2022/23 - 17 - Gaffer (Patreon)

17.

"Whites, to me." The players started drifting in my direction. It seemed like a weird thing to call them - half the team weren't white. They gathered around, except the goalie, who was over on his own doing weird goalkeeper things. I waved at him to come in. To the others, I said, "I'm Max. My friends call me Secret Agent. You can call me gaffer."

"Gaffer?" said Ziggy.

"Yeah, I'm your new coach. First things first, we need a team name."

"How about, ‘FC United Reserves Plus This Guy'," suggested one wag, pointing to Ziggy like he was something he'd found by the side of the road.

I gave the guy a Look. In my imagination it was 'Jose Mourinho giving you the evil eye' but it was probably 'call centre guy on his first day as deputy team leader'. I swept my finger around the semi-circle. "You were shit in the first half, but you're going to crush the second. So from now on, you're AFC Phoenix. Right? Now, I want you to play 5-3-2." I held my left hand up, fingers and thumb splayed. I went from left to right, tapping a digit as I spoke a name. "Baz at left-back, Adam, Clive, Gronk, Sam." I switched to holding up three fingers. "In the middle, Paul, Luke, Fash." I pointed to the last two. "Callum and Ziggy up top." Every single player, including Ziggy, gave me the same look. A look which I will now try to describe.

Imagine, if you can, you are a 6-year-old boy and it's your first day at school. You don't care much for the maths or the English, but you know that after the first break there will be P.E. But when the bell goes and you rush to the grass, you are pulled away and told that you will be playing rounders with the girls while every other boy gets to play footy.

That was the face they were giving me. Scrunched up confusion, disappointment, and several other expressions I couldn't put my finger on.

Oh, boy.

Big Nev, the goalie, finally made it to the huddle, just as Neil blew the whistle. Nev gave me a dirty look and started trudging back to his goal. The teams hadn't switched ends, for some reason. With a shrug, I wandered off to the far side of the pitch, standing opposite Neil and his gaggle of coaches.

"That's it, Phoenix!" I roared, clapping my hands furiously. "Big energy!"

What happened next was one of the most infuriating moments of my whole life. I mean, no joke, I nearly spontaneously combusted. I nearly went full supernova.

The fuckers had totally ignored me and lined up in a 4-4-2 with Ziggy at left back!

I was so shocked and so angry that I did nothing for several seconds. My heart didn't beat, my blood didn't pump. I mean, seriously, the only movement in my whole body was my eyes expanding two inches outside their sockets and contracting, a movement which repeated again and again like in a cartoon.

When I finally regained control of my motor functions, I was just about to extend my arms and summon down the thunder of the gods when a tiny, quiet little voice somewhere inside my head whispered to me. It said, ‘Can I just say something?’ I knew that voice. It is the voice I use when a woman is crying because of me.

(None of this happened, you understand? I don't hear voices. I'm being whimsical to try to convey how I felt.)

Before blowing my top, I tried to follow the instinct that had warned me not to go full tonto.

I was the coach. Neil had said. Even if I had chosen to over-interpret what Neil actually said, Ziggy, at least, would have gone to play where I told him even if the other ten ignored me.

So what the eff was going on?

I took a deep breath and watched the game unfold. When my heart rate dropped under 300 bpm, I was able to think a little more clearly. I called up my menus and found the whole interface was different. On the left was a column. On the top of this column it said 31. Below this it said FC United Tactics, and below that it said AFC Phoenix Tactics.

But the majority of the screen was taken up by a big rectangle. At the top of this were the words FC United 3 - AFC Phoenix 0.

Just under that were four tabs. Match Overview; Match Stats; Action Zones; Match Report.

The last 3 were inaccessible.

Under that section was a list of the goalscorers and what times their goals had been scored.

And then there was a big flashing box of text, white on red.

Murray tries to pass to Smith, but the pass is too strong.

Then it changed to black on white:

Gribbin picks up the loose ball and tries to dribble forward.

The text box vanished, then reappeared a tantalising moment later.

But he loses the ball.

My head snapped to the right and, indeed, the ball had squirted away off the pitch and Gribbin was the nearest of my players to it.

Fucking weird stuff, man.

I shook my head. If it was still bothering me later I could do some tai chi or go for a run. But for now I had limited time to work this shit out. It was pretty likely I’d never get this chance again.

I clicked on FC United Tactics and saw the team's lineup, plus a formation graphic on the right. According to the heading and the little icons, which contained each player's shirt number, they were playing 4-3-3 with the left-back pushing far up the pitch and the right-back staying back. I hadn't noticed that with my naked eye. Interesting.

I clicked on a player’s name and his profile popped up. Awesome. It meant as long as someone was on the pitch, I didn't have to waste calories turning my head towards him to see his profile.

I switched to AFC Phoenix Tactics.

It was set to 4-4-2 and Ziggy was at left-back.

Ahhhhhhhhhh.

I closed the screens and went for a little walk up and down the touchline with a wry smile on my face. A couple of things had become clear.

1) Buying 4-4-2 hadn't been a waste. Although if I hadn't bought it, what formation would the team be using right now? I suppose I'd never know.

2) The players had been giving me that strange look because what I was telling them and what the curse was telling them I wanted them to do was different.

Now that was an interesting question. Was the curse controlling the players? Or was it just bypassing the need for me to verbalise what I wanted? Meh. Leave the philosophising to the taxi drivers.

Anyway, I remembered there was a perk I could buy called Match Stats 1. That, obviously, would unlock the second tab. I was very interested to see what it'd show, but I wouldn't be in control of any more teams for a while, so there was no point buying it. I had to stick to the plan. Becoming an agent!

Although... this management thing was getting more and more attractive by the second.

So I tried to go to the place where I bought the perks - just to see, you know - but I was stuck in the match screen. Ah, well. It was probably for the best.

I brought the tactics screen back up and dragged Ziggy up into attack. Nothing happened. I tried swapping him with the left-mid, number 11. Both icons snapped into their new places. It was still 4-4-2 but now the number 3 was in the left-mid slot and the number 11 was at left-back.

At first, nothing changed on the pitch, but as the players moved around, Ziggy just sort of drifted forwards and the other guy drifted backwards. And they stayed there. I had moved Ziggy closer to his destiny! Whoo!

Neither guy looked over at me or gave any indication that anything weird had happened.

I gave myself 30 seconds to think things through. My players really would have been better in a 5-3-2. Well, why not just change the formation? In my tactics screen there was an option to do just that. I clicked on it, tapped it, mentally savaged it, but it wouldn't budge.

That's because you've only bought 4-4-2, you prick.

Ugh. Well, I could at least squash this 11 into a more optimal version of 4-4-2, with a couple of square pegs in round holes. I had 2 right-backs, so one went into right midfield, and my best right-mid had to go in the centre. I didn't have a left-mid, but I had a left-footed central midfielder. I put him as left-mid. It'd have to do.

I mentally reassigned the players a couple at a time so that there wasn't absolute mayhem. When I was satisfied the players were more or less where they needed to be, the number on the top-left of the match overview changed to '34'. The number of minutes played!

This was all ludicrously easy.

I watched the match play out for a couple more minutes, and my lads felt a lot more solid. Most importantly, Ziggy was up front, ready to pounce. Ready to score a goal and blow everyone's minds with the coolness and precision of his finishing. Ready to fire me into a future filled with home saunas, infinity pools, and French maids!

I went for a little walk again, to let off some steam. I wasn't thinking clearly! Or maybe I was thinking too clearly, but about the wrong things.

Once I'd got a bit of a grip, I went back into the tactics page to see what I could tinker with.

In a way, there wasn't much, but there was enough. For the team, I could set a passing 'culture': short, mixed, long, or direct. I could set the level of tackling aggression: easy, medium, hard. (Medium and hard were visible but not currently selectable.) I could select pressing or not; offside trap or not; counter attack or not; or instruct everyone to get behind the ball, i.e. defend for their lives.

I could also tweak those settings on an individual basis. So I could have most of the team play short passing, but set my right-back to fire long balls to the left. Um... okay.

And I could instruct a player to man-mark someone on the other team. My guy would try to follow the other guy around the pitch, sticking to him like a barnacle, trying to stop him from being involved.

I left most of the settings alone because I didn't totally understand what they would do. I mean, I understood what they’d do on their own, but what would the second-order effects be? If I had someone man-marking an opposition player, wouldn’t that mess up the shape of my team? It was safer to leave most things as they were.

But there were two options I selected right away.

First, there was one called 'playmaker'. Seemed clear what that meant - the team would play through one guy. Like a quarterback in the NFL. When I clicked on that it gave me a list of every player in the team. I chose Gribbin, and that was done. Next, I put Ziggy as the penalty taker. I doubted Neil would give us a pen, but you never knew! Scoring a goal against a real goalkeeper, even if it was a penalty in a glorified training session, would surely do Ziggy the world of good. And if he missed? Well, I'd murder him and bury him under my patio. No harm done.

Satisfied, I closed everything and turned my attention to the actual game. It continued in its usual patterns for a while, but then I realised something had shifted. I opened the FC United tactics page but there was nothing different there. I watched the patterns of play a little more and while I'd learned to doubt what my naked eye told me, I was pretty sure I knew what was happening.

My boy Gribbin was running the game. And it wasn't just that he was dominating. The kid was taking the actual piss.