A/N
Hey, author here! How are you all? Hope you are enjoying the book?? Okay, I have some news.
And please calm down, I'm not going on a break or stopping the book đ đ. What I want to discuss is something I saw a lot of comments about, especially with this UCL final, so I wanted to address it. I normally never do this, but I think I need to make some things clear.
First off, I want people to remember this is the 20/21 Barcelona squad. Yes, 20/21 Barcelona. I don't mean to sound rude, but I see a lot of people saying I'm nerfing this Barcelona team, and I'm genuinely baffled. Like, 20/21 Barcelona?? Have people forgotten how shit this team really was?? If anything, I have overhyped them every single time.
I mean, this was the same squad that, without Messi, fell into the Europa League for two consecutive seasons. Like, that's the squad we are talking about. đ
And yes, Messi and Mateo are world-class, but come on, we all know football. It's impossible for two players to impact a game every single time. There were games where an even better Barcelona team, comprising of Messi, SuĂĄrez and Neymar, couldn't find the net and couldn't score. It's normal. It happens. No player, no matter how good he is, scores every game. It's simply not possible.
Messi and Mateo are great, but this is football. They can do everything right, play their best game, and still lose.
Especially against this Chelsea squad playing a low block. This Chelsea squad was one of the best defensive sides in modern football history, no cap. They shut down Manchester City in the Champions League final, had only conceded four goals throughout their UCL campaign, and kept nine clean sheets. Like, this is insane, people. They were defensive monsters.
I get it, and I appreciate that you are all emotional about the story. I really am. But I won't lie, it hurt me when I saw some of the comments and all.
Wow, this feels sooo good, getting this off my chest. The fuck, why haven't I done this before?? đ©đ©đ€Ł
Okay, but seriously, I'm so blessed that you all are loving the book, and well... enjoy the chapter!
Thanks! â€ïž
...
...
"GOAAAAALLLL! GOAL! GET IN! YES! YES! YES! GOAL!"
In a house above the hills of Turin, Cristiano Ronaldo came up off that sofa like something launched.
Both fists went straight into the air. He was shouting at the television, at nothing, at the room, at Timo Werner sliding on his knees four hundred miles away in a stadium in Portugal.
"GOAL! GOAL! YESSS!"
"HAHAHAHA."
Georgina had already moved out of range, laughing at him with a hand over her mouth, because she had seen this before and she knew there was no talking to him for about ninety seconds.
Cristiano Junior was on the sofa laughing too, half at the goal and half at his father.
And then Cristiano turned around.
"GOOOOAL!"
He went straight for Georgina, and he got both hands into her ribs and started tickling her, still shouting it into her ear.
"GOAAAAL!"
"NO! No, no, stop, STOP!" She was shrieking, twisting away from him, laughing so hard she could not get the words out. "CRISTIANO!"
The little ones had all come running by now.
He let go of her and scooped Alana Martina straight up off the floor and swung her round in a full circle, both her feet leaving the ground, her hair going everywhere.
"GOOOOAAAAL!"
"AGAIN! AGAIN!"
He put her down and picked up Mateo, and got Eva under the other arm, and now he had both of them and both of them were screaming and kicking their legs and howling with laughter.
And then something landed on his back.
Little Mateo had climbed him. Just gone straight up his father like a tree and locked both arms round his neck.
Cristiano spun with all three of them, turning in the middle of the room, kids hanging off every side of him, the noise in that house genuinely unbelievable.
Georgina was laughing so hard she had to sit down.
Junior was doubled over.
And eventually Cristiano stopped, and set them down, and stood there breathing, grinning at the three smallest ones.
He looked at them.
Then he looked, very slowly, at Junior.
Junior stopped laughing.
"What?"
Cristiano's grin got wider.
"What? What is it? PapĂĄ, what."
And Cristiano pointed at his eldest son and roared it.
"GET HIM!"
"AHHHHH!"
Junior was gone off that sofa in half a second.
"YESSSS!"
"HAHAHAHA!"
Three small children went screaming across a living room in Turin after their older brother, and the whole house came apart with it.
And Georgina stood at the side with her arms folded and watched her family, and did not stop smiling for a very long time.
Cristiano Ronaldo was not the only happy man in the world.
Not by a very long way.
In the away end at the EstĂĄdio do DragĂŁo, Amos had both hands clamped over his own mouth.
"How."
He said it into his own palms.
"How."
Beside him, his three friends had lost their minds completely.
They were all over each other, shirts pulled, hoods grabbed, screaming into each other's faces. And the one who had bet his tuition, the one who had spent the last forty-three minutes with his hands on top of his head, had gone somewhere else entirely.
He was pumping both fists down at the grass, again and again, the veins standing out on the backs of his hands and up his forearms, his whole face red.
"YES! YES! YES! YESSSSSS!"
He grabbed the man next to him, who he had never met in his life, and shook him.
"YESSSS!"
And there were millions more.
Millions.
Because there is a very particular feeling that arrives when you have spent forty-three minutes watching the team you love get pinned against their own goal, and it is not a nice one. It builds. It curdles. You start swearing at the television. You start swearing at your own players.
And there is exactly one cure for it.
The people who had spent the last half an hour calling Tuchel a coward, who had been screaming that he had set them up to lose, who had been abusing their own team for being passive every single time Barcelona came at them again, were now on their feet in their living rooms screaming.
Laughing.
Calling Thomas Tuchel a tactical genius.
@BlueBoyKai LETS GO BLUESSSS đ”đ”đ”đđđđ I NEVER DOUBTED
utdtrey â everyone come and laugh at barcelona đđđ
Troll Football â [smug monkey / screaming tiger] work smart not hard đ§
Mark Goldbridge â Horrific goalkeeping from Ter Stegen. He might have just cost Barcelona the Champions League. What a sad way for their season to end. Tuchel has got exactly what he wanted, he's going to park the bus completely now. That's the last goal of this game.
@CFCMod I TOLD YOU ALL BARCELONA CAN'T BEAT US. I FUCKING SAID IT. WHAT DO YOU LOT THINK CHELSEA IS?? THESE ARE THE GAMES WE LIVE FOR. THIS IS WHAT WE DO đ”đ”đ”đ„đ„
Reshad Rahman â fuck
@Asensii20 đđđđ patience is key. this hatewatch is going to feed generations đđđđ
Inside the stadium, it was on a different level entirely.
Because these were the ones who had lived it in their bodies.
Twenty thousand people who had watched their team stand in the fire for forty-three minutes, who had not been able to breathe properly since the whistle, who had spent almost an hour with their hearts in their throats and their hands on their heads.
And the second that ball crossed the line, the away end of the EstĂĄdio do DragĂŁo detonated.
It was not a cheer. A cheer is a thing with a shape. This did not have a shape.
Whole blocks of people simply went over. Rows collapsing forward into the rows in front of them, bodies on top of bodies, arms and legs everywhere. The stewards along the front gave up entirely and just turned and watched.
A man in his fifties stood in the middle of it with tears absolutely pouring down his face. He was not wiping them. He did not know they were there. He had both arms straight out at his sides and his head thrown back and he was screaming at the roof with his eyes shut.
Two girls, maybe nineteen, with blue and white paint across both their cheeks, were jumping up and down and holding onto each other's forearms, both of them shrieking, both of them going.
"OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!"
A man had his shirt off in about two seconds flat and was swinging it over his head in a circle, his mouth wide open.
"COME OOOOOON!"
"WERNEEEER!"
"THAT'S OUR TEAM! THAT'S OUR TEAM!"
"WE'RE WINNING THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE! WE'RE WINNING THE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE!"
Somebody's phone went flying. Nobody looked for it.
And underneath it all, coming up out of the mess of twenty thousand delirious human beings, the song started again, ragged and broken and at three different speeds at once.
"CAREFREE, WHEREVER WE MAY BEâ"
But the happiest people in that entire stadium were the eleven men in blue on the grass.
Because they had heard all of it.
For weeks.
Barcelona are the favourites.
Barcelona are going to kill Chelsea.
I think three-one, maybe four-one.
They should have just let Real Madrid into the final.
Online. In the newspapers. On Twitter and Instagram. On the radio in the car on the way in from training, where you cannot turn it off without your teammates noticing that you turned it off. In the press conferences, where every single question started with the word Barcelona. In the airport when they landed, where the neutrals in the arrivals hall had looked at them with something that was not quite pity and was worse than pity.
They had felt every single ounce of it.
The disdain. The dismissal. The complete, total, universal absence of anybody outside their own dressing room thinking they had a chance.
They did not have the support.
And now, right now, standing on this grass one goal in front in the Champions League final, they did not need it.
Let all of them come.
Let every last one of them come.
Because Chelsea Football Club had needed this, and Chelsea Football Club had just taken it, and that ball crossing that line was vindication for every single thing that had been said about them for the last four months.
The Chelsea team exploded.
"AHHHHHH! YESSSSS!"
They came from every corner of that pitch at once, all of them screaming, veins standing out in their necks, faces contorted. Thiago Silva came from his own eighteen-yard box at a dead sprint. Chilwell was running with both arms out like wings. Even Mendy had abandoned his goal entirely and was tearing up the pitch, gloves in the air, roaring.
And at the centre of the whole storm was Timo Werner.
He was still on his feet.
Mason Mount was hanging off his neck with both arms and both legs completely off the ground, and Werner was still on his feet, and he was still screaming.
Havertz arrived and got him round the ribs. KantĂ© jumped clean onto the pile. RĂŒdiger hit it like a wrecking ball. Somebody's arm was across Werner's face and he did not care.
And then Tuchel arrived.
The manager of Chelsea Football Club had sprinted forty yards down his own touchline in a suit and he did not slow down at the edge of the pile.
He jumped on it.
Grown man, three-piece suit, hair everywhere, both arms round the whole heaving mass of his own players.
And Timo Werner was still standing.
Underneath all of them. With five men and his manager hanging off his body.
He was still standing, and he was still screaming.
I did it.
I DID IT.
He could not hear anything.
Twenty thousand people were screaming his name and it had turned into one solid wall of noise with nothing inside it. He could feel Mount's weight on his shoulders and somebody's hand gripping the back of his head and somebody else shouting directly into his ear from about four inches away and he could not make out a single word of it.
I DID IT.
Because Timo Werner knew exactly what they had been saying about him.
All season.
He knew about the misses. He knew about the compilations. He knew that his name had become a punchline in England, that people had made an entire hobby out of it, that there were accounts that existed purely to post him missing chances. He had scored fewer than anybody had wanted and he had heard about it every single week, and he had gone out and run himself into the ground every single week anyway, and it had never been enough for anybody.
He had heard it in stadiums. He had heard it from his own supporters.
And forty-three minutes ago he had walked out into a Champions League final as the man everybody expected to miss.
LOOK AT ME.
LOOK AT ME NOW.
He threw his head back and roared it at the roof of that stadium with his whole chest, with everything he had, with five men hanging off him and his manager's arms around all of them.
Timo Werner was a Champions League final goalscorer.
And nobody on this earth was ever going to be able to take that off him.
...
"Huff."
The breath came out of Mateo slow and heavy, all of it at once, and it did not seem to take anything with it.
He had pulled the front of his shirt up over his face and left it there, the fabric across his nose and mouth, and he was breathing into it with his eyes on the grass.
He let it drop halfway and looked around.
And there was nothing.
Piqué had walked twenty yards away from everybody and kicked the turf, hard, once, and then just stood there with his hands on his hips staring at nothing at all.
Alba was crouched down on his haunches with both hands laced behind his neck.
AraĂșjo was flat on his back on the grass, arms out wide, looking straight up at the roof.
Busquets was bent double, hands on his knees, and he had been like that for a while now.
Dembélé had not moved from the spot where the ball had gone in. He was just standing there.
Ter Stegen was still in his own six-yard box. He had not come out of it. He was standing on the line with his back to the whole stadium and both gloves flat on top of his head.
Pedri was walking in a small circle, very slowly, going nowhere.
And this was normally the moment.
This was the exact moment when Messi would come over, or Busquets, or both of them, and the two of them would go round the pitch one man at a time, palms on chests, hands on the backs of necks, saying the same three or four things they had been saying to teammates for a decade and a half. It is one goal. There is a whole half. Heads up. We are fine.
That was what happened. That was what always happened.
It did not happen.
Because Busquets was still bent double with his hands on his knees.
And Messi was standing on the halfway line, on his own, with his head down and his hands on his hips, and he had not looked up for a very long time.
There was nobody left to do it.
Every single man in that shirt was empty. All of them at once. Eleven men standing in a Champions League final and not one of them had anything left to give anybody else.
And the whole thing had gone dark.
Mateo pulled the shirt off his face properly and let it fall.
And he looked across the pitch.
Where eleven men in blue were still going. Still screaming. Still hanging off each other in the corner in a pile that had not come apart yet, with their manager in the middle of it in a suit, with twenty thousand people above them making a noise like the world ending.
Mateo watched them for a long moment.
Then he looked back down at the grass.
"Fuck."
David King said it out loud, and he did not care who heard him.
Beside him, Isabella put a hand on his arm.
"Hey." Her voice was gentle. "Hey. Do not worry. They will come back. I am sure they will come back."
Because this part of the stadium had gone quiet too.
The second that ball crossed the line, the family area had simply switched off.
Olivia had both hands over her face and had not moved them. When she finally took them down her expression was completely blank, and she just looked at the pitch and did not say anything at all.
Aina was staring at the field. Not at anything on it. Just staring.
Oriol had one hand over his eyes and the other one gripping the rail in front of him.
The kids, who had not sat still for a single minute of the entire evening, were all sitting down. Every one of them. Quiet, in a row, looking down at the pitch, worried for their fathers.
The Chelsea goal had done a great deal of damage in this small block of seats.
And the only person in it who was still alright was Antonella.
She still had a small smile on her face. It was not the same as it had been before kick-off. It had come down a little. But it was still there.
"Yeah." David nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, yeah."
He was not really listening. His knee had started going. He kept moving his hands, putting them on his thighs and taking them off again, pushing them through his own hair.
Then he stood up.
Isabella looked up at him.
"Where are you going? The half is not even over yet."
"I know."
He was not looking at her. He was already half turned toward the aisle.
"I know, I just."
His voice cracked in the middle of it.
"I just need to get out of here for a minute. I need to breathe. I need to."
He stopped.
"I will be back before the restart."
And he went.
He got out through the back of the stand and into the concourse, and the noise fell away behind him into a dull roar through concrete.
David King put a hand over his own face and stopped walking.
He stood there in the middle of an empty hallway and took a huge breath in and let it go.
"No."
He said it into his own palm.
"No, no. Please. Please, not this."
His heart was going. His hands had gone cold. Actually cold, the way they went before big things, and there was a thin sick feeling sitting somewhere under his ribs that he had not been able to shift since the ball hit the net.
He has waited his whole life for this. His WHOLE life.
Please. Not like this.
He turned to walk back.
And walked straight into somebody.
"Oh."
He caught the man by the arm to steady him.
"Oh, I am so sorry. I am so sorry, sir, I did not see you at all, that was completely my fault."
The man was in his sixties. Grey, thick through the shoulders, wearing a jacket that had clearly been chosen by somebody who loved him.
He was laughing.
"It is fine. It is fine, it is fine."
"Are you alright? Are you okay?"
"I am good." The man patted David's hand where it was still on his arm. "I am good, honestly."
Then he looked at him properly.
And his face changed a little.
"Although." He tilted his head. "I feel like I should be the one asking you that question."
"Ah."
David let out a breath and rubbed the back of his own neck.
"It is nothing. It is." His voice went thin. "It is just that my son is part of the team, and."
He did not finish it.
"Oh," the man said.
And then he smiled.
"Which one?"
David blinked.
"Pardon?"
"Which one is your boy?"
"Oh. Oh, right."
David looked around and found a screen mounted on the wall further down the concourse, and by pure luck it was showing the Barcelona players, all of them going through the motions, walking back into some kind of shape with the half-time whistle coming.
He pointed.
"There. Number thirty-six."
The old man's eyes widened.
"Oh."
And then his whole face lit up.
"Oh, your son is very talented. Very talented indeed."
"Thank you."
David said it flatly, dejectedly, the way you accept a compliment you cannot feel.
"My kid talks about him a lot, you know." The man nodded at the screen. "A lot. Very promising young man, your boy. Very promising."
And something moved in David's chest, because praise for Mateo was praise for Mateo, and it did not matter what state you were in, it landed in the same place every time.
He almost smiled.
Then he caught up.
"Your son?"
"Mm."
And the old man's face did the thing that fathers' faces do.
He turned toward the screen too, and he looked for a second, and when he found him the smile got bigger and softer all at once.
He lifted a hand and pointed.
"There."
A beat.
"Number ten."
David's eyes went wide.
"That."
He looked at the screen. Then at the man. Then back at the screen.
"That is."
The old man was still smiling at the television.
"The job is hard, is it not?"
David turned.
The man looked at him, and there was something enormously kind in it.
"As fathers." He nodded slowly. "It is a hard thing. To watch your son out there, in a place like that, in front of all these people, in a moment where things are not going his way."
He gestured vaguely at the concrete around them.
"And not be able to do a single thing about it. Not one thing. You cannot help him. You cannot go down there. All you can do is sit in a chair and watch."
David could not speak.
"Yeah," he managed.
"That is why I came out here as well." The old man laughed at himself, warm, unembarrassed. "I needed to gather myself for a minute. HAHAHA. My heart is not what it used to be."
David just stared at him.
"But."
David's head came up.
The old man turned back to the screen.
Lionel Messi was on it now, walking with his head down toward the tunnel, and his father looked at him.
And the love that came off that man was the most obvious thing in that entire building.
"But as fathers," he said, "that is not the only job we have."
He kept his eyes on the screen.
"Anybody can believe in a boy when he is winning. Anybody. The whole world will do it for you. They will queue up to do it. They will write it in the papers and they will sing it in the stands and they will tell you what a wonderful son you have got."
He shook his head.
"That is easy. That does not cost anything."
He turned and looked at David King.
"The believing is for now. It is for exactly this. For when he is one goal down and forty-five minutes from losing the biggest night of his life, and half the world has already decided how this ends."
He tapped his own chest, twice.
"That is when he needs somebody, somewhere in that stadium, to still believe it. And he will never know we were doing it. He will never know we were even here in this corridor."
He smiled.
"But it is a privilege. It really is. Do you know how many fathers on this earth would give anything at all to be standing where the two of us are standing right now, worrying about our sons?"
He shrugged one shoulder.
"So we believe."
And then he said it, and he said it like the simplest thing in the world.
"After all. If we do not, then who will?"
David King stood there in that hallway and did not say anything for a moment.
Then he turned toward the screen.
The camera had moved. It was on the Barcelona players again, and there he was.
Number thirty-six. Walking across the grass. Going to AraĂșjo first and pulling him up off the floor by the hand. Then over to DembĂ©lĂ©, a hand on the back of his neck, saying something into the side of his head. Then to Pedri. Then to Ter Stegen, who was still in his own six-yard box, and Mateo walked all the way to him and put both hands on his chest and said something, and Ter Stegen finally took his gloves off his own head.
Seventeen years old.
Going round his own teammates, one at a time, doing the exact thing that nobody else in that shirt had anything left to do.
And David King smiled.
"Yes," he said.
The old man clapped his hands together once.
"So. What do you say the two of us go back in there and watch them do this thing?"
David laughed.
It came out of him properly, the first real one in about ten minutes, and it felt like something coming loose.
"Let's."
He put his hand out.
"David King."
The old man took it. Firm grip, both of them holding it a second longer than strangers do.
And he smiled.
"Jorge Messi."
...
"And the referee is finally getting this football match back underway."
"And what a passage of play that was, Peter. What a moment."
"It was. And let us be very clear about what has just happened here, because I do not want a single person watching to miss it. Barcelona have controlled this entire football match. They have had the ball. They have had the territory. They have had the chances, they have hit the woodwork, they have forced this goalkeeper into save after save after save."
"And it has not been enough."
"It has not been enough. One poke of a boot from six yards, from a man who has been laughed at all season, and Chelsea Football Club are the ones in front."
"They are the protagonists of this story now."
"They are. And if this story ends the way it currently stands, then Chelsea are your Champions League winners."
Out on the grass, the Chelsea pile was finally coming apart.
Tuchel was in the middle of them, holding onto the back of somebody's shirt, shouting into all of their faces at once.
"HEY! HEY! LISTEN TO ME!"
They came in around him.
"You hold this. YOU HOLD THIS. Two minutes plus whatever he adds, that is all it is, that is ALL it is. You do not lose your heads now. You do not go chasing anything. You hold this thing to half time and then we walk in there one goal up in a Champions League final."
He grabbed the nearest two shoulders.
"Everything we said. Everything. This is it. This is exactly it."
They were nodding, all of them, faces still lit up.
Tuchel smiled.
"Alright. Let's go."
He put a hand into the middle.
"Together on three. One. Two. Three."
"CHELSEA!"
The shout came out of eleven throats at once and it carried up into the stand behind them.
"YES! COME ON! LET'S DO THIS!"
"COME ON, BOYS!"
"WOOO!"
They broke, all of them still buzzing, jogging back to their positions with their heads up. Somebody rubbed Werner's head on the way past and Werner laughed and shoved him off.
And Tuchel turned back toward his own supporters, and put a fist in the air, and pumped it once.
"LET'S GO!"
Twenty thousand people came back at him.
Mateo rolled the ball under his boot on his way to the centre circle.
The referee was still moving people around, arms going, pointing.
"Back. Back. Out of the circle. All of you, out."
Dembélé went past and tapped him on the back.
"It is still on, man. It is still on. Let us do this."
Mateo smiled at him.
"Vamos."
He put the ball down on the spot.
And the Chelsea players came past him on their way to their own half, and every single one of them was smiling. Not at him. Just smiling, the way men do when they are winning something enormous, talking to each other, clapping, energised.
And then one of them crossed him.
Mateo's eyes came up.
RĂŒdiger's eyes came up at exactly the same time.
The German was jogging back with a huge grin all over his face.
Neither of them said anything.
They just held it for one second as they passed each other, and then they were gone.
Mateo looked away, over at the touchline, where the fourth official was still sorting something out.
"So can Barcelona get one back before this half is over? Because that, Jim, that would do an enormous amount for eleven men walking into that dressing room."
"It would change everything, Peter. Everything. Going in one nil down after the half they have had is a very different thing to going in level."
"Two minutes of normal time. Whatever the fourth official gives us on top of it."
"And they will throw everything they have got at it."
"Well. We do not have to wait any longer. Mateo King is over the ball. The Champions League final is about to be."
A beat.
"Underway."
Fweeep.
Mateo rolled it back.
Barcelona did not rush it. They took it across the back, Busquets dropping in, PiquĂ© to AraĂșjo, out to Roberto, and Mateo turned and started jogging forward into the space in front of the Chelsea shape.
The match had changed.
Chelsea being one goal up had broken the entire dynamic of it, and Barcelona knew exactly what that meant. They had two minutes plus whatever came after it to fix it, and they were going to try.
And Chelsea knew it too.
There was no relaxing. There was not a single man in blue on that pitch who thought the job was done, because this was a Champions League final and they were far too professional to make a mistake that stupid.
But it was going to be a long two minutes.
43:57.
The ball moved into the Chelsea half and the shouting started up again.
"ÂĄAQUĂ! ÂĄSOLO!"
"ÂĄATRĂS! ÂĄTRĂS DE TI!"
Mateo took it thirty yards out and tried to slide one through the gap between RĂŒdiger and Azpilicueta.
Reece James cut it out.
But Pedri had not gone anywhere. He had stayed high, hunting, and he was on the loose ball in a second and a half and had it back before James could clear it, and rolled it straight back to Mateo.
Kanté came.
Mateo saw him coming out of the corner of his eye and cut inside him, one touch, a drop of the shoulder, and Kanté was past his own man for the third time tonight and did not slow down for a fraction of a second, just turned and started running back.
Mateo laid it wide to Dembélé.
And Barcelona went to work, one touch, two touches, the ball going round the outside of the Chelsea block, the breathing on both sides getting louder now, both teams grunting and shouting, sweat coming off men in the floodlights.
Messi got it in the half-space.
Azpilicueta and Chilwell came at him from two sides at once, and one of them got a hand on his shirt, and the other one got a shoulder into his back.
Messi did not go down.
He fought it. He rode the shoulder, kept his feet, dragged the ball with him and came out the other side of both of them with the ball still at his boot, and both Chelsea defenders were left grabbing at air.
"OH! He is out! Messi is out and Messi is running!"
He drove into the middle of the box.
And hit it.
Thiago Silva threw himself in front of it.
The ball smashed into the Brazilian's thigh and deflected up and away, and Silva was on his feet immediately, roaring, arms going.
"CLEAR! CLEAR! GET IT OUT!"
44:12.
Pedri won it back in the middle and gave it straight to Mateo.
Mateo turned into the space, took two touches through the middle of the pitch, and Kanté and Jorginho both came at him at once and he went between them.
He looked up.
And chipped it.
A beautiful, delicate little ball, lifted over the top with the outside of his boot into the left channel, and Dembélé ran onto it.
James came across.
Dembélé took him on. Dropped the shoulder, dragged it, went outside, and beat him.
"DembĂ©lĂ©, into the areaâ"
He drove to the byline and fired it across the six-yard box, low and hard, absolutely rifled it.
And Mateo went for it.
He came between RĂŒdiger and Thiago Silva at full speed, straight between the two of them, and both of them had a hand on him, both of them grabbing, RĂŒdiger's arm across his chest and Silva pulling at his shoulder, and they still could not stop him.
He broke through the middle of both of them.
Both centre-backs' faces changed at the same time.
He stretched. Every inch of him, leg out, boot reaching for it.
He got a toe to it.
And the ball skidded on and past the far post and out of play.
"OHHHH! Nobody there! The ball skips past the post and out! HOW is that not a goal? He is BETWEEN two centre-backs and he has got a foot to it!"
The Barcelona end came up and came down.
Mateo threw both hands out and shouted at nothing.
44:27.
But Messi had not let it die.
He had chased it all the way to the byline and got there before the ball did, hooking it back into play with his left boot before it crossed, and now he was coming inside with it.
Two blue shirts converged.
Messi took it under his sole, shifted it, went between them, got squeezed, and instead of forcing it he laid it backwards into the space at the edge of the area.
"ÂĄPEDRIIII!"
Pedri was arriving.
He did not take a touch. He hit it first time, right foot, low and hard and clean, aimed at the bottom corner.
"PEDRIâ"
Mendy went down.
Full stretch, low to his left, and he got a strong hand behind it and pushed it wide of the post.
"MENDYYYYYY!"
"HE IS EVERYWHERE! ĂDOUARD MENDY IS EVERYWHERE!"
The corner.
The box filled up again.
Bodies pressing everywhere, shirts being pulled, arms going up, everybody talking at once. PiquĂ© in there. AraĂșjo in there. DembĂ©lĂ© standing on Mendy's line again.
And Thiago Silva was shouting.
"RĂDIGER! RĂDIGER! HE IS COMING! HE IS COMING TO YOU!"
RĂŒdiger did not even turn his head.
"NOTHING FOR HIM! I AM HERE! I AM HERE!"
And Mateo did not say one single word to either of them.
He was not interested. He was not thinking about RĂŒdiger, and he was not thinking about smiles, and he was not thinking about anything anybody said in a tunnel two hours ago. There would be time for all of that. After they had tied this football match, he could talk as much as he liked.
Right now he just ran.
Messi whipped it in.
The whole box went up at once.
And Mateo climbed.
He went up off one foot and RĂŒdiger went up with him, right beside him, exactly where he said he would be.
And Mateo used him.
He got one hand and then his whole forearm onto RĂŒdiger's shoulder and he pressed down, driving the German back into the ground and driving himself up off him, and for a moment there was daylight between Mateo King's boots and the grass that should not have been possible.
RĂŒdiger felt himself going down.
Shit. Shit. SHIT.
BANG.
Mateo hit that header with everything in his neck and his shoulders and his back.
"MATEOâ"
"MENDYYYYY!"
The Senegalese moved before the ball did.
He was already going. He got down and across and got both palms up and the ball smashed into the middle of him, into his chest and hands together, at a speed that folded him backwards.
It bounced out.
Dembélé pounced.
And Thiago Silva got there first, again, and hammered it forty yards clear.
"WHAT A HEADER! WHAT A SAVE! WHAT IS GOING ON IN THIS FOOTBALL MATCH?"
"Mateo King and Ădouard Mendy have been at each other's throats for ten minutes and neither of them will give an inch!"
Mateo came down on the grass and stayed on one knee for a second.
Hands started arriving on his back.
"Nice one."
"Next one, chaval. Next one."
"We are getting them. We are getting them."
He got up and started jogging back.
And on his way, he looked over at the touchline.
Where the fourth official was standing with the board already lit up above his head.
+3
Three minutes.
"And we have three added minutes at the end of this first half."
"And Thomas Tuchel does not like that at all. Look at him. He is on the edge of that area with his arms out, he thinks three is far too many, and I suspect he would think one was too many at this point."
Still the match played on.
And still Barcelona came.
Alba and Dembélé worked it down the left. It went inside to Pedri, out to Roberto, back through De Jong, and then to Mateo on the right, and Dembélé came across to join him, and the two of them went at it.
One touch each. Mateo to Dembélé, Dembélé back, a stepover, a shimmy, Mateo dragging it back under his sole and going the other way, and Chelsea's whole right side collapsing inward toward the two of them.
Everybody in the stadium could see what was coming.
He was going to give it to Dembélé.
RĂŒdiger could see it. Chilwell could see it. The two centre-backs shifted their weight across to cover the outside.
And Mateo passed it into the middle.
Straight through the middle of them.
A pass nobody in that stadium saw coming, threaded between three blue shirts into a lane that had been open for about half a second, and it split the entire Chelsea defence in two.
"OH! OH, WHAT A BALL! WHAT A BALL!"
Jordi Alba was gone.
He had come from deep, from nowhere, all the way from his own half, and he was through the middle of a Champions League final with nobody in front of him but the goalkeeper.
"ÂĄALBA! ÂĄALBA!"
The whole stadium came up.
Mendy came out.
Alba took one touch to set and hit it low, across his body, hunting the far corner.
And Jorginho slid.
He had run thirty yards. He had come back from the halfway line with his lungs burning and he threw his whole body across the grass at full stretch and got his outstretched boot into the flight of it.
The ball ricocheted off his shin and spun away out for a corner.
"JORGINHO! JORGINHO! HE HAS COME FROM NOWHERE!"
"AHHHHH!"
Alba screamed it at the sky and put both hands on top of his own head and stood there, frozen, looking at the goal he had not scored in.
And the Chelsea players went to Jorginho.
RĂŒdiger got to him first and dragged him up off the floor by the shirt. KantĂ© was rubbing the top of his head with both hands. Azpilicueta was slapping his back.
"COME ON! COME ON!"
"THAT IS IT! THAT IS IT!"
And RĂŒdiger turned away from all of them and ran ten yards toward the Chelsea end with both arms going, pumping them up, screaming at twenty thousand people.
"COME ON! COME ON! COME ONNNN!"
And they came back at him like a wave.
"COME ONNNN, BLUESSSS!"
Down the touchline, Tuchel was doing exactly the same thing, arms up, roaring at his own supporters, all of it coming out of him at once.
Because these last few minutes had been unbearable for every single person in blue in that stadium, and they had all been holding it in, and now they were letting it out.
46:55.
And the corner arrived.
...
"And it is Mateo King going over to take this one."
"Interesting."
"Very interesting. And I will tell you why, Jim. This is the first corner this boy has taken since Manchester City. And in that match, he put two of them directly onto the head of a teammate, and both of them ended up in the back of the net."
"He fancies this."
"He fancies this. Last kick of the half. One goal down. And this seventeen-year-old wants the ball in his hands."
The box was chaos.
Bodies everywhere, more of them than there was room for, everybody grabbing everybody.
PiquĂ© had come up. AraĂșjo had come up. Even Busquets was in there. Ter Stegen was the only Barcelona player left in his own half of the pitch and he was standing on the halfway line watching it like a supporter.
Chelsea had every single man behind the ball.
RĂŒdiger had a fistful of PiquĂ©'s shirt at the back and PiquĂ© had his elbow into RĂŒdiger's ribs, and neither of them had any intention of letting go.
"OFF ME! GET OFF ME!"
"YOU GET OFF!"
Thiago Silva was pointing at people and shouting names.
"KAI! KAI, THE FRONT POST! COVER IT!"
Mendy was in his six-yard box roaring at all of them.
"MOVE! MOVE OUT! GIVE ME ROOM! GIVE ME ROOM, MAN!"
Two Chelsea players actually shoved each other trying to get into the same yard of grass.
"MOVE!"
"YOU move!"
And out at the flag, Mateo King stood over the ball.
His chest was going. His shirt was stuck to him. He put one hand in the air and held it there and looked into that box, at the whole heaving mess of it, at every body and every gap, breathing hard through his nose.
Fifty thousand people were making a noise that did not stop.
FWEEEP.
Now.
He ran.
"King takes itâ"
On the touchline, Ronald Koeman did not move a muscle.
He did not shout. He did not point. He did not walk his line the way he had been walking it for forty-five minutes.
He stood completely still with both fists clenched down at his sides, so hard that the tendons stood out on the backs of his hands, and he watched the ball come off the boy's boot and start climbing.
The ball went up.
And it hung.
It came in with height on it, dropping toward the six-yard line, and for one single second the entire EstĂĄdio do DragĂŁo held its breath at exactly the same time.
Fifty thousand people. All of them. In one enormous suspended silence with a football hanging in the air above a penalty area.
And in the middle of that box, one man was already going.
Piqué.
The man who had scored two of them against Manchester City off this exact boy's boot was doing it again. He had lost RĂŒdiger in the scramble and he had found the space and now he was rising, thirty-four years old, absolutely nothing else in his head, eyes locked onto that ball and his whole neck loaded, and he was going to bury it.
He knew he was going to bury it.
Chelsea's defence had been under enormous pressure for ten straight minutes.
Unfortunately for Barcelona, Chelsea's defence was very, very good.
Because CĂ©sar Azpilicueta jumped too.
He was smaller than Piqué. He got up later than Piqué. And he got there anyway, coming across the front of him at the last possible instant and getting the top of his own head onto the ball a fraction before the Catalan's forehead arrived.
He nodded it away.
"AHHHHH!"
The whole Barcelona end came up and fell back down again.
"Azpilicueta! Azpilicueta gets there first!"
"But it is not enough. It is NOT enough."
"Because it is not over."
Because the ball had not gone far.
It had looped up and dropped just outside the area, on the right-hand side.
Where Lionel Messi was standing.
Mateo had been walking away from the corner flag.
He turned and he saw where that ball had landed and he did not think about it at all. He just ran, straight back in, thirty yards at a full sprint back into a penalty box that was still full of bodies.
And Messi took it.
He faced up to the goal and he made as if to come inside, one shift of the hips, and Ben Chilwell came flying at him.
Because they were not going to leave Messi alone. Not for a second. Not in this match. Nobody in a blue shirt was foolish enough to give Lionel Messi one free yard in the last kick of a half in a Champions League final.
And Messi cut it back.
One touch, sharp, dragging the ball across his own body the other way, and Chilwell's momentum took him straight past.
The Englishman's legs went out from under him and he hit the deck.
Kanté came sprinting across to help.
Kanté was not going to get there in time.
And Messi looked up. Once. Into the box.
That was all he needed.
And he hit it with his right.
His right.
The wrong foot, from a man who has spent his entire career being told he only has one, and it came off the outside of that boot with a curve on it that bent the ball away from the goalkeeper and dropped it into the exact patch of air he had looked at.
"OH, WHAT A BALL! WITH HIS RIGHT! WITH HIS RIGHT FOOT!"
Mateo was already in position.
He had sprinted thirty yards to get here and he had found the pocket and he was going up, both arms coming out, everything in him uncoiling toward that ball.
And it was not enough either.
Because Antonio RĂŒdiger came off the floor like something out of the ground.
He went up above everybody, above Mateo, above the whole box, at the very top of his jump with his eyes wide and his neck already snapping, and he got the middle of his forehead onto it.
BANG.
The ball flew forty yards.
"Shit."
Mateo grunted it out in mid-air, still going up, watching it go over the top of him.
He came down badly, off balance, and put a hand on the grass.
The ball dropped in the middle of the pitch, between Jorginho and Frenkie de Jong.
Jorginho got under it and took it on his chest, and De Jong arrived into his back immediately, leaning on him, arm across, not fouling him, just making the next touch as difficult as it could possibly be.
Jorginho let it drop.
And Thiago Silva came from nowhere.
Thirty-six years old, in the ninety-third minute of a first half that he had spent throwing his body in front of things, and he still got there first, and he took two steps and absolutely leathered it.
The ball went into the sky and forty yards up the pitch.
Dembélé turned and chased it, sprinting, arms going.
And before he had gone fifteen yards.
FWEEEEEEP.
The Barcelona players froze where they stood.
All of them. Every single one, caught mid-stride, mid-turn, mid-run, as if somebody had reached in and switched them all off at once.
Dembélé stopped dead and put his hands on his knees.
Piqué stood in the Chelsea box and looked at the referee.
Mateo was still on one knee near the penalty spot with a hand on the grass.
Half time.
"COME ON! YES! YES! COME ON!"
And Chelsea came apart.
They came together in the middle of that pitch, all of them, screaming, grabbing at each other, and it was not the smooth walk-off of a team in control. It was the noise of eleven men who had just survived something.
Because they had.
Kanté had his hands on his own head, laughing. Reece James was doubled over. Chilwell was still getting up off the floor and Azpilicueta went and pulled him up by the arm and hugged him.
RĂŒdiger was roaring at the sky.
Mendy came all the way out of his goal and went straight to Thiago Silva, and the two of them clasped hands and pulled into each other, and Mendy was shouting something into the older man's ear.
And Tuchel stood on the edge of his technical area and applauded his own players off, both hands going, nodding at every single one of them as they came past.
"And that. Is. Half. Time."
"Goosebumps, Peter. I have got actual goosebumps sitting here."
"And well you might. Because I want everybody watching to understand exactly what they have just seen. Barcelona have thrown everything they own at this football team. Everything. Twenty shots. Eight corners. The bar. Four world-class saves from a goalkeeper. Two centre-backs beaten at once. Jordi Alba clean through in the final seconds."
"And they have nothing to show for it."
"Nothing at all. I would say unlucky but This two teams deserve better than that. And down at the other end of the pitch, one poke of a boot from a man that the whole of England has spent a season laughing at."
"Chelsea have not just survived it, Peter."
"No. They have not just survived it, Jim. They have thrived on it. This is a football team that came to Porto knowing exactly what was going to be done to them, and they have stood in it for forty-eight minutes and they are walking off this pitch in front."
A pause.
"It is half time in the Champions League final."
"And Chelsea Football Club lead FC Barcelona."
"One."
"Nil."
A/N
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