The low, rhythmic rumble of the team bus engine vibrated through the floorboards, a steady hum that Callum felt in the soles of his trainers.
Outside the heavily tinted windows, the grey Leeds suburbs slid past, the midday traffic parting for the massive club coach as it made its way toward LS11.
Callum sat with his knees pressed against the seat in front of him, his head resting back against the plush headrest.
His heavy over-ear headphones were clamped firmly over his ears, isolating him in a cocoon of deep, steady bass.
The smooth, slow-tempo RnB track playing was the only thing keeping his racing thoughts in check.
The atmosphere on a matchday bus was a stark contrast to that of the team hotel, which was filled with banter and laughs.
It was a silent, focused sanctuary.
To his left, across the aisle, Lewis Cook was staring blankly out the window, a pair of earbuds in, his thumb mindfully spinning his phone on his knee.
A few rows ahead, Sol Bamba sat upright, his massive frame dominating the seat as he read through a laminated set piece sheet one last time.
Further down, Mirco Antenucci was completely still, eyes closed, likely visualizing the runs he would make.
Callum shifted his gaze back to the window.
The closer they got to Elland Road, the more blue and yellow scarves started to appear on the pavements.
Groups of fans, dressed in heavy jackets against the brisk Yorkshire air, were already walking in the same direction as the bus, clutching programmes and talking animatedly.
Some of them looked up as the coach rolled past.
Underneath his tracksuit jacket, Callum’s chest tightened with a sudden, sharp spike of nerves.
He reached down, adjusting the volume on his phone, letting the music swell to drown out the worries and heavy expectations in his head.
As the bus pulls into the parking lot, the players slowly file out, one by one, into the brisk West Yorkshire air.
Outside, the coach’s quiet sanctuary was instantly shattered.
A barrier of metal railings kept a thick crowd of Leeds supporters back, but it did nothing to muffle the wall of sound that hit Callum the moment his feet touched the tarmac.
The smell of frying onions from nearby burger vans, damp grass, and cheap beer hung heavy in the air.
“Come on, Cal, keep moving,” Cook murmured from behind him, giving him a gentle nudge in the small of his back.
Callum pulled his headphones down around his neck, the sudden roar of the crowd rushing into his ears.
“Go on, lad! Give ’em hell today!” an older fan in a retro Thistle Hotels shirt shouted, slamming his hand against the top of the barrier as Sol Bamba led the team through the gap.
“Who’s the kid?” another voice muttered further back in the crowd, squinting at Callum.
“Is that the lad from the academy?”
Callum kept his head down, clutching his wash bag tightly under his arm as he followed Bamba’s massive shoulders through the security gauntlet.
His heart was hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
Every stride felt slightly detached, as if he were watching himself in one of Rösler’s tactical videos.
They pushed through the heavy glass doors of the West Stand entrance, the sudden warmth of the corridor and the quiet security guards offering a brief reprieve from the madness outside.
The walls here were lined with black-and-white photos of Billy Bremner, Don Revie, and the legendary Leeds teams of the past, a silent, heavy reminder of the club’s history.
“First time?”
Callum looked up.
Liam Cooper had slowed his pace, walking alongside him as they headed down the narrow, carpeted corridor toward the home changing room.
“Yeah,” Callum admitted, his Scouse accent tight.
“A bit different from Accrington. Well, maybe a lot different.”
Cooper let out a low laugh, clapping a heavy hand on Callum’s shoulder.
“Wait until you walk out of the tunnel, mate. This is nothing. Just get your head right. The lads have got your back out there.”
They rounded the corner, and the door to the home dressing room stood open, the sound of the stereo already pumping from inside.
This was it.
The point of no return.
Hanging from the peg of locker number 29 was a pristine, white Leeds United home shirt.
His surname -VANCE- was printed in crisp, blue letters above his squad number, flanked by the official Sky Bet Championship patches on the sleeves.
Seeing it on a hanger in a real matchday dressing room made Callum’s throat go completely dry.
“Don’t just stare at it, lad. Put it on,” Sol Bamba’s booming voice echoed over the thumping bass of the stereo.
The captain was already down to his shorts, vigorously rubbing warm-up oil into his massive thighs.
“You earned that shirt, Callum. Now you go out there and make sure they remember the name on the back of it.”
“Right. Cheers, Sol,” Callum said, his voice cracking slightly before he cleared his throat.
He walked over to his spot, dropping his wash bag onto the bench.
Next to him, Lewis Cook was already pulling his white socks up over his shins, tape wrapped tightly around his ankles.
“Nervous are we, Cal?” Lewis asks, keeping his voice low beneath the music.
“The atmosphere here is one of a kind. Don’t worry, keep your head up, and play your football.”
“One of a kind is one way to put it,” Callum mutters to himself as he unzips his kit bag and pulls out his shin pads, sliding them down the front of his socks before securing them with tight wraps of white tape.
He grabs his custom boots and begins to thread the laces with deliberate, steady movements.
“I’m not nervous, Lew,” Callum says, glancing up at Cook with a tight, determined smirk as he tugs the laces tight and double-knots them.
“Just ready. My dad always said if you aren’t feeling a bit of a spark in your belly before walking out at a place like this, you’re in the wrong job.”
The heavy fabric feels cool against his skin as he pulls it over his head, adjusting the collar and smoothing down the embroidered crest over his heart.
“Besides,” Callum adds, his voice dropping into a low register as he catches his reflection in the mirror, the royal blue 29 sitting solid on his back.
“Once we’re out there on the grass, they’re just eleven blokes in red and white shirts. And they’re in our way.”
Grabbing the white tape, he carefully wraps it around his wrist, a small habit he’d picked up in the youth ranks.
Ensuring it was tight enough to his liking, he pulls it taut.
Just as he was finishing his routine.
The music suddenly cut out.
The silence that followed was instant and absolute.
The players stopped mid-stretch, mid-conversation, and turned toward the center of the room.
Uwe Rösler stood by the tactics board, a black marker in hand.
His face was a mask of cold, German determination.
Beside him, Rob Kelly closed the heavy double doors, shutting out the distant, muffled chanting of the fans already filling the stands.
“Listen to me,” Rösler began, his voice quiet but carrying an immense, commanding weight.
“The preparation is done. The tactics are on the board. But tactics do not win matches. Hearts win matches. Physicality wins matches.”
He locked eyes with Callum for a fraction of a second before scanning the rest of the starting eleven.
“Brentford will try to play their neat, short passes. They think they are clever. I want us to suffocate them from the first whistle. When we do not have the ball, we are a compact, aggressive block. When we win it…” Rösler drew a sharp, aggressive arrow on the board, pointing directly from the right-wing channel into the penalty box.
“…we transition with maximum speed. Callum, Mirco, Souleymane, you run. You run until your lungs burn.”
Rösler capped the marker with a sharp click.
“Ten minutes until warm-up. Get your minds ready.”
He closed his eyes, holding out his hands, and then opened his hands, exposing his palms to the sky.
He whispered a small, quiet prayer, a soft murmur meant only for himself.
It was a ritual he’d kept since his academy days.
It’s a plea for strength, for focus, and to make his family proud.
Just let me make an impact.
Let me keep my head.
He let out a slow, steady breath, releasing the last of the suffocating pressure.
When he opened his eyes, he slowly curled his fingers back into tight, powerful fists.
The trembling in his hands was gone.
The nervous kid who had walked off the team bus had vanished.
In his place stood the striker, the cold, single-minded competitor who lived to put the ball in the back of the net.
“Hey,” Cook said, nudging Callum’s shoulder as he stood up, his studs clacking sharply against the tiled floor.
“Let’s go show them what we’ve got.”
“Right behind you, Lew,” Callum said, his voice dropping into a low, steady register.
He stood up, adjusting the fit of the white Leeds shirt across his chest.
He took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the sharp scent of wintergreen.
He was seventeen years old, playing out of position, with thirty-five thousand fans waiting to judge his every touch.
And, most importantly, he was ready
Walking from the dressing room to the tunnel, the clacking of their studs on the ground echoes through the hallway, the sound getting drowned out by the sound of pre-game music and cheering from the stands.
Walking in a single file line, Callum was sandwiched between Lewis Cook and Mirco Antenucci, his eyes fixed on the white-and-blue collar of the shirt in front of him.
Sol Bamba led them from the front, his massive frame anchoring the queue, while the Brentford players filed out of the away dressing room to form a parallel line just inches away.
The contrast was sharp.
The Brentford lads, clad in their red-and-white stripes, looked tense, a few of them bouncing on their toes, staring straight ahead.
Callum’s eyes instinctively drifted down their line, searching for their left-back, Jake Bidwell, his direct opponent for the afternoon.
When he spotted him, Callum didn’t look away.
He let his gaze linger, a cold, competitive hunger settling deep in his chest.
As they reached the end of the corridor, the carpet gave way to the heavy, studded rubber matting of the tunnel.
The air instantly turned freezing, a sharp, biting draft blowing in directly from the pitch, carrying the scent of freshly cut damp grass and winter rain.
The sound was deafening now.
The pre-game music was pumping, but it was completely dwarfed by the rhythmic, thunderous chanting of thirty-five thousand Leeds fans.
The concrete walls of the tunnel literally vibrated against Callum’s shoulder.
Suddenly, the opening chords of “Marching On Together” began to swell from the stadium speakers, sent up by a wall of screaming voices.
“This is it, lad,” Cook muttered from behind, his breath misting in the cold air.
“Don’t look back.”
Up at the front of the line, the referee grabbed the match ball from its stand.
Sol Bamba took a deep, theatrical breath, turned to face his team, and let out a fierce roar, clapping his hands together.
“Come on, boys! From the first second! Let’s go!”
The line began to move forward, stepping out of the shadows of the tunnel and into the blinding, brilliant wash of the Elland Road floodlights.
The roof of the West Stand seemed to tower infinitely into the grey Yorkshire sky, and the floodlights cut through the mist, illuminating millions of tiny, swirling water droplets in the air.
Thirty-five thousand fans were a roaring sea of white, blue, and yellow.
To his left, the Don Revie Stand was a wall of pure noise, their voices merging into a deafening, unified chant: “We’ve been through it all together, and we’ve had our ups and downs…” The sheer volume vibrated straight through Callum’s boots, pulsing in his chest.
Callum forced his legs to move, stepping onto the pristine, springy grass of Elland Road.
He took a deep, sharp breath of the cold air, his eyes scanning the pitch, then the stands, and finally settling on the green turf beneath his feet.
The nervous flutter in his stomach instantly hardened into a solid, ice-cold focus.
The white Kappa shirt felt light.
He belonged here.
The pre-match warm-up was a fast-paced blur of action, starting with sharp jog-and-stretch lines to shake the biting West Yorkshire air from Callum’s limbs before transitioning into a high-tempo passing rondo where the ball zipped cleanly over the slick, immaculate turf.
He truly found his rhythm during the shooting drills, catching a ball on the half-turn and slamming a fierce effort off the underside of the crossbar to a roaring ovation from the early-bird fans in the Revie Stand, settling his nerves just in time for the final team talk and the official march back out onto the pitch.
Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with his teammates under the blinding, mist-filled floodlights, Callum felt the massive stadium shake to the deafening chorus of “Marching On Together” before the referee signaled for the pre-match handshakes.
Walking down the line, he kept his head held high, and when he finally reached Bidwell, he gripped his opponent’s hand with a firm, unyielding pressure.
Remembering Rösler’s lecture about mentality, and the mental games that take place while on the pitch, he had to let his opponent know he was not here to play around or get bossed around.
Trotting out to the right wing, Callum jumps on the spot, eager for the blow of the whistle.
His lungs drank in the cold air, his heart rate steadying.
Cook and Marco step up to the ball, kicking off the ball and getting the match underway with a sharp, echoing blast of the referee’s whistle.
Cook tapped the ball softly forward to Antenucci, who immediately swept a crisp, diagonal pass backward to Cooper in the defensive line.
Cooper looks up and passes to Bamba, who takes a composed touch under no immediate pressure, surveying the pitch as Brentford’s front line begins to step up in a coordinated press.
Bamba shifts his weight, faking a pass back to Silvestri before sliding a crisp, low ball forward through the lines toward the feet of Tom Adeyemi in the center circle.
Adeyemi is quickly closed down by Konstantin Kerschbaumer, one of Brentford’s defensive midfielders.
Under pressure, Adeyemi tries to lay the ball off to Cook, but another midfielder and pivot, Toumani Diagouraga, intercepts it.
Diagouraga immediately takes a heavy touch to drive forward into the vacated space, his long strides eating up the turf as Leeds’ midfield scrambles to recover their shape.
Sensing the danger, Lewis Cook quickly tracks back, snapping at the big Frenchman’s heels, while Bamba steps out of the defensive line to close down the passing lane to the striker, Djuricin.
Diagouraga, realizing his options are narrowing, looks to shift the ball out wide to their dangerous left-winger, Alan Judge.
Judge skips past Berardi and catches Cooper flat-footed, playing a weighted through ball to Marco Djuricin, their striker.
Djuricin peels off the shoulder of Bamba, timing his run to perfection to meet the weight of Judge’s pass.
With the ball rolling invitingly into the penalty box, Djuricin takes a sharp first touch to set himself, leaving Silvestri scrambling to narrow the angle at the near post.
Silvestri gets a touch to it, barely managing to parry the ball away.
The ball spins frantically off Silvestri’s outstretched fingertips, dying in the wet grass just inside the six-yard box.
For a split second, time seems to freeze as Brentford’s onrushing attackers and the scrambling Leeds defenders desperately lock eyes on the loose ball.
It is Cooper who reacts first, throwing his body on the line to hook a desperate, lunging clearance, getting the ball away from danger and sending a collective gasp of relief through the packed stands at Elland Road.
The soaring clearance falls near the halfway line, but Tom Adeyemi loses the aerial duel under pressure, his attempted flick-on heading backward into Leeds territory rather than forward.
Seizing on the loose ball, Brentford’s Alan McCormack immediately loops a dangerous, first-time header back over the retreating Leeds defensive line and straight into the penalty box.
Instantly, Callum’s heart leaps into his throat as the Elland Road crowd lets out a collective, anxious roar.
The ball bounces awkwardly on the slick turf, sparking a chaotic scramble as Bamba and Cooper scramble back to recover, with Djuricin and the arriving Lasse Vibe sniffing a second chance.
The stadium goes dead silent for a fraction of a second as Vibe connects perfectly with the dropping ball, striking it with frightening velocity.
The volley is an absolute rocket, screaming past Silvestri before the keeper can even lift a hand, and violently rippling the back of the net to open the deadlock.
A pocket of traveling Brentford fans erupts in the corner, while a collective groan ripples through the Elland Road stands.
Leeds United 0 – 1 Brentford (4′)
Callum stands out on the right wing, hands on his hips, watching the Brentford players sprint to the corner flag to celebrate.
Four minutes in, and they are already chasing the game.
It wasn’t even the second half, and they are already getting pressured into the ground.
He looks over at Cook, who kicks the turf in frustration, then back toward the center circle.
The dream debut just got a whole lot harder.
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A/N: The week is almost over, and I have only posted one chapter over 3 days, so I have a longer chapter for y’all.
Callum is gonna have it rough, as irl, Uwe’s team underperformed, and he was just one of the many managers they had in under 3 years.
Don’t expect them to be a super team, but with the addition of Callum, they will do plenty better than before.
The team heavily struggled offensively under Rösler, which solidified their inability to win games.
We are going to see how differently things would have gone had they had someone clinical and youthful.