The team lunch pasta is a hostage situation. Somebody boiled it until it confessed. I eat it anyway, because tomorrow is a round of sixteen and calories are calories.
“The pasta is eleven minutes past saving,” I tell Tomáš, who did not ask. “Somebody in that kitchen looked at a timer and chose violence.” I push it around the plate. “A real ragù takes three hours on a low flame. There is a kitchen—“
I stop.
That sentence had a destination. I heard it leaving and I know where it was going, and it was not going anywhere in the Czech Republic.
“Where?” Tomáš says.
“In general. There are kitchens.” I fill my mouth with hostage pasta so nothing else can leave.
Tomáš moves on, because Tomáš takes people at face value, which is one of the great mercies of my life.
“Mexico’s striker,” Tomáš says, coming back to me. “The tall one. Trouble?”
“Only if we let him get bored. A bored striker starts inventing runs. Keep him busy and he keeps himself offside.”
“You make defending sound like babysitting.”
“It’s mostly babysitting. Occasionally a knife fight.”
Film that afternoon is the Round of 16 opponent, Mexico. Their left side is slow to recover after losing the ball, their striker drifts offside when he gets bored, their set pieces are a real threat and the analysts say so four times. I take notes. I’m good at film. One screen, one task.
Afterward, the analyst packs up his cables and nods at the screen. “Quarterfinal folder’s already on the drive. Conditional. Don’t open it, it makes the boss superstitious. Mexico first.”
“Mexico first,” I say, like a man agreeing.
At eleven that night I’m on the hotel gym bike with my tablet open to a folder labeled ITA (COND).
This is preparation. Nobody prepares this early. I’m aware that nobody prepares this early. I watch Italy’s last match, anyway. I tell myself I’m watching their fullbacks, and for eleven minutes I genuinely am. Then their left winger picks the ball up near the touchline, and shows the defender the outside, and takes the inside, and I stop watching fullbacks.
I know that move the way I know my own signature. I’ve defended it twelve times. Maybe thirteen. I have it cataloged from every angle, in league footage and cup footage, and one memory with no footage at all. A training pitch outside Naples at dusk where he tried it on me for fun, laughing, sandals, holding a local peach in one hand the entire time.
Nothing about that is tactical.
I close the tablet. The bike says I have been pedaling faster for four minutes. The bike is keeping records too.
Šíma is in the doorway with a towel over his shoulder. Šíma is always somewhere with a towel over his shoulder. It’s his surveillance uniform.
“Eleven at night,” he says.
“The gym is open at eleven.”
“You were asleep by nine every night in Qatar. We used to check watches against you.”
“Tournaments change.”
“What are you watching?”
“Fullbacks.”
“Whose?”
“The gym is open, Šíma. I’m using it.”
He looks at the dead tablet, then at me, and does the thing he does, which is nothing, loudly. “Big match,” he says, on his way out.
“They’re all big.” I watch as he turns.