Monday’s session was the lightest Will had experienced since joining the group properly.

They did a slow warmup jog around the full pitch, some stretching in pairs, a few passing triangles with barely any intensity and no press, and that was mostly it for the physical work.

The jog itself was almost meditative in the way that low-intensity movement after a match day could be, legs still carrying the memory of Saturday’s eighty-three minutes but without the sharp complaints that came in the first twenty-four hours. The body taking stock of itself. They moved in a loose group without urgency, conversation drifting between players in fragments, and the pitch looked wider and quieter than it ever did during full training.

The real content of the morning was the film review David ran in the indoor facility, with the squad sitting in rows on the fold-out chairs they kept stacked against the back wall and the projector throwing the Derby match onto the white wall at the far end. The room had that particular atmosphere of indoor spaces in football academies, slightly too warm, slightly too bright, the smell of kit bags and the faint rubbery undertone of training shoes on a hard floor. Players sat with water bottles and arms folded and the particular posture of people who were prepared to pay attention.

David ran it from the start. He paused it at the moments he wanted to discuss and talked through each one with the kind of specificity that told players he had been up late watching footage. That was always the tell with David. The vague comments came from coaches who had watched once and formed a general impression.

The precise ones came from someone who had sat with the footage long enough to notice the details that disappeared at full speed. He was precise about what he praised and equally precise about what he corrected. There was no general vagueness about it, no telling players to be better without telling them how or where or in what specific situation.

When he said Liam had cut inside at the wrong moments he showed the three specific instances, froze the frame on each one, and explained exactly what the correct decision would have been and why, what the body shape should have been, where the pass should have gone, what the correct read of the defensive shape was at that precise moment.

Liam sat with his arms crossed and his jaw set and said nothing, which was exactly the right response.

Will watched his own moments on the screen without the cringe that had come with watching himself in the early preseason sessions. That cringe had been the gap between what he thought he looked like and what the footage actually showed, the slight mismatch between the internal experience of a movement and its external reality. The gap had narrowed over the previous months. He moved with more intention now and the footage confirmed it in a way that felt quietly good rather than just relieving.

David paused the footage on the assist for Callum’s goal. The frame was frozen just as Will was playing the pass across the six-yard box, his body shape open toward the far post, his weight through the ball correctly, his head up in the half-second before contact.

"This is what I want from the ten position," David said to the room. "Not just the pass itself. The whole sequence. The hold. The decision not to force it early when the first option wasn’t quite there. The identification of the right moment and the conviction to play it when it came. That is what controlling a game from a central position looks like. Not doing the most. Doing the right thing at the right time."

He left the frame frozen for a moment longer than he needed to before moving on. Nobody said anything.

Will kept his eyes on the screen. He said nothing. He sat with it quietly in the way you sit with something that has been said publicly about you, neither leaning into it nor deflecting from it, just letting it exist.

The rest of the review ran for another twenty minutes. David covered the defensive shape in the second half, the set piece organisation, the transitions after Derby’s equaliser. He finished with the added-time sequence, the free kick and Liam’s finish, and said only that it was a good example of a team finding a way to win when winning was hard. Then he closed the laptop and dismissed them.

After the session, on the way out across the car park, Alex caught up with him. Alex had been doing light technical work on the side during the main session, separated from the group by the physio who was carefully managing the final phase of his return.

The cast had been off for nearly two weeks and he moved with the familiar restless energy that had always been his most recognisable quality, that particular physical confidence that made him look perpetually ready to sprint somewhere even when he was standing still. Two more weeks of controlled training and then full integration back into the squad.

"Two more weeks," Alex said as they fell into step together, saying it the way he had been saying it for several days now, with a mix of patience and barely contained impatience.

"How does it feel?"

"Like a leg." He shrugged. "Which is considerably better than it felt three months ago. I’ll take it." He glanced sideways at Will as they walked. "You were something on Saturday. The free kick especially. I was watching from the far side of the pitch during my recovery work and even from seventy yards you could see the goalkeeper’s weight was wrong the moment the ball left your foot."

"I got fortunate with the placement," Will said.

"No you didn’t." Alex said it flatly. Not as a compliment. As a correction, the way you correct something you feel strongly about being accurate. "You practised it. I’ve seen you at that rebounder wall in the mornings before the rest of the group arrives. You don’t get fortunate with technique. You build it and then you produce it under pressure because you’ve already produced it a thousand times when nobody was watching. That is not the same thing as fortune."

Will nodded slightly but didn’t respond to it directly. Some things were better received quietly than argued with.

They walked the path that curved around the outside of the main pitch toward the car park. The sky was the particular shade of grey that September sometimes produced, overcast without any weight or threat in it, the kind of sky that made everything look considered rather than bright. The trees on the far side of the training complex had started to turn at the edges of their leaves, the first suggestion of autumn arriving without any announcement. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

"David said something to me after training," Alex said.

"What?"

"That when I’m back to full fitness he expects me to compete properly for the right side slot. Kyle has been doing alright but David wants competition, wants two players making the decision difficult." He paused and kicked a small stone off the path, watching it skip twice and come to rest in the grass at the edge. "He also said that with you at ten and me on the right, the right side of the team would be very difficult for opposition defences to handle."

"He said that?"

"Direct quote. I remember it specifically because it made me smile at him during a serious conversation, which I don’t usually do. He noticed and kept talking as if it hadn’t happened, which is very David."

Will turned this over as they walked. He and Alex on the right side of a 4-2-3-1 had a clear logic to it that he had been able to see since before Alex’s injury. Alex’s relentless energy, his pressing and the pace with which he attacked the line when the ball was on the opposite side, would create a particular kind of chaos on that side of the pitch. And chaos on one side of the pitch created space on the other side, and space on the other side was where a number ten who moved well could do the most damage. The combination had shown a couple of flashes in the training matches before Alex went down. Those flashes had felt like something worth returning to.

"Two more weeks," Will said.

"Two more weeks," Alex confirmed.

They split at the car park entrance, heading in different directions without ceremony. Will pulled his jacket tighter against the grey morning and walked toward the bus stop, already mapping Tuesday’s session in his head, the specific aspects of his game he wanted to push before it and the capsule scenarios he would run that evening to get there.

A/N:

Remember guys:

Every 50 Power Stones = 1 extra Chapter

Every 5 Golden Tickets = 1 extra Chapter

Every 5 reviews = 1 extra Chapter

Every 5 gifts = 1 extra Chapter

Any super gift = 5 extra Chapters and a shoutout