My Four Superstar Ex-Boyfriends

Chapter 7: Champions of South Bohemia

The capital of Southern Bohemia, Budějovice, had to be a much, much bigger city than the medieval town of Kromlov, which had a very small population. Although the entire Czech Republic had a population of just over ten million people, which meant that Bujejovice, as big as it was for Czechs, seemed to Emily to be a very small and sophisticated town, the Southern Bohemia championship team was located in a school that was much larger than the high school that Emily worked at.

At the very least, they had a much more formal soccer field, and even had two rows of covered seating on the side of the field. But those seats were closed during varsity practices.

When Emily arrived, there were already a smattering of teenagers standing at the chain-link fence outside the field watching the varsity's weekend practice on the field. But these youngsters were more like little varsity fans than they were, eagerly picking at the fence and shouting out someone's name every now and then.

By this time, last year's Southern Bohemian State championship team had finished its warm-up drills and had begun a drill of running forward with the ball in s-forms over obstacles. This is a basic training program that many of the big teams also do. It's just that compared to those teams, the obstacles used by this Czech high school varsity team would be much farther apart one from the other.

After this drill, they moved on to passing drills on the run, and even tactical drills where they split into two teams to attack each other.

After standing outside the barbed wire fence and watching for a long time, Emily opened her mouth and asked the three boys who came with her, "What do you think, compared to them, are your shortcomings?"

"Their cooperation ...... is much smoother than ours." The first one to speak was Luther, who frowned and said this sentence, as if he didn't want to admit that the others were better than himself, but couldn't open his eyes and say blind things.

"All of their individual skills shine through as well." Freckle-faced Matz stood there for a few more moments, this time hanging his head in defeat.

Just as Heinz was about to open his mouth to say something as well, the teens next to him, who were picking at the barbed wire fence, shouted out someone's name with extreme emotion, "Roman!!!"

"Roman!!!"

"Roman!!!"

When Emily heard the man's name, her first reaction was to look at the group of boys on the field who were doing group sparring drills, only to see that one of them, who wasn't very tall and didn't look very strong physically, was dribbling the ball to break through the blockade that the three varsity players had teamed up to put on him.

It was at that moment that the boy stopped the ball in front of his body, and then made a series of fancy movements with his feet, he even picked up the ball with his toes, and took a slight bump with his shoulder, which controlled the ball under his feet again. When he looked straight into the eyes of the three members of the varsity team who were blocking him, the other team was almost blinded by his series of footwork. It was also at that time that he used the outside of his foot to flick the ball outward after two more maneuvers and smoothly passed the ball out.

Luther, Matz and Heinz, who had seen the scene from outside the wire, all let out a gasp, but Emily couldn't hold back her laughter. Although that sound was very, very soft, and again was quickly suppressed by Emily, Heinz still heard that sound, which turned his head and said to Emily with some embarrassment, "You also think Roman is very good, don't you?"

Hearing the students she brought to ask herself so seriously, Emily was a little embarrassed, she coughed twice, and then said in a lowered voice, "Do you guys think ...... he's great?"

This time, all three of them nodded, and the first one to speak up was Matz: "Roman is very famous in this area! He's a sophomore in high school this year, and he really scared us last year when he played the South Bohemian State Interscholastic League!"

That was as far as Matz could get with his English and German, so he said the next part in Czech to Heinz, and had Heinz translate over to relay it to Emily.

Heinz listened and thought for a while and looked up several words in his phone's dictionary before organizing his words and saying, "Matz said that Roman's idol was the Uruguayan Fontas, and that he did study Fontas' style of soccer since he was in junior high school."

After hearing Fontas' name, Emily froze. Seeing Emily fall into silence, Heinz thought that Emily didn't know this South American player who had risen to fame in the past two years, so he very kindly introduced this person for her: "Fontas is 25 years old this year, and he is a South American player who has gained great success in Europe's top five leagues in the past two years. He is the captain of the Uruguayan national team, and after coming to Europe, he first played in the English Premier League Southampton, and then transferred to Real Madrid, and is now the main player of Real Madrid! His style is very ...... South American."

On the other side, freckle-faced Matz heard Heinz so seriously introduce Roman's idol Fontas to Emily, which then also said excitedly, "And ah! Fontas is an authentic handsome guy! He's a white guy, but he has a kind of handsome look that's unique to South Americans! That's called ......"

Luther: "Handsome!"

Matz, who felt that he couldn't get to the point with any of his words, heard Luther add to God's words, and then quickly nodded his head and said, "Yes, yes, yes, that's handsome! And he's tall and handsome, with a great body and a sweet smile! The year he became famous, many women around me were charmed by him! Can you imagine! My cousin bought men's underwear endorsed by Fontas! She didn't even have a boyfriend then!"

When Matz got to the last sentence, Luther hastily grabbed Matz by the neck and bared his teeth at him, indicating that there was another female here! How can you talk so unabashedly about what we men talk about!

Luther and Matz were still having a very energetic time, while Heinz was eagerly using his cell phone to find out the photo of Fontas. Emily wanted to tell the other party that you don't need to look for him, I know what he looks like, but when she saw that Heinz was so serious about looking for the photo that made Fontas look as handsome as he did in person, Emily didn't interrupt her and slowly showed the photo to her when the other party begged for praises. photo for her to see, she took a slow breath before losing her smile and saying, "I know him."

Emily couldn't help but look at Fontas' picture for a few moments before returning her eyes to the boys playing soccer on the field inside the wire fence and speaking, "Actually, this Roman you're talking about has been imitating Fontas, but there's a fundamental difference between them. Very different."

Hearing this, Luther was about to interject, "Isn't the fundamental difference that one of them is on the varsity team and the other is on a top tier powerhouse team?" But Heinz sensed what he was thinking, and Heinz gave him a firm tug and nipped that intention in the bud. So Emily this was explained again in very slow speech and as simple words as possible combined with body language.

"Fontas grew up in South America and by the time he was ten he was able to play street soccer beautifully. Then he was spotted by scouts and didn't lose what he was initially good at after a few years of systematic training. And, when he played in South America, he had some showmanship outside of the game for the live audience, which is a tradition that has been inherited in South American soccer for many years. But by the time he got to Real Madrid, his style had changed a lot. His eye-popping footwork has been simplified so much that it takes no more than three seconds each, and he hardly ever stops to make those moves. All of his 'fakes' are made in motion with his body's instincts rather than brain control."

Emily spoke to Heinz and the others one sentence at a time, stopping to re-explain in detail once they had at some point a puzzled look on their faces. In this way, she had a hard time explaining Fontas' style of soccer to the three varsity boys. This led to another analysis of Roman's soccer style.

"Roman does seem to be imitating Fontas, but he's only imitating his movements without being able to find the gist of his movements, and even his movements are only imitated to the outermost layer, and he doesn't really understand Fontas's skills and style of play. His skills actually look more like street-style soccer, making fancy moves for the sake of making fancy moves. Also, his skills are not really very pure in their use in real life."

Since such comparisons between players' skills as well as explanations were just too complicated, Emily, after carefully noting the various on-field habits of the members of this South Bohemian state's last year's championship team this returned to their small town of Krumlov after taking the three boys together for a quick lunch in Budějovice and headed straight to the home of Emily's best friend, Carolina, the school's German teacher, to have the the other to act as his interpreter.

"Roman didn't really want to do that when he poked the ball out with the back of his foot in the group drill, he just accidentally ran into it after he made those moves. After he touched it, he simply poked the ball out. But luckily he had a wider field of vision, and before that he knew there was a teammate in that direction who was in the same group as him. But when it came to physically stronger opponents, it was easy to cut him off with two people working together, as long as they ignored his footwork and just kept their eyes on his man and stayed close. The truth is, he's not bad on the disk, but he's not very good at protecting the ball."

Hearing the full content of what Carolina had translated for them, and knowing from Carolina what they hadn't heard earlier, Emily's opinion of Fontas' skill with the ball, all three of them, Heinz, Luther, and Matz, all of them made a hard swallowing motion as an afterthought.

The statement that Emily gave today really surprised Luther and Matz, the two of them were initially opposed to Emily being the coach of their varsity team, and a large part of the reason was that she hardly talked to them about the profound tactics and the macro coordination of play, compared to their previous "tactician" coach, Emily's performance was much better than that of their previous "tactician" coach. Compared to their previous "master tactician" coach, Emily acted like a novice who didn't know much about soccer.

But now they heard something!

Ms. Emily knows the game! When she analyzed it, Matz immediately spat on Roman's "Fontas style of play"!

All three of them were still thinking: I didn't know that our coach, Ms. Emily, was such a talented person!

And Emily had already put down an even more tantalizingly heavy bomb!

Emily said, "Actually, you guys didn't have to look at them in such a supercilious manner. In my opinion, they are indeed much better than you are now. But the distance is not hard to cross. And I don't think you're necessarily going to lose if you meet them this year."

Luther: "That's a lie!"

Matz: "It's a lie!"

Heinz: "That can't be right!"