As the weeks rolled by, the senior English league season officially kicked off.
Concurrently, the preliminary rounds of the National Junior Cup began.
There were no massive, sweeping grandstands here.
There was no thunderous roar from fifty thousand spectators.
There were only two small squads of children, a humble grass pitch, and a desperate hunger to win.
“Alright, boys, gather round!” Joss clapped his hands together, his voice echoing across the quiet field.
“Today is our opening match of the National Junior Cup.
Look at the opposition over there.
They want this exactly as much as we do.
They want to win, and they want the trophy.
They will not show us any mercy.
So, tell me, are you going to let them dance around and celebrate while we go home as a laughingstock?”
“No way, sir!”
“We will smash them!”
“Let them see who we are!”
The boys screamed in unison, their faces flushed with adrenaline.
Joss nodded in satisfaction.
His motivational speech was incredibly simple, but for a group of fired-up pre-teens, simplicity was exactly what worked.
He had successfully tapped into their natural, stubborn competitiveness.
However, not everyone was swept up in the fiery rhetoric.
Allen stood near the back of the huddle.
His face was entirely devoid of emotion.
As a former Tier-1 operator, he found Joss’s pre-battle speech utterly childish.
To a man who had been briefed on high-casualty black-ops missions, hyping up a youth football match felt almost comical.
Joss noticed the cold, disdainful glint in Allen’s eyes.
The veteran coach sighed internally and shook his head.
Over the past few weeks, he had grown accustomed to the seven-year-old’s unnerving, deadpan stoicism.
The boy was built like a machine and operated like one.
Whatever, Joss thought.
Let the kid think what he wants.
As long as he scores goals for me, I don’t care how he processes the game.
Today’s opponents were the Tigers, a local squad put together by a nearby school.
Unlike the massive professional academies, grassroots youth football in Liverpool was heavily supplemented by school teams.
Outside of Liverpool FC and Everton, most local sides were just groups of neighborhood kids cobbled together to fill out the regional brackets.
A school team like the Tigers was practically cannon fodder.
For a mismatch like this, Joss’s tactical directive was brutally straightforward: Allen needed to score.
He needed to score constantly, and he needed to score ruthlessly.
Goal difference was a vital metric in the group stages, and Joss wanted to cement Liverpool’s absolute dominance from day one.
He knew Allen had the lethality to pull it off.
Joss had deployed the squad in a 4-5-1 formation.
Chris Kirkland wore the captain’s armband in goal. This chapter was copied from novelping.com without permission.
Stephen Warnock and Jon Otsemobor operated as advanced fullbacks.
Because of their superior athleticism, Joss had instructed them to push high up the pitch, essentially playing as wingbacks to suffocate the opposition in their own half.
The midfield was packed with five players, orchestrated by the relentless engine of John Welsh.
Up front, operating entirely alone, was Allen George.
His sole mission was to act as the tip of the spear and execute the enemy.
Because this was an official Cup match, the local FA had actually dispatched a real officiating crew—one referee and two linesmen.
They were amateur officials, but their presence added a layer of legitimacy to the fixture.
At the center circle, Kirkland met the Tigers’ captain for the coin toss.
Normally, captains would exchange club pennants before kickoff.
However, since the Tigers were just a local school team, they had no pennant to offer.
The ceremonial exchange was skipped entirely.
Allen watched from his position near the midfield line.
To the other kids, standing at the center circle and shaking hands under the referee’s gaze was the ultimate dream.
But to Jack Vance, it was just another administrative delay before weapons-free.
“Allen!
Let’s go, my boy!
Show them what you are made of!
Show them the blood of the House of George!”
Allen’s head snapped toward the touchline.
Hammond was leaning over the waist-high metal railing, screaming at the top of his lungs.
The fearsome, sixty-year-old patriarch of Britain’s most terrifying shadow empire was wearing a custom-tailored Liverpool jersey.
Emblazoned across the back was the name GEORGE.
He was not alone.
Allen’s father, York, and his uncle, John, were standing right beside the old man.
Hammond had dragged the entire executive branch of the family out of their sprawling estate just to watch a seven-year-old play grassroots football.
Because they were not at Anfield, the only “fans” in attendance were the parents of the players.
Hammond’s booming, aristocratic voice completely dominated the sidelines.
A dark line formed across Allen’s forehead.
He sighed heavily.
To see the undisputed king of the British underworld acting like a crazed soccer hooligan was intensely embarrassing.
Nevertheless, Allen respected loyalty.
He raised his right fist and pounded it twice against his chest, signaling to his family that the objective would be secured.
At the center circle, Kirkland lost the coin toss.
The young keeper cursed under his breath and jogged back toward his penalty box, visibly annoyed that he had lost the first tactical advantage of the season.
Allen chuckled quietly.
He still found it amusing that a prodigy goalkeeper like Kirkland—who played with such calculated, icy precision—had the foul-mouthed temperament of a street brawler.
The referee checked his watch.
He raised his whistle and blew a long, sharp note.
The match was live.
The Tigers kicked off. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Their striker immediately passed the ball backward, and the entire team pushed forward toward the Liverpool half.
Allen did not hesitate.
The moment the whistle blew, he initiated an aggressive high press, sprinting straight at the enemy center-backs.
He knew he probably wouldn’t win the ball immediately, but military doctrine dictated that constant, suffocating pressure forced enemy errors.
The Tigers, to their credit, did not panic instantly.
They managed a few quick passes, eventually funneling the ball out to their number seven winger.
The winger put his head down and accelerated down the flank.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Warnock muttered, watching the winger charge straight into his sector.
“You have the whole bloody pitch, and you run straight at me?
Do I look like an easy target?”
Warnock dug his cleats into the turf and exploded forward.
The Tigers winger froze, completely unprepared for the speed of the Liverpool fullback.
He panicked, looking frantically left and right for an outlet pass.
Warnock offered no quarter.
While still a yard away, he launched into a vicious, perfectly timed sliding tackle.
He swept the ball cleanly away, sending the winger tumbling into the grass.
Warnock instantly popped back to his feet, securing the loose ball.
It was a brutal demonstration of the massive skill gap between an academy prospect and a schoolboy.
Sprinting up the touchline, Warnock drew two defenders toward him.
Rather than trying to be a hero, he strictly followed Joss’s tactical briefing.
He snapped a crisp pass inside to Welsh.
Welsh received the ball effortlessly.
He threw a quick shoulder drop to completely bypass a lunging midfielder, then picked his head up and scanned the final third.
He saw Allen.
Without a second thought, Welsh launched a precise, sweeping long ball over the top of the Tigers’ defensive line.
Allen was already positioned perfectly at the edge of the penalty box.
He backed into the opposing center-half, using his superior core strength to pin the boy in place.
As the ball dropped from the sky, Allen did not even bother turning around.
He extended his foot and killed the ball dead on the turf.
In the exact same fluid motion, he aggressively backheeled the ball to the left side of the pinned defender, while simultaneously spinning away to the right.
It was another flawless knock-and-run maneuver, executed entirely backwards.
The center-half was left staring at empty space, completely bamboozled.
Allen bypassed the defender and reunited with the ball just inside the box.
The Tigers’ goalkeeper had already rushed off his line in a desperate attempt to close the angle.
Allen did not break stride.
He didn’t smash it with power.
He simply slipped the toe of his boot under the ball and executed a delicate, perfectly weighted chip.
The ball floated gracefully over the frantic goalkeeper’s head, dropping softly into the back of the net.
1-0.