The first thing I did after settling onto the bench wasn’t stretch, hydrate properly, or even breathe like a medically supervised human being.

  No.

  It was to assess myself and look for the reason why I couldn’t even last an hour on the pitch.

  My stamina was still at 102, not horrible, but I still couldn’t keep up. I scrolled through the stats to find the culprit, and there it was:

  The smoking gun. The limp noodle in my athletic spaghetti.

  The UI helpfully chimed another breadcrumb:

  I snorted. Now that was a dramatic name for a quest.

  Match Sharpness improves with minutes, repetition, consistency. It’s exposure therapy for the cardiovascular system. I can fix this. No. I will fix this. All I need is three or four matches before my legs stop checking out at the 55-minute mark.

  Mitch didn’t even let me finish catching my breath. “Jamie! Over ’ere.”

  I pushed off the bench with a grunt, calves twitching like they were trying to unionize against me. A couple of lads did ask me to join them for a pint after the game, which would’ve been a good opportunity to mingle had I not had coaching duties to attend to, so here I was.

  He jerked his chin at the field. “Talk me through what you saw.”

  A proper debrief, it was.

  I said, “Defensive shape needs tightening. When we’re dropping into a low block, the back four compress too fast but the midfield doesn’t match the squeeze. It leaves a band of space twenty yards out. That’s how Thatcham’s forward kept drifting into pockets.”

  Mitch grunted once. That looked like approval. “Aye. I clocked that from the sideline.”

  I continued. “Mansfield and Evans are fine individually, but they don’t communicate. And when Okafor steps in, nobody compensates behind him. That created two of the overloads on the right. We need to set a trigger—maybe first pass wide—so they know when to shuffle early.”

  He nodded again, slower this time, but still engaged.

  “And the central mids,” I added, swiping my UI aside. “They’re not involving themselves enough. They’re reactive. When the tempo rises, they drift too deep and stop showing for the ball. Leaves Chinedu isolated, so our build-up stalls. If we coached them into vertical support patterns—”

  Mitch’s eyebrow twitched.

  “But also,” I went on, tragically unaware of what that twitch might entail. “their distances are off. They don’t move in coherent form, so when we transition, we lose the second phase too easily. We could run a pattern drill where the pivots—”

  “Look, Jamie,” Mitch cut me off. “I asked for impressions. Not a full bloody dissertation.”

  “Right. Just giving the overview.”

  “Aye, well . . .” He scratched his jaw. “Good thoughts. Most of ’em. But you’re two sessions back after seven years out. Let me handle the midfield for now.”

  Ah.

  There it was.

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  The subtle ‘stay in your lane.’ He got me the job; I shouldn’t really have overstepped.

  He clapped a firm hand on my shoulder. Friendly, but also final. “What I do want,” Mitch said, “is for you to take a proper look at our defensive shape drill. The one I want us using.”

  He pointed toward the cones already laid out on the far end of the pitch: a rigid line of defensive markers set up in a familiar, old-school 4–4–2 defensive shell.

  “You’ll run the back line through that next session,” he said. “I’ve prepped the notes for you to study. Standard back line, so you’ll get it in no time.”

  “Understood.”

  “Good. Less essay, more execution.”

  He stepped away, calling over another player who hadn’t left yet, leaving me standing there with a slight sting under my ribs.

  It didn’t take me nearly as long as I feared to study the drill at home, mostly because half the concepts were still lodged somewhere in the tactical attic of my brain. Seven-year hiatus or not, once I started reading Mitch’s notes, old patterns slotted back into place like someone flipping breakers in a dusty fuse box.

  Still, I didn’t want to bluff it. Mitch could smell a shortcut from fifty yards away.

  So I parked myself in front of my (new) laptop, legs propped up on a pillow because my thighs still felt like they’d been slow-roasted. I skimmed through the session PDF he’d sent—tight back-four compression, the asymmetric right shift on wide triggers, the timing of fullback engagement—and most of it made immediate sense. The familiarity was almost embarrassing. Like, Wow, I really was built in a lab for this kind of thing, wasn’t I?

  Still, I wanted an edge, so I did the only reasonable thing a man with a UI system, a bruised ego, and disposable income would do: I bought a tactics course.

  Some ex-analyst from The Athletic—proper nerd pedigree—ran a whole module on defensive shapes, shell structures, and how to drill width control without frying players’ brains. I watched three lessons back-to-back until the guy’s voice droned like a bedtime story for football obsessives. Half of it I already knew. The other half plugged neatly into the gaps Mitch’s PDF left open.

  And then, when I pulled up my character sheet to see if any of that theoretical cramming had counted, something new glinted at me:

  It wasn’t active. It wasn’t even greyed out. It just sat there like a locked door with someone breathing on the other side.

  This meant: the system wanted context, some sort of narrative justification. Some kind of event tied to . . . what? Understanding a formation? Applying it in real-time? Getting thrown into a system change?

  From what I’d seen so far, the UI didn’t hand out quests for thinking about stuff. It handed them out when something meaningful happened: Play time → Match Sharpness quest.

  Which meant, if I wanted a Formation Understanding quest, I needed to be exposed to a formation change. Something live. Something prompted by the environment or by a clear objective.

  My brain immediately latched onto a catastrophically stupid idea.

  What if I forced the system to acknowledge tactical variety?

  If the system responded to ‘experience,’ then maybe I could . . . manufacture some.

  I opened my laptop again, cracked my knuckles, and pulled up a folder I hadn’t touched since university coaching drills: “Tactical Systems – Everything But The Kitchen Sink.” A graveyard of old templates, weird experiments, and half-baked shape transitions.

  I loaded up a blank pitch map.

  Then I started deliberately exposing myself to formations like some kind of tactical pervert. I would learn, and I would get so intimate with shapes and formations until I got a hard-on from sliding magnetic markers of imaginary No. 10s into half-spaces.

  4-3-3.

  4-1-4-1.

  5-3-2.

  3-4-3.

  The cursed 3-3-3-1 that Bielsa evangelists died on hills for. Even a 4-2-2-2 that made my eyes water.

  I leaned in close to the screen, scrolling through diagrams, zooming and annotating. I even watched an old YouTube breakdown of Nagelsmann’s box midfield at 2x speed while holding my mouse like a conductor’s baton, hoping the UI would pop something like:

  But nothing happened.

  My eyes drifted to the training schedule Mitch had emailed.

  Tomorrow: “Tactical Walkthrough – 4-4-2 → Transitional Shape.”

  A shape change.

  A literal one.

  Fine.

  If watching videos and playing puppet-master with furniture wasn’t enough, then I’d do the next best thing:

  I’d engineer a situation where Mitch had to change shape.