My Four Superstar Ex-Boyfriends

Chapter 20: Debut Loss

Heinz was not able to come to the first full team practice before the start of the new season because he had to report to the University of Prague as a freshman. But the next morning, Heinz came to Prague Meteo Club for his "tryout".

Emily had already spoken to Ms. Kriks about Heinz before she officially took over the job, and without much hesitation, the other team agreed to sign the Rutland High School's top scorer, who had made a big splash at the Czech High School Championships that year.

"Boys, this is Heinz! Starting this season, he'll be with us, fighting for Team Meteo!"

At the start of the next day's training, Emily introduced the striker, whom she had brought with her from the last team she had coached, to these warriors she had not yet been able to tame.

Heinz and the Russian Shirokov are both strikers, but their positions don't really overlap, and a closer comparison reveals the differences between them. Compared to Heinz, Shirokov, who studied at the youth camp of Lokomotiv Moscow in the Russian Premier League, has more solid footwork and a deeper sense of goal-scoring.

But Heinz also has his strong points, he has a stronger link with the midfield and has a great sense of the big picture. As such, Heinz is arguably a more No. 10 that favors the No. 9. Shirokov could be a proper 9.

Emily, who records everyone's performance in daily training, quietly observes each of them in detail, noting their current playing positions, their strengths and weaknesses, their playing habits and even their personalities, and analyzes them.

In a week's time, she'll be playing her first league match as coach of the Blag Météo.

Until then, she has no warm-up matches to allow her to test her idea after idea, and lacks an accurate expectation of what her team will look like against an amateur team in the same division.

In fact, the safest thing to do in such a situation would be to play the team in the formation and with the personnel that had worked best the previous season. But Emily didn't want to do that.

She wanted the first game after she took over the Blagometeo to be completely her own.

She scribbled the names of the players on a piece of paper and thought quietly, attempting to catch the strand of thought and inspiration that kept wandering through her mind, mysterious yet somewhat untouchable.

She placed Heinz's name in the center, and wrote Shirokov's name diagonally to the right of Heinz's name. The pencil drew a line back and forth between the two names, and the image of the two scoring players playing off each other in a game flashed through Emily's mind, as if it were being played out on a court she could see from her office at the moment. Then her mind caught the image of Saraka, the organizing midfielder, from among the dozen or so players.

The pen in her hand turned round and round. In the end, she decided to make Heinz the one that ranked in the middle of those two names.

"Heinz and Shirokov provide support for each other. Shirokov can go in and get right in front of the opponent's side of the goal for a steal, and Heinz can go back out to the midfield for energy for the next attack ......"

Deciding on how and where these three would pass once the attack started, Emily then mused once again on which of the cards she had in her hand would be best suited for such a frontcourt combination.

At this time, she heard a knock on her office door, so Emily raised her voice and said, "Come in."

The person who came was none other than Shirokov. This Russian with a blonde head might be due to the fact that he was working as a front desk butler in a high-class hotel, and his every move always gave people a comfortable sense of closeness.

"The coworker I'm partnered with took a leave of absence, and I need to cover his shift. So tomorrow I'll need to watch the inn for about 24 hours."

Emily, who had heard this, nodded, and then asked, "About what time from?"

"At six in the morning, from six in the morning tomorrow until six in the morning the day after tomorrow. Maybe a coworker coming in for a shift change will come in a little earlier, and that's until five a.m. the day after tomorrow."

Listening to such an arrangement, Emily took out the player's time schedule she had created and looked at it carefully before saying, "You'll have your training as usual today. You'll be given a day off tomorrow. The day after tomorrow, come to practice at four in the afternoon, when Saraka, Piszczek and Heinz will be there. I happen to have a new idea and want you to do a little drill on tactical coordination."

Shirokov nodded slightly, indicating that he had remembered Emily's arrangement, and that was all it took to leave her head coach's office.

After the Russian had left, Emily was standing in front of the window again, pulling down the drawn blinds a bit. She waited for a while until it was almost time for the assembly, and she still hadn't waited for Piszczek and Rangel, who she had scheduled to come over for training this afternoon ......

So standing in front of the window Emily sighed before grabbing the things she needed to bring with her to the training session and leaving her office.

Ten days after Emily officially took over Bragmetio, she had her first D-League game.

She had prepared so much for this game, which was especially important to her, that there was hardly a single night in those ten days when she was able to sleep soundly and stay awake until dawn. Every day, falling asleep became a very difficult task. As soon as she closed her eyes, countless messages would appear in her mind.

She couldn't control herself from thinking about the tactical graphics.

She also couldn't help herself from thinking about what she'd seen during daytime training.

She couldn't even control herself from thinking about a certain displeasing look her players gave her.

Sometimes she'd toss and turn for an entire night, so after a few days like that, she'd simply get right up when she felt like she couldn't sleep and go do something. Like researching their opponents in the first round of the league. It wasn't until four or five when it was almost dawn that she went back to sleep, barely getting three hours of sleep. This first match after her coaching of Bragmeteo had put her under unimaginable pressure.

But even then, she still couldn't win the game that meant so much to her.

In the first match of the new season at the end of July, Meteo Prague played away against Klatovy. It was the first loss of the season for this D-level team in the Czech capital.

In this game, she introduced the positional play that that tactical genius from Barcelona was so proud of. She was so eager to make the Meteo team play at its strongest level with the setup they now have with these subtle tactics.

She made all sorts of expectations about the tactics her opponents might use in this game.

But what ultimately defeated them was their own internal collapse.

Such an amateur team, even though they had utilized Emily's well-designed and simplified positional battle tactics in their regular training, they still fell into a series of hand-wringing and frequent articulation errors in the real game.

Emily knew she was wrong when she saw the Meteo team's formation collapse.

She stood on the sidelines and loudly reminded the players over and over again to watch their spacing! Watch the distance between them and each other! Watch out for the mending! The formation must not collapse! But when the players themselves started to panic, as a coach who hadn't even won the trust of the players yet, there was nothing she could do to stop what was happening on the field.

It was a clear day in the Czech Republic, an August day when the sun was so bright that it could have easily blown your eyes away. But on the way back in the bus chartered by the club, Emily felt that her heart and the scenery outside the window were two completely different worlds.

It was as if she was sitting in a place where all around her was pitch black, and the intense, blinding sunlight coming in through the tiny windows that were high, high up, as if they were open at the top of a spire, could not make her feel any warmth.

This was not a simple defeat for her, but a complete and utter failure.

It meant that the entire set of tactics she had set up for the Meteo team was not adaptable to the realities of the team and the league in which it played. It also meant that all of her efforts in the last ten days might have been wasted, as she had to figure out a new path and start from scratch.

The thought of it made Emily feel indescribably anxious. She even thought that she would need to vent before she could go on to do something about it.

But that wasn't the worst of it.

From the day you become a soccer coach, you have to know that the pressure you can feel is crushing down on you from all sides.

Fans of Bragmeteo were quite vocal about the club's decision as soon as they learned that the team had hired such a mixed-race female coach. It's like the saying that is often said in the industry. No one gets fired for buying an IBM computer for their company. But what if you bought something other than an IBM?

In soccer, there would be a more general guideline for what kind of coach a team should hire.

First, he must be a white male.

Number two, he used to be a player.

Thirdly, it's over forty years old.

Obviously, Emily could not fulfill any of these three criteria. That is to say, she is not the "IBM computer" that can't make mistakes. The mistakes and failures that happened to her will rightly be viewed in a more critical and even harsh light.

For the first time, Emily's newly registered f*******: and Twitter accounts gained a lot of followers overnight, but they didn't come from a place of goodwill. There were many who expressed in euphemistic tones that she was clearly not suited as a woman to coach a team of all men. There were also many who said that the 1:5 loss to Kratovy was a disgrace to the team. There were even those who came to ask her when exactly she was going to get the hell out of their Meteo.

Even though the club didn't come to have a talk with her on the matter, she never forgot that the contract between Meteo and her was only for six months. If she failed to perform to the club's satisfaction, she would soon have to say goodbye to the first adult men's soccer team she had ever coached. Not to mention, losing her first game in charge of Meteo Prague put Emily under a lot of pressure from the fans.

If that's all it was, it was probably within Emily's reach. Accompanying Borukorin in Manchester has taught Emily that there are too many people in the world who will tout someone as an invincible soccer miracle because of one win, and then call that soccer miracle a rat because of two consecutive defeats.

But the out of control in the locker room ...... that would be something that would really overwhelm her.

The next morning, as she walked from her head coach's office to the players' locker room, she clearly heard what was being said about her in a very angry voice.

"She doesn't know anything at all! She doesn't know anything about soccer! Ms. Creeks told us earlier that that woman has experience in coaching a men's soccer team! But do you know what her experience is? High school varsity! Hey, that's you. Don't you look at me like that, college boy. I know you're one of her guys, but I'm just gonna say it for you, that woman, she's f*****g awful! Ha ha! Varsity! Good for her for thinking that! Maybe she thinks she should be coaching Class A, but apparently she can't even coach Class D. I've said it before, how can we have a woman as our coach! Playing in a team coached by a woman it puts me to shame!"