Glory Of The Football Manager System-Chapter 369: The Phone Call I

July 17th, 2017

The training pitch at Geylang was a hive of controlled, purposeful activity. The Singaporean heat was already a thick, heavy blanket at ten in the morning, but the squad was working through it with a new, sharp focus that had been absent before the Atlético game.

The 4-2 win had been a confidence boost, but the video analysis session had been a necessary, cold dose of reality. The 18% pressing efficiency number had landed like a stone in the dressing room. They knew they had been second best for forty-five minutes. They knew the scoreline had flattered them. And they were working to fix it.

My coaching staff were a well-oiled machine. Sarah was running the main tactical shape drill on the main pitch, her voice clear and precise as she walked the two central midfield units through the pressing triggers.

She had a set of cones laid out to represent the opposition back four and midfield, and she was physically moving players into position, showing them the angles to cut off, the moments to press, the moments to hold.

"Not yet, Luka!" she called out, as Milivojević started to move a fraction too early. "Wait for the trigger! The trigger is the pass to the full-back! Then we go!"

Rebecca had a small group of players who had played the full ninety minutes doing a low-impact recovery session in the shade.

She had them on resistance bands, working through a series of controlled movements designed to increase blood flow and aid recovery without putting any stress on their joints.

She moved between them with the quiet, watchful authority of someone who knew every single player’s physical limits better than they did themselves. She saw Tarkowski wince as he stretched his hamstring and was at his side in a second.

"Too much?" she asked. He shook his head. "Just tight," he said. She nodded. "Hold it for five more seconds, then release slowly. Don’t force it."

Kevin Bray had the set-piece group on the far side of the pitch. He had a laptop on a tripod showing clips of Atlético’s defensive set-up from the night before, and he was walking the attacking unit through the three different corner routines we had been working on.

"They leave the back post open," he was saying, pointing at the screen. "Every single time. We get Benteke to make a run to the near post, drag the defenders with him, and we hit the space at the back. James, you see that?" Tomkins, who had a knack for finding space in a crowded box, was nodding slowly, his eyes fixed on the screen.

Marcus Reid, our analyst, was on the touchline with his own laptop, tagging clips from the current session in real time. Every drill, every mistake, every moment of quality was being captured, logged, and prepared for the next debrief.

And at the far end of the pitch, Michael was putting Hennessey and Mandanda through a brutal, brilliant goalkeeping session: sharp, close-range saves, one-on-ones, dealing with crosses. The sound of the ball hitting the keepers’ gloves was a constant, percussive rhythm in the background of the session.

I stood and watched them all for a while, a quiet, deep satisfaction settling in my chest. This was what a proper coaching staff looked like. This was what a top-level training session felt like.

Every single person knew their job and was doing it to the highest possible standard. The players were responding. The intensity was high. The quality was improving with every drill.

The three-way battle for the number ten position was already making the sessions electric. James, Bojan, and Eze were all in the main group, and every time one of them got on the ball, you could feel the shift in energy.

They were constantly trying to one-up each other: a no-look pass from James, a sudden, explosive turn from Eze, a perfectly weighted through-ball from Bojan. It was a silent, unspoken competition, and it was making every single player on that pitch better.

But as I watched a transition drill, my eyes kept being drawn to the left side of the pitch. To Ben Chilwell. He was having a great session: his energy was relentless, his touch was clean, his final ball was consistently excellent.

He was twenty years old and he was already one of the best attacking full-backs in the league. He was also the only natural left back in the entire first-team squad.

The thought had been a low-level hum of anxiety in the back of my mind for weeks. Now, watching him sprint the length of the pitch to join an attack, it became a loud, insistent alarm. One bad tackle in a pre-season friendly.

One pulled hamstring in a training session. One suspension for a red card. And the entire left side of our defence would be exposed. We could shift Tomkins or Dann out there, but they were centre-backs.

We could ask Ward to play on his unnatural side, but he was a right-back. We could not go into a Premier League season with one player holding down an entire position. It was not a question of whether Chilwell was good enough. He was. It was a question of what happened when he was not available.

I saw Freedman standing in the shade at the edge of the pitch, watching the session with his arms folded. I walked over to him.

"We need a left back," I said, without preamble.

He nodded slowly. He had been thinking the same thing. "I was watching Chilwell," he said. "He looks a bit isolated."

"He is isolated," I said. "He’s the only one we’ve got. One injury and we’re patching it up with players out of position for the rest of the season. We can’t have that."

"Agreed," he said. "Who do you have in mind?"

I had already done the research. I had spent the previous evening on my laptop, scrolling through scouting reports, watching footage, and looking at contract situations. There was one name that kept jumping out at me.

"Grimaldo," I said.

***

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