Harbinger Of Glory

The huddle was still watching him.

Leo in particular hadn’t looked away, and Reyes, feeling the attention, turned to face him.

”What?”

Leo pointed at his face, specifically, his eyes.

At that, Reyes blinked in realisation.

”Oh,” he made out as he reached up and took the sunglasses off.

He then walked them over to Nolan at the edge of the group and placed them into his hand with the care of a man depositing something fragile.

”Keep those safe,” he told Nolan without breaking stride back to his position.

”They were not cheap.”

Nolan looked down at the sunglasses in his hand and then looked up at Dawson.

Dawson shook his head once and took over.

The drill was simple enough in concept.

Red bibs, attackers and their midfielders, going at the blue bibs, defenders and theirs.

If the Blues won it back, they kept it.

If the Reds scored, they got possession again.

Leo, in green, had no team.

He played for whoever had the ball, which meant the ball was the only thing that told him where he belonged at any given moment.

After the players got the concept, Dawson separated them into 4 teams of five, with the two defensive teams having one of the 3 keepers in the squad while the other one sat things out, making 24 players in total, leaving only Leo neutral.

After a while, Nolan’s whistle went to start the contest between the two teams.

Fletcher played it to Broadhead, sparking a press as the blue teams came at them, only for Broadhead to let the ball run through his legs to Leo, who was standing behind him.

By the time the ball reached the feet of Leo, he already had what he wanted to do in mind.

He lifted his head, saw McClean already breaking the blue team’s defensive line and bent the ball up and over the backline in one motion.

The blue team’s press got broken instantly as they turned to chase McClean, who didn’t break stride.

He met it on the volley, and before Ben Amos could get his hands anywhere near the ball, the net snapped back, its sound echoing slightly through the pitch before falling back down.

”OHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” the fans mouthed, responding immediately in the stands to the whole sequence that had just unfolded.

”Damn, our team really is shaping up!”

”What a pass from Leo, but an even better volley from James McClean. Dude still has some life left in him.”

A few of them even were already looking at each other with the expression of people quietly revising their expectations upward.

The sequences that followed had a different quality to them.

Leo wasn’t doing anything spectacular in isolation.

No moment that you could pull out and put on its own.

It was more that everything he did seemed to arrive at exactly the right time.

He stayed present, with a touch here and there, and the ball always ended up somewhere better than it had been, and that made the fans in the stands start to lean forward without realising they were doing it.

Before the feeling could fully settle, Dawson’s whistle cut across the pitch.

”Switch,” he called out, waving the group on the outside in.

A murmur went through the stands, the small deflation of a crowd that had just been getting comfortable, but that feeling didn’t last long.

Because what came on had O’Shea and Seriki stepping onto the pitch together in blue, looking solid and unhurried, their confidence in their abilities showing outright.

On the red side were Jake, Ezra, Carlo and Reyes.

Four players who hadn’t shared a pitch together before today, but their demeanour already looked like they might catch problems soon.

Reyes drifted toward Leo before Nolan had even raised the whistle.

”Always pass to me,” he said, a statement of preference delivered like a known fact.

Leo looked at him for a moment and thought, fine. Let’s see.

Nolan’s whistle went, and the instant it did, Jake played it immediately to Reyes, who had dropped into the ten position and received it with his back to goal, which looked unnecessary, but to him, it was.

He met Leo’s eyes as if telling him to ’watch’ what he was going to, and Leo did.

Without looking up and probably not needing to, Reyes turned and began moving forward, and what happened next was the kind of thing that made you understand immediately why a manager would sign a player and then spend the whole season tolerating them just because of how good they were.

His movements had a looseness to them, unhurried in a way that shouldn’t have been effective but was.

Every touch saw his hips shifting just slightly, and that movement saw each defender committing to a direction and finding themselves standing in empty space.

He went past one blue bib, then another, drifting into the area with the grace of something that knew it had nowhere to be.

Then he went past the keeper who had come off his line, and then, ball still at his feet, shaped to finish without looking.

The whole pitch had stopped, and the stands had gone quiet, trying to hold onto the image of what they had just seen.

The fans couldn’t help but gasp at what they had just seen.

And then Seriki appeared from nowhere, arriving at the exact moment the ball left Reyes’s foot and clearing it off the line with the clean authority of a man who had spent years making sure moments like this didn’t count.

The clearance went to O’Shea, who controlled it, looked up, and lifted it immediately toward Leo, who was now theirs.

Leo, recovering from his Reyes-inflicted stupor, chested it down and in the same motion played it back over to the red side where Jake, Ezra and Carlo had already shaped into a line, and then he followed it across, switching sides.

Now he was conducting.

O’Shea had the ball, having received it back from Seriki, and he stood with it at his feet, calm, inviting the pressure forward before Leo called for it.

Jake came to close him down as Leo received the ball and in one movement shifted the ball from his right foot to his left and back to his right.

His body rolled over it as his hips dropped just low enough to pull Jake’s weight one way, and when Jake’s momentum went, the ball had gone the other way with Leo through the gap before Jake had finished moving.

Ezra had read it and was already collapsing across to cut him off, but Leo had already seen it and had also seen Carlo arriving at the edge of the area.

Before either of the two could really get near him, he slowed and then rolled the ball back to Max Power before Ezra could get to him.