By the rules of the rondo whoever misplaced a pass had to step into the circle and take over as a defender.
Griffiths walked into the middle, his face was like gloomy thunder clouds.
He and Dean swapped positions.
Dean’s turn came to stand on the outside, his expression was just as flat as before, though he understood exactly what had just happened.
He remembered perfectly well how Griffiths had deliberately made things difficult for him a moment ago, hoping to watch him make a fool of himself.
Of course, every single one of the others had been a little bit against him too, one way or another, just not to the same extreme as Griffiths.
The ball kept circulating on the outside, the pace was quickening with every pass.
Griffiths kept lunging and scrambling in the middle, missing by a tiny margin time after time, his face was also growing darker by the second.
When the ball finally rolled to Dean’s feet, Griffiths happened to be standing just a few steps directly in front of him, his body tensed, already anticipating the line, getting ready to close him down.
Dean deliberately held the ball half a beat longer, not playing it away right away.
That pause landed at exactly the right moment—giving Griffiths the illusion that the new kid’s reactions had slowed, that the ball was there for the taking.
Almost instantly, Griffiths dropped his weight and lunged forward, his whole body was committing as his leg stretched straight for the ball.
But in that exact same instant, Dean stepped forward too—faster than him by a bit and slid the ball sideways along the grass.
The ball’s path was wickedly clever, skimming just past the side of the other defender and landing, precisely, right at Adam Pepper’s feet.
Adam hadn’t expected Dean to thread a ball like that from such tight defensive pressure.
He froze for half a second, a beat too slow underfoot, nearly losing it to the defender spinning back onto him.
Luckily his reactions weren’t slow either—he hooked it away again with the tip of his boot.
Picking the passing sequence back up.
Everyone in the circle had seen it, and everyone understood exactly what it meant.
There was nothing accidental about that.
Dean had clearly, intentionally set Griffiths up—handing back everything he’d been dished a moment ago, without missing a beat, and without even seeming to try.
A few of the older players exchanged a glance, and each read the same surprise in the other’s eyes.
This quiet, tight-lipped new kid didn’t take a single loss lying down, and his footwork was genuinely sharp—nothing about him read like someone who’d only been training for half a month.
They started to understand, too, that given how Dean was performing, they couldn’t afford to push things too far with him.
It was best to stay on good terms with him.
He might genuinely end up a real teammate before long.
Griffiths lunged at empty air, his balance was wobbling before he steadied himself, looking thoroughly ungainly—and when he turned back around, his face was even darker than before.
He shot Dean a venomous look.
But Dean didn’t pay him any attention at all, his eyes were still fixed on the ball.
Over the next ten-odd minutes, the rondo kept cycling, one player after another was swapping into the middle to be the “monkey” after a misplaced pass—except for Dean, who never once left the outside.
His first-touch passing was absurdly steady, the weight and angle landing was exactly right every single time; no matter how the defenders pressed him, he kept delivering the ball cleanly to a teammate’s feet, his pass completion rate was staggeringly high.
Peep!
At last, the whistle went, and youth coach Astley raised a hand to call a stop to the rondo.
“Right, that’s it for the rondo.
Next thirty minutes, open training—grab a ball, work on whatever you like, pair up for some one-on-ones if you want.”
This style of training was meant to let the players’ own creativity run free.
The coach gave no fixed structure.
Just let the players work things out for themselves.
The squad scattered, each grabbing a ball and starting to play around with it.
Conor came over from the other group’s pitch, ball tucked under his arm, and sidled up next to Dean, grinning.
“I saw what you did back there.
That was proper good.”
He meant it, he was genuinely impressed.
“When I first got into the U16s, my first time in the middle of the rondo, I got run around like an idiot—couldn’t even get near the ball, completely out of breath.
And here you are, first time, strolling through it like it’s nothing, and you even played Griffiths at his own game.”
“He wanted to play games with me too.”
He could feel it, too—during the rondo, more than a few pairs of eyes had settled on his back at different points, one of them belonging to Griffiths, carrying an open hostility.
Conor didn’t say anything more about it—he understood it, in a general sense.
The open training didn’t run long before the morning’s session wrapped up.
The whole squad regrouped at the edge of the pitch.
Astley looked the group over and spoke.
“Right, everyone to the tactics room.
Rest of the morning, you’re with Coach Heighway going through tactical breakdown.
This afternoon’s targeted specialized training, and we’ll finish with a squad scrimmage.”
The players nodded and headed off in twos and threes toward the training complex.
Dean walked along with the group.
Conor looked a bit put out.
“Ugh, another dull tactics lesson.
I’d rather just play.”
Dean, on the other hand, felt genuinely curious.
He wanted to see, properly, how football actually worked out on the pitch.
The tactics room had its curtains half-drawn against the light, and up front, a whiteboard bore a clearly drawn 4-4-2 formation in black marker, crossing lines marking out passing lanes and off-the-ball running directions.
Dean sat down with his teammates and listened as Heighway spoke.
“Today’s tactics session covers one thing, and one thing only—passing.
Don’t go thinking passing’s simple.
Anyone can knock a ball to a teammate.
Tearing a defence apart through passing—that’s the real skill.”
Heighway tapped his marker against the midfield zone on the board.
“A pass is never the point in itself.
Shifting the defence, stretching the space, creating a gap—that’s what every single pass is actually for.
Every short pass, every ball played backward that you’re practicing right now, is laying the groundwork for the killer pass through the heart of the defence.”
He sketched three interlocking triangles across the formation.
“First: your positioning has to form a stable supporting triangle.
Whoever’s got the ball needs at least two players offering support on both side of him, level with him, plus one offering support from deeper or further forward.
Three points make a plane—and the ball never dies.
If one opponent presses you, you’ve got two options for where to play it, so he won’t dare commit to the tackle recklessly.
That’s the most basic sense of security any pass can give you.
Why does Alonso control the midfield so calmly for the first team?
He’s always got two options right there—Gerrard, Riise—and the opposition can never quite lock him down.
Second: use horizontal passing to shift the whole defensive line.”
Heighway drew a long horizontal line across the board, connecting the left and right flanks.
“The ball moves from the left, to the centre, to the right, switching sideways again and again, and the opponent’s entire back line and midfield line have to shift across the pitch right along with you.
Everyone has a reaction lag.
The instant the defence’s shift falls half a beat behind, a gap opens up between two defenders.
That’s your chance to play the ball through.
Shifting the ball side to side with no purpose behind it means nothing.
Horizontal passing exists to set up the vertical breakthrough—get that hammered into your heads.
It’s meaningless without a purpose.”
He drew a diagonal arrow next, cutting straight through both defensive lines.
“Third: half of what makes a pass good comes down to the run made without the ball.
It’s never really about how good the man on the ball is—it’s about the runner finding the gap.
When do you start the run?”
The instant your teammate’s foot touches the ball.
That’s when you go.
Where do you run?
Into the blind space behind the two defenders.
Into the gap between the midfield line and the back line.”
Get yourself into position, and the pass comes naturally.
A player who waits for the ball dies waiting.
A ball that goes looking for the player—that’s what tears a defence open…”
Dean’s eyes stayed locked on the whiteboard, utterly absorbed.
Everything he’d trained so far had just been the basics underfoot—first touch, keepie-uppies, short passing.
No one had ever walked him through the tactical logic sitting behind a pass in any structured way before.
Every single sentence out of Heighway’s mouth felt like a new door swinging open in front of him.
As he listened, the sounds around him suddenly grew distant, and blurred.
The lines and symbols on the whiteboard slowly bled together, resolving into a real, flat expanse of green turf.
His awareness seemed to drift up above the pitch itself—the ground below him had eleven versions of himself standing on it in red shirts, and across from them, eleven blurred black silhouettes, arranged in a standard defensive shape.
Heighway’s voice reached him as if from very far away, and yet every word came through with clarity.
With every tactical point Heighway made, the eleven red figures out on the pitch responded, instantly, in kind.
When he spoke of the supporting triangle, the red figures spread out automatically, each one forming a stable triangle of support around whoever held the ball, the ball was circulating smoothly, every single press from the black figures was coming up empty.
When he spoke of horizontal stretching, the ball switched rapidly between the left and right flanks, forcing the black defensive line to shift back and forth again and again, until gaps began opening up in the shape, one seam at a time.
When he spoke of the vertical breakthrough, one red figure suddenly cut diagonally out of a gap in the defence, and the ball sailed right over the defensive line to land at his feet, with nothing but the goal in front of him.
Dean was completely absorbed in it.
He could feel the view from every single position on the pitch at once, could anticipate exactly where every pass would land, could catch, with clearness, every last flaw in the defence’s movement.
Everything Heighway was teaching became, in this vivid, embodied version of the pitch was absolutely plain to see.
He understood it now.
A pass isn’t about finding a teammate with your eyes.
It’s about using the shape of the team to stretch space, using off-the-ball movement to create the chance, and using the pass itself to draw a teammate’s run.
Just as he was following along, watching the red figures execute a full wide-play, cross-into-the-box passing sequence.
The picture in front of him shattered without any warning at all, and vanished in an instant.
Dean snapped back to himself with a jolt.
The noise of the tactics room rushed back into his ears, Heighway’s voice was landing clearly again.
“…remember, the instant a chance appears, you have to be decisive.
Hesitate half a second, and the defence recovers its shape, and the gap’s gone…”
Heighway was still calmly working through the material, the formation diagram on the whiteboard was exactly as it had been, as though nothing at all had happened.
Dean tried to focus, tried to find his way back to that feeling from a moment ago—looking down over the pitch, directing eleven figures through the tactics himself but no matter what he did, he couldn’t reach it again.
All that remained in his head was an unbelievably clear passing logic, stamped firmly into memory.
But no more vivid picture to go with it.
Right at that moment, the three beads in his field of vision surfaced on their own.
Both outer beads sat clear, same as always.
The one in the middle held its red.
But the blue—the colour that had been steadily building in the left-hand bead since the very first time he’d touched a ball was gone and wiped completely clean, as if it had never been there at all!!