential Chapter 39: On The Scoresheet?

Tuesday’s session was the first proper full training since the Derby match and David made sure everyone felt it.

They pressed from the first whistle. High intensity pressing drills, one and two-touch only phases, defending in tight spaces under physical pressure, attacking in transition with outnumbered situations that forced quick decisions. The kind of session that leaves legs heavy before the halfway point and forces the mind to compensate for what the body is complaining about.

It was the type of training that separated the players who genuinely understood football from the players who were rely athletic. The athletic ones looked increasingly ragged as the intensity continued. The ones who understood it found the right positions and the right monts and made the work look smaller than it was.

Will went through it without complaint. The recovery potions and the capsule work and the structured rest had built his fitness base into sothing genuinely different from what it had been at the start of preseason. His endurance was sixty-seven.

The physical difference between sixty and sixty-seven was not a number on a screen. It was the quality of his seventh sprint in the high intensity phase compared to his first. It was the clarity of his decision-making in the fifty-eighth minute of a session rather than the way that clarity normally started to blur.

He noticed it most in the pressing drills. He could sustain the press for the full duration of the drill without his shape deteriorating in the final ten seconds the way it had in July. The shape in the final ten seconds was the thing coaches watched most carefully because anyone could press well when they were fresh. It was who maintained the structure when tired that told you what you were looking at.

Toward the end of the session David set up a small-sided possession ga in a tight box. Six against six with two neutrals who always played with the team in possession, making it eight against six in favour of whoever had the ball. The rule was simple and brutal: lose possession and you sprinted to touch the far line before re-entering. It punished carelessness and rewarded the player who understood that keeping the ball was not a passive act but an aggressive one.

Will was in a team with Liam and Marcus and three of the younger scholars. The opposing team had Daniel Pryce.

He was aware of Daniel the way you were aware of a person who represented a version of the question you were currently trying to answer about yourself. Daniel was sixteen, technically very good in tight spaces, and had been the first-choice ten before Will had forced himself into consideration over the previous weeks.

He was not unfriendly. They had trained alongside each other for weeks without friction and had exchanged perfectly normal conversation on nurous occasions. But they were competing for the sa position, which ant every training session was also an argunt, even when no one was making it.

Daniel was sharp today. His first touch in tight areas was consistently excellent, more reliable than Will’s at close quarters, and twice in the possession ga he played passes that Will, in the sa situation, would have taken an extra touch to find. One of them produced a goal that left three players standing.

Will noted it without dwelling. He had things Daniel didn’t. The vision from range. The pressing trigger awareness in larger spaces. The patience in build-up that ca from understanding how a defensive shape moved rather than just reacting to where the ball was. They were different kinds of tens and David would choose whichever kind fit the ga in front of him. The job was to be the more useful answer to that question on more occasions.

After the session David kept both of them back briefly while the rest of the squad headed toward the changing rooms. He stood between them on the emptying pitch with his hands in his jogger pockets.

"Next match is Thursday, away at Sunderland," he said. "They sit differently from Derby. Deeper block, direct transitions. I need a ten who can keep the ball under pressure and also track back quickly when we lose it. Not one or the other. Both."

He looked at both of them in turn without any obvious signal of which way he was leaning.

"Train well tomorrow. I’ll confirm the team sheet Thursday morning."

He walked away.

Will and Daniel stood on the pitch for a mont in the particular silence of two people processing the sa situation from different sides of it. There was nothing hostile in the look they exchanged. Two players. One shirt. The sa understanding from opposite directions.

"Good session," Daniel said.

"You too," Will replied.

They walked toward the changing rooms in separate directions.

That evening Will spent an hour in the ti capsule. He was specific about the scenario he asked the system to configure: deep defensive block from the opposition, transition defending from high positions, movent and combination play in tight pockets near the eighteen-yard box.

The exact profile David had described as the deciding criteria. He wasn’t being cynical. The system gave him scenarios that made him better. The fact that the scenarios also happened to address the question his manager had just posed publicly was not a manipulation of the process. It was the point of the process.

When he ca out of the capsule he lay on his bed in the dark without turning on the light. The ceiling looked the sa it always had. The scuff in the corner from the poster he had taken down at fourteen. The thin line of streetlight through the curtains. The particular quiet of the house at ten in the evening.

Thursday. Sunderland away.

He wanted his na on that team sheet.

A/N:

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