Rhodes hovered near the touchline, hands on hips. He was nineteen, keen, and still at the stage where being told to watch felt suspiciously like being told you didn’t belong.

  I caught his eye. He looked away immediately.

  “Rhodes,” I called. “You fit?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Good. You’re helping me then.”

  He jogged over, relief written all over him. I handed him a bib. “You’re opposition right side. You’re not playing—yet. You’re a problem.”

  He echoed, “A problem?”

  “Yeah. Your job is to make the drill uncomfortable. Start high, drop late, step in when the pass looks safe. If you think you can nick it, go for it.”

  I waved Mitch over between reps.

  “Can I borrow McAteer and Langley for five?” I said. “And, uh, Tom.”

  Mitch squinted at the setup, then at Rhodes hovering beside me like he’d been promoted by accident. “Fine,” he said. “Don’t break them.”

  McAteer grinned like this was a holiday. Langley just nodded. Tom Schofield looked confused but jogged over anyway.

  I set them up opposite Rhodes and Boras, staggered slightly, like a lopsided front three.

  “Alright,” I said. “You lot attack the right channel. No shots. Your goal is entry and disruption; drag shapes and force decisions.”

  McAteer raised a hand. “Can we score if it’s on?”

  “No,” I said. “If you score, you’ve missed the point.”

  We ran it.

  At first it looked like chaos. Passes fizzed into feet that weren’t ready. Rhodes stepped when he shouldn’t, hesitated when he should’ve gone, got spun once by Reeves and recovered late. Boras dropped too deep, then overcorrected. Exactly the sort of mess that never showed up cleanly in matches.

  And yet, I hadn’t seen FMSim even acknowledging we were training.

  I felt it like a word on the tip of my tongue.

  This should count.

  I reset the drill, hands on hips, and tried again, but this time I thought about how the system named things. It didn’t care about vibes. It cared about intent, inputs, conditions. I hadn’t fed it with the Youtube videos it had begged for the other drills. So I did something slightly ridiculous.

  I looked past the pitch, past the cones, and spoke quietly, like I was explaining it to myself.

  “Right,” I muttered. “This is a defensive transition simulation. Right-side overload. Live pressure. No fixed patterns.”

  Rhodes glanced at me. “Sorry?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Do it again.”

  Still nothing from FMSim as well.

  I clapped my hands once. “Reset. Same thing, but listen carefully.”

  I pointed at Rhodes. “You’re the first problem they have to solve. Start high and wide. If the full-back takes a bad first touch, you press. If the ball goes inside, you delay and cut the lane. If they play through you, you sprint to recover and re-engage. Say which one you’re doing.”

  Rhodes frowned. “Out loud?”

  “Yes.”

  I turned to the back four.

  “Palmer, you’re the reference point. First touch tells us everything. If you’re clean, we drop. If you’re loose, we jump.”

  Then Wood and Kowalski.

  “You two are cover and handoff. If McAteer pins, one of you steps, the other covers the space behind. If Langley drifts inside, you don’t both follow; pass him on. Call it.”

  Reeves pointed at himself. “Then me?”

  “You’re the hinge,” I said. “You go when Rhodes goes. If he jumps, you squeeze. If he drops, you hold the line and show them wide. No guessing. I want instant reaction.”

  He nodded once. “Fine.”

  “You lot are provoking. You’re not trying to score. You’re trying to force a defensive decision. If you don’t make them choose, you’ve failed the rep.”

  McAteer grinned. “So be annoying. That’s my brand.”

  “Exactly.”

  We ran it again.

  “PRESS.”

  “HOLD.”

  “INSIDE.”

  “SWITCH.”

  The drill didn’t get prettier, but it got sharper. We’d gotten fewer dead runs and fewer half-steps. Rhodes pressed too early once, got played around, and on the next rep held his run just long enough to funnel the ball where Wood could step in cleanly.

  Oh.

  So that was the trick.

  Not inventing drills.

  Naming what the drill was actually teaching.

  It was, quietly, the best thing I’d put on a pitch since I’d gotten this job. Decisions were being made in real time, named, owned, corrected on the fly. Even the mistakes had shape to them.

  The catch, of course, was bodies.

  Seven needed, and that was the minimum. Eight if you wanted it to breathe. A full back four, a wide problem, two central attackers, someone willing to pin, and someone willing to drift. This was the sort of numbers Tier Seven pretended it had right up until a lad worked late or someone’s car wouldn’t start.

  “McAteer! Langley! That’s enough.” Then Mitch called them around, and this drill was done.

  Mitch glanced over at me, thumb hooked in his pocket. “Need ’em back. Finishing patterns.”

  I just shrugged. They were his session. I wasn’t the one who decided what ran and what didn’t.

  So I focused on the next best problem: speed. Our defense consisted of amputated war veterans from the Second World War. The fastest player we got was Reeves, and his Pace was a 65 ± 30.

  On a scale of 200, where

  200 is ‘Gareth Bale if in front of him is Marc Bartra’,

  150 is ‘top-flight winger everyone keeps calling ‘electric’’,

  100 is “respectable, won’t embarrass you on Match of the Day”,

  60 is . . . something else entirely.

  Sixty is ‘looks fast until literally anyone else starts running.’ At 60, you’re beaten by the concept of distance.

  We needed this drill: Lateral Sprint & Recovery Drill (Level 1)

  By the time the session report rolled in, the pattern was obvious.

  The gains were small, but they were denser.

  Last time, a lot of lads had scraped a couple of percentage points and called it development. This time, several of them added another two or three on top, on the same attributes, under live pressure. That might not sound like much written down, but at this level it was enormous. For a few of them, it effectively doubled what they’d managed to extract from the previous session.

  Palmer stood out immediately. His Concentration ticked from 59 to 60, with a 38% current progress. He seemed like the type who could explode exponentially if he was well-drilled. If only I could gain EXP fast enough to unlock more stats so I could see his actual level.

  My own EXP for the drills had gone up too:

  Mitch finally blew the whistle for good.

  I flicked through the individual progress logs while the lads drifted toward water bottles and idle complaining.

  Wood’s numbers jumped first, just under nine percent across the targeted attributes. That was okay for his age.

  Then Rhodes.

  Same range. Same nine percent.

  That made me pause.

  Rhodes was four years older than Wood. He shouldn’t have been keeping pace like that. Not unless something had clicked properly. I drilled down a layer.

  Fifty-three wasn’t spectacular, but for his age, in this league, in this mess of a squad? It was quietly solid. To be fair, Rhodes had always looked… fine, which was the problem, because Reeves already existed.

  Reeves was one of the most reliable players we had. You didn’t drop a player like that lightly at this level. You survived by clinging to them.

  Still, the thought wouldn’t go away.

  If Rhodes could do this, how many others were we sleeping on? Tier Seven squads didn’t have depth. But maybe we had latency.

  I closed the logs and looked back out at the pitch, suddenly less sure that the pecking order was as fixed as everyone pretended it was.

  Really need to look into that.

  I was halfway through packing the spare cones when Kowalski stopped beside me. “You not jumping in?” he asked, nodding back toward the pitch.

  I checked the system without thinking.

  “Not today,” I said. “Still feeling it.”

  “You might want an ice bath tonight. Cold tap, ten minutes, swear a bit. Then carbs before bed should do you good.”

  I raised a brow. “You voluntarily take cold showers?”

  “Showers?” he said. “No, no. Showers are for people who still have hope. I sit in the bath like a war crime victim and question every decision that led me there. First two minutes you think you’re tough. Minute three you start bargaining. Minute five you’re seeing God. After that, it’s fine. Numb as a Sunday crowd in February.”

  I wondered why Kowalski was still stuck playing at this level if he was that committed to torturing himself for sport.

  He glanced toward Mitch, who was herding players into a finishing drill like a sheepdog. “If it were up to me, I’d tell you to take the week off. No heroics. One week of being boring beats six of being broken.”

  “And if it’s not up to you?”

  Kowalski huffed a laugh. “Then Mitch remembers we’re playing Portishead and starts hearing words like ‘rotation’ as personal insults.”

  I stood there a second longer than necessary.

  The truth was uglier. I wasn’t just a bit sore. I was recovering glacially. I’d emptied the tank in the last match, then I’d gone straight back to work. At fifty-five percent sharpness, recovery lagged, and I wasn’t sure if I could even get to 80% before the weekend hit. Boras was refusing to train and Mansfield had eaten a red card. It was looking grim. Maybe I really needed to look into the development kids now.

  I pushed that thought aside because there wasn’t time to sit with it. Right now, there was one thing that mattered more than how my legs felt in three days’ time: Portishead.

  Bottom of the table and in a relegation battle with us. If this didn’t scream must-win, nothing would.

  ’s new manager Liam Rosenior: In English, the word “manage” is divided into two “man” and “age”, so you are ageing men.