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“I have found someone.”
“Kick-off, Jenna.”
Jenna went, walking backwards, pointing at Beth with both hands, until Jax yelled at her.
The whistle went at two.
For the first ten minutes, Carly was terrible.
Not catastrophically. Nobody would have noticed but her. Her first pass was half a yard short, her first header went backwards off the top of her head, and when their striker turned her on the edge of the box, she blocked it more by luck than judgement. Her legs knew what to do. Her brain kept arriving a second later.
“Talk to me,” Lauren called from behind her. “I can’t hear you.”
She hadn’t said a word. The back line was the same one she’d watched on her first Sunday: four women in a row like strangers at a bus stop, each waiting for someone else to decide.
So she made one.
“Step up. Up. Stay with me.” Carly pushed the line ten yards forward with her arm. “Right side, tuck in. If she goes wide, let her go. She’s no good on her left.”
They stepped up. The next long ball sailed over the striker’s head into empty space, the linesman’s flag went up, and for the first time in two years, Carly felt like a footballer.
After that, it came back like a language. Rhythm first, then the words.
She stopped thinking about where to stand and just stood there. She read the striker’s runs a step before she made them. When the winger cut inside, Carly was already across, and when the ball came into the box, she attacked it rather than waiting for it to arrive. She talked constantly: step, hold, away, time, man on. By the twentieth minute, the back four had stopped looking at each other in panic and started looking at her for instructions, and by the twenty-fifth, they didn’t need to look at all.
Behind her, Lauren had gone quiet. It took Carly a while to work out why. Lauren had nothing to do.
On the half-hour, the striker finally got goal-side, and for one horrible second, Carly saw it happen the way it had happened all season: a striker clean through, a keeper stranded, another one for the tally. Then her body took over. She covered the distance in four long strides, went to ground at exactly the right moment, and took the ball off her toes with a sliding tackle so clean it barely made a sound.
She was up before the ball had stopped rolling, pushed it wide to the full-back, and caught herself grinning. Not the polite version she used on suppliers. A proper fifteen-year-old grin, from before every bad dressing room, when this had just been the thing she loved most.
She turned, and Lauren was looking straight at her from the goal line.
She’d seen it. Not the tackle. The grin. Lauren didn’t shout. She just raised one gloved thumb and held it there a second longer than she needed to.
Carly turned back to the game before she had to decide what that meant.
Two minutes before half-time, Jenna ran onto a through ball behind the opposition’s high line, just as Jax had promised, and slotted it into the bottom corner. She celebrated by sliding on her knees towards the halfway line, where Beth was standing, and screaming something that sounded a lot like COACH until three teammates landed on her.
At half-time, they gathered by the touchline with water bottles and sweets. Carly stood on the edge of the huddle, hands on hips, breathing hard. Her hamstring was holding. Her lungs were not. Two years of gyms had made her strong, but strong wasn’t the same as ninety minutes of cardio.
“Who taught you to defend like that?” the left-back asked, staring at her as if she’d done a magic trick.
“Her,” Carly said, and nodded at Beth.
It was true. Beth was the first coach who’d told her she had a brain for defending, not just a body for it, and had drilled the offside line into her on Thursday nights with cones and swear words. Beth had also stood on a touchline like this one and watched Carly change alone in a corner every Sunday, and said nothing. Both were true. Carly had stopped expecting them to cancel out.
Beth didn’t hear. She was looking along the touchline.
Greg had wandered over to the under-eighteens with the man in the yellow coat at his shoulder, clapping his hands like a man who’d never once been ignored by a room.
“Girls. Girls, gather round a sec.” He waited until they’d shuffled into a ragged semicircle. “This is Kevin. He’s going to be looking after you lot from January, so you’ll want to get to know him.”
The girls looked at each other.
“Alright, ladies,” Kevin said, rocking on his heels. “Proper structure from now on. We’ll get you training after the lads on a Thursday, once they’ve finished with the big pitch up at the leisure centre.” He beamed around the semicircle. “Which one of you’s captain?”
A tall girl at the back half-raised her hand.
