Steve Cooper glanced over the group of sixteen and seventeen year olds in front of him.
Most of the players had already been training with the squad for three or four days, so he was fairly familiar with them by now.
In the end, Cooper’s gaze settled on Zayn.
Dewsnip had just spoken to him about this Villa boy, who had been added to the squad at the last minute.
A highly efficient forward who had only recently been converted from defensive midfield.
Interesting.
Cooper did not say much.
After asking Zayn to give a brief introduction, he blew the whistle for the warm-up.
Jogging, dynamic stretching, shuttle runs, rondos.
It was as standard a warm-up routine as it could get.
The fitness work afterward was only a few token sets of interval runs, nothing too intense.
Cooper had no intention of running the players into the ground on the first day.
The main event of the morning was the tactical session.
The young players were taken into the tactical analysis room at St George’s Park.
A huge projection screen hung on the wall, with photographs of classic Three Lions matches displayed on both sides.
Cooper stood in front of the screen, pressed the remote, and the display lit up.
“Every one of you was selected from the best academies in England.”
“At your clubs, you all play in different systems.
Some of you play possession football, some play on the counter, and some play with a high press.”
“But the national youth team isn’t a club.
We don’t have much time to build chemistry, and in three days, we face Portugal.”
Cooper pressed the remote again, and a tactical diagram appeared on the screen.
“So I’m not going to make this too complicated.
You only need to remember two words.
Possession and pressing.”
“Here, we play one kind of football.”
…
Zayn stared at the tactical board on the screen, covered in arrows and circles, and felt a little intimidated.
In his previous life, he had also been the kind of “armchair tactician” who argued passionately with people online, discussing everything from Guardiola’s possession philosophy to Klopp’s heavy metal football as though it were second nature.
But now that he was actually sitting in a tactics room, listening properly to a UEFA Pro coach explain tactics, he felt as if he might fall asleep within five minutes.
To his surprise, once Cooper began speaking, Zayn actually paid attention.
First, football was the thing Zayn cared about most across both of his lives.
Second, Cooper, the coach who had led England U17 to the World Cup title, clearly understood that he was dealing with a group of sixteen and seventeen year old boys who were not exactly fond of studying. New chapters come out on g.com first.
So he deliberately avoided obscure terminology.
He used plain phrases like “keep the ball” and “win it back after losing it,” and paired every tactical concept with match footage, making everything easy to understand.
But simple explanations did not mean simple tactics.
The core logic of Cooper’s system was extremely clear.
In possession, the team advanced as a unit.
From the forward to the goalkeeper, everyone moved within a tight, compact shape.
After losing the ball, they counter-pressed immediately and tried to surround the ball carrier within five seconds.
In attack, they did not rely on one single point.
Instead, the entire team was expected to contribute from multiple areas.
The longer Zayn listened, the more alert he became.
But as he listened, an uneasy thought slowly rose in his mind.
This tactical system did not seem to suit him very well.
Everything Cooper said made sense.
The focal point, the pressing, the movement, the passing combinations.
The logic was clear, and each part connected smoothly with the next.
In this system, the center forward did not only need to score.
He also had to receive the ball with his back to goal, protect it, and create space for teammates arriving from deeper positions.
That was the core demand placed on the center forward in Cooper’s 4-2-3-1.
On top of that, once the team lost possession, they immediately pressed high up the pitch.
As the first line of defense, the center forward had to work hard to pressure the opposing defenders and disrupt their build-up.
The center forward also had to keep moving off the ball, dragging the defensive line out of shape to create space for wide players cutting inside and midfielders pushing forward.
Finally, the system emphasized quick passing and movement in the final third, which meant the center forward needed excellent one-touch passing ability to fit into the collective attack.
Torres, however, was precisely not that kind of player.
T9’s struggles with Spain and Chelsea came from the fact that he was not suited to being a tactical focal point in settled possession.
When space was compressed, his pace and explosiveness had no room to shine.
Aside from injuries, another major reason for his difficulties at Chelsea was that the team’s high-pressing tactics did not play to his strengths.
It was only when Roberto Di Matteo brought his Italian-style counterattacking approach to Stamford Bridge that Torres was given the space and freedom to counterattack, leading to that classic Champions League semifinal moment when he raced through and scored the goal that finished Barcelona off.
Torres’s game was built on space.
He needed teammates to create space for him, then he used his explosiveness and speed to tear defenses apart.
But Cooper’s system required the center forward to be the one creating space.
Zayn shook his head and brought his attention back to the session.
…
The afternoon training focused on tactical drills and a small-sided match.
Cooper split the twenty-odd players into two groups and had them repeatedly practice the possession build-up and counter-pressing patterns he had explained that morning.
At first, the session was indeed chaotic.
These young talents had been gathered from all over the country, and their playing habits were wildly different.
The Manchester City boys were used to short passing and combination play.
The Liverpool boys looked eager to play every ball in behind.
The Manchester United boys liked taking players on individually.
A few days of training together was nowhere near enough to smooth out all those differences.
Still, these were the “second batch” of the best seventeen year old footballers selected from across England.
It did not take long before the rhythm on the pitch gradually began to settle.
The initial chaos on the training ground was being organized layer by layer into the structure Cooper wanted.
Zayn’s performance during the tactical drills could only be described as steady but ordinary.
He was clearly still trying to figure out the responsibilities of a modern center forward in Cooper’s system.
Standing on the touchline with his thermos, Dewsnip watched Zayn stumble through the tactical drills and was not especially surprised.
The boy had only just switched from defensive midfield to forward.
It was normal for his tactical understanding not to have caught up yet.
But once they moved into the small-sided match, Zayn looked completely different.
After all, tactical drills were one thing.
A real contest was another.
In just twenty minutes, Zayn scored three goals.
The way his teammates looked at him changed from “Who is this guy?” to “What is going on with him?”
Zayn himself remained calm.
In his mind, with his current ability, scoring a few goals was nothing more than routine.
After completing [Main Quest 2], the Realization Rate of Torres’s Money-Power Template had already risen to 35.2%.
Zayn figured that if one hundred percent Realization Rate represented peak Liverpool-era Torres, then his current 35.2% should be close to Torres as a teenager.
And what did teenage Torres represent?
In Madrid, young Torres was a name written into the record books.
At ten years old, he scored fifty-five goals in a single season, leaving defenders his age with nightmares.
At fifteen, he signed a professional contract with Atlético Madrid, and the entire Calderón waited for him to grow up.
At seventeen years and sixty-eight days, he made his first-team debut for Atlético Madrid, setting the club record as their youngest ever player.
At nineteen, he became the youngest captain in Calderón history.
Along the way, he won the Golden Boot at the UEFA European U16 Championship, the Golden Boot at the UEFA European U19 Championship, and the Silver Boot at the FIFA World Youth Championship.
The nickname “El Niño” echoed across the football world.
And it certainly was not because Torres had a handsome face.