Derby pushed.

When teams chase a game they tend to take a shape that creates the same problems they were trying to avoid. Their defensive midfielder pushed higher, which left the space behind him more exposed than it had been in the first hour of the match. Their wide players narrowed to give the centre-backs extra cover against the threat of the counter, which in turn freed Middlesbrough’s full backs to hold wider and give more options. Their back four held deeper to avoid the counter, and in doing so created the space behind their midfield that Will had been reading all game. The shape that was supposed to help them score was simultaneously the shape that left them most vulnerable to being hurt.

Will didn’t exploit it immediately. He was a very patient man. He tracked back when he had to, dropping twenty, sometimes twenty-five yards to help the midfield hold the ball and slow Derby’s rhythm. He won a couple of aerial challenges that left his shoulders complaining and surprised him slightly, since aerial play wasn’t a part of his game he had spent particular time on. His heading stat was forty-three. He won them through positioning rather than power, getting across his marker and arriving at the ball first rather than trying to outjump anyone. He filed that away. Positioning first, always.

He generally did the unspectacular things that keep a one goal lead intact when the opposition has momentum and the crowd behind them is starting to believe. The duels he won in central midfield. The times he received the ball under pressure and played it simple to keep possession rather than trying to make something happen. The tracking runs back toward his own half that nobody in the ground would have noticed unless they were specifically watching him.

In the seventy-third minute, Derby equalised.

It came from a set piece, which was the way the game had suggested it might. A corner that the Middlesbrough defence dealt with poorly, the first header going straight back to the Derby winger at the edge of the box who laid it off. The ball dropped to the Derby number eight arriving late and he hit a first time volley that found the bottom corner cleanly. It wasn’t a lucky goal. It was a good goal, well worked and well struck, the kind of goal that deserved the celebration it got from the Derby bench.

The goalkeeper got a hand to it but it wasn’t enough.

Will stood with his hands on his hips and watched his teammates react, some of them with heads down, some clapping and calling for focus. He looked at the clock on the scoreboard. Seventeen minutes plus added time. Enough time. He had been in the time capsule in exactly these situations, one goal up, then level, needing to find something in the final quarter of a match when the legs were heavy and the thinking had to compensate for what the body couldn’t give anymore.

He didn’t feel panic. Something in him had shifted over the past weeks and panic was no longer the first thing that arrived when the situation became difficult. He looked at the game as a problem with a solution rather than a crisis requiring survival. The distinction mattered. Surviving a difficult passage gets you one point. Solving it gets you three.

The game opened up after the equaliser the way games always do when both teams want to win it. Derby were energised, Middlesbrough were rattled and trying to find their feet again. The space that appeared in the final fifteen minutes of a tight game is different from the space that exists when teams are still cautious. It’s more honest, less manufactured. Both teams commit more, which means both teams leave more.

In the eighty-first minute he got the ball in a tight area near the centre circle with a Derby player tight on his back. The marker was close enough that Will could feel the heat of him. Not enough space to turn. Not enough space to drive. Exactly the kind of situation that punishes players who freeze or take an extra touch.

He had been in this exact situation in the capsule what felt like hundreds of times. He shielded the ball, let his body take the contact of the pressing player’s weight, waited for the commitment to become irreversible, then played a deft back-heel into the space to Marcus who had taken up an angle two yards to his right, perfectly placed because he had read the press and made the run before Will even received the ball. The combination was so quick and clean that the Derby midfielder who had been pressing Will was now pressing empty space.

Marcus drove forward immediately. The Derby press had stepped up to win the ball back and their defensive shape was suddenly thin, stretched by the momentum of their own press. Will spun off his marker and burst through the gap, angling his run toward the inside left channel, the one place the Derby right back couldn’t cover from his current position without abandoning his man.

Marcus saw the run. The through ball was perfectly weighted, hard and low, skipping across the surface with enough pace to beat the cover but not so much that Will couldn’t control it at full stretch. He reached it just ahead of the recovering centre-back, one touch to kill it, set himself with the goalkeeper coming off his line, and shot across him toward the far post.

The keeper got a full hand to it this time.

It went wide.

Will stood with his hands clasped behind his head, looking at the sky for two full seconds. Then he dropped his hands and turned back. The near miss sat with him for a moment before he let it go. Still four minutes of regular time left, plus whatever the board showed for added time.

Three minutes.

In the second minute of added time, a Derby midfielder caught Liam late just outside the box. Twenty-two yards from goal, slightly left of centre. Liam protested the booking the Derby player received for it even though he was already getting up and was clearly fine. David was shouting something from the touchline about the positioning of the wall.

Will stood over the ball and looked at the wall, at the gap on the right side of it, at the goalkeeper’s weight. He was carrying it fractionally toward his left, anticipating the standard curled effort over the wall that most players would try from this position. It was a small tell. A small tell was all he needed.

He had been working on his set pieces. The session on the rebounder wall the Wednesday before the match had been specifically about height and delivery angle. Low and around, not high and over. A different question for the goalkeeper.

He ran up and hit it low and hard around the right side of the wall, bending it with the inside of his right foot. The goalkeeper moved across, committed to the line of the ball, got both hands to it and parried it back into the box. A good save.

The rebound fell to Liam, arriving late from the edge of the box.

Liam hit it first time. No hesitation.

The net moved.

The noise that came from the Rockliffe stands was the loudest thing Will had heard in a real game. He was already moving toward Liam before the ball had even settled in the net. The team arrived from everywhere in that way teams do when something has just happened that might define the whole season in hindsight. Someone’s elbow caught him in the ribs and he didn’t care at all.

[Ding!]

[Set piece delivery credited: +15 Credits]

[Match Rating update: 8.3]

The referee blew full time two minutes later.

Two-one. Home win. First league match of the season.

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