As Will sat in the living room, waiting for his sister to finish with warming the food, his phone buzzed on the cushion beside him and he picked it up. It was a message from Will.

Alex: You good for tomorrow

Will: Yeah. You?

Alex: Always. Get some rest tonight man, don’t be overthinking.

Will smiled and put the phone back down. Alex had a way of saying the right thing in the fewest possible words. He had been one of the first people at the club to actually talk to Will like a person rather than someone who was just taking up space in training. Will appreciated that more than he ever said out loud.

Janet came back into the living room carrying two plates and handed one to Will before dropping down on the other end of the couch and tucking her legs underneath her.

"You’re watching this?" She asked, looking at the television with a frown.

"I wasn’t really watching anything."

She took the remote and changed the channel to something she preferred, some drama series she had probably already seen twice. Will didn’t mind. He ate quietly and let the noise of the television fill the room.

"Are you starting tomorrow?" Janet asked without looking away from the screen.

Will turned to look at her, while blinking rapidly. "Are you serious, I just told you this yes-" Will stopped himself. "Yes. Yes, I’m starting

"That’s good You need to make an impression so you need all the game time you can get."

"I know." 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

"Like actually make an impression. Not just run around like a cardio merchant or something. Do something that people remember."

Will glanced over at her. "You’re really into this tonight."

"I’m into it every day." She said, still not looking at him. "I just laugh at you most times, but I decided not to laugh today".

"Thanks". Will said.

"Don’t thank me". Janet said. "I just didn’t think it would be fun to kick a dead dog".

"Fair enough. I should have seen that coming". Will shrugged.

After they finished eating, Janet took the plates back to the kitchen and Will stayed on the couch for a little while longer before deciding to do something productive with the rest of his evening. He went upstairs to his room and opened his laptop. He had been in the habit lately of watching footage of the teams they were going to play against, not in any deeply analytical way, just getting a feel for how they moved and pressed and defended.

He pulled up some clips on his laptop but there wasn’t much to work with. It was a friendly, and the other side was made up mostly of trialists, players from different clubs and different backgrounds thrown together with no real coherent identity yet. There was no real tactical shape to study, no patterns built over months of working together, no set pieces drilled into muscle memory. They were essentially strangers to each other, which meant the match tomorrow would be scrappy and disjointed in the way that these kinds of games always were.

Will closed the laptop after a few minutes because there was genuinely nothing useful he was going to get from staring at it. You couldn’t prepare tactically for a group of individuals who hadn’t prepared tactically for themselves. The match would be decided by moments, by individual quality, by who wanted it more when the ball fell in a dangerous area. That was actually something he could work with.

The system hadn’t offered him any breakdown either. There was nothing for it to analyze. There were no tendencies or preferred tactical or defensive shape as they were a trialist team, so everything that happened tomorrow would be on him. Well, him and the information the system would give him after the match started

Seeing as there was nothing else to do to calm his head, he spent the greater part of the night doom scrolling until he got tired and closed his laptop and stared at the ceiling in deep thought

He thought about his dad.

His dad had been the one sitting beside him during that Champions League final, the one who had groaned loudly when Messi scored and then gone quiet for a long moment before shaking his head slowly and saying, "You know what, you can’t even be angry at that. That man is different." Will had been four years old and he had understood exactly what his dad meant. There was a level of quality that existed beyond rivalry and beyond allegiance. A level that simply demanded respect.

His dad had driven him to training every Saturday morning for three years without ever complaining about it once. He had stood on the sideline in the cold watching Will play for his youth team, always the first to clap and the last to leave. He never pushed too hard or said too much. He just showed up, every time, and let Will know through his presence that whatever Will was building mattered.

He wasn’t around to see tomorrow’s match. Will thought about that for a moment and let it sit with him the way he usually did when it came up. Not with grief anymore, not really, but with a quiet kind of weight that never fully left. He wanted to play well tomorrow for a lot of reasons and that was one of them. For his dad. He wanted him to come home and be greeted with the news of how well he played and how he’s made sure that the David had to start considering him for the team

He reached over and turned off the bedside lamp and lay in the dark listening to the sounds of the house settling around him. Downstairs he could faintly hear the television still playing and Janet moving around in the kitchen.

He thought about the pitch outside, the worn grass and the mud stains and the blood and sweat he left on the pitch, how much he practiced until he could no longer feel his legs, all the goals he scored in front of nobody.

He thought about tomorrow.

He wasn’t afraid anymore. What his sister had said had stripped something loose in him and now there was just a steadiness sitting where the nerves had been. A readiness. He had worked for this, trained for this, given up things for this. Whatever happened tomorrow was not going to define him permanently, but it was going to tell him something about who he was when it mattered.

He closed his eyes.

Tomorrow he would find out.