The referee checked his watch before kick-off, held up a single finger toward both sides and informed the players that five minutes of normal time left, plus one more minute added on top.
It wasn’t much but team Blue needed every second, let alone a minute.
The blues threw themselves forward almost immediately once play resumed, the specific desperation of a team that understood exactly how little time remained to fix what had just gone wrong.
Takumi and Ryosuke both pushed high immediately, Hayato dropping deep to spring longer passes forward the moment his own defense won it back, and the reds found themselves defending in genuine numbers for the first time all match with Ken dropping alongside Kaito and Sho to add a body to the box rather than risk anything further forward, shifting from the distributor to a man barricading a door.
“Stay switched on!” Ken shouted, voice cracking slightly from the accumulated running during the game.
The blues’ kept on pushing and their best chance since the restart, with time working against them, arrived in the fifty-seventh minute.
It came from good ball possession, they stitched passes together with a patience that seemed almost cruel given how little time they had left to work with, Hayato found Naoya wide, Naoya passed it back inside to Souta who had been given a half-second longer than he should have been by Renta, who had drifted towards Naoya chasing the ball, curled a shot toward the far corner that had the whole crowd gasping in the same instance.
Tomoya got there as he threw himself full-stretch, fingertips barely brushing enough of the ball, changing its flight to send it looping up and over rather than in for a goal.
The crowd’s gasps turned into cheers because of the moment of brilliance from Souta and Tomoya.”Nice save!” somebody shouted from behind the fence,because the crowd was here for moments like this, not which side actually deserved to win.
Tomoya didn’t celebrate, he scrambled back to his feet immediately, already barking instructions at his own back line for the resulting corner, sweat dripping steadily off his chin onto the dry ground beneath him.
Sho reached him first, slapping his shoulder, it was something between good job and a reminder that the danger wasn’t over yet.
“The save just guaranteed our victory” Sho said, while picking a blue-bip to man mark.
“Don’t jinx it, corners still coming and the game is not over.”
The corner itself carried real menace — Daiki rising highest at the near post, a flick that nearly caught everyone flat-footed, the ball skimming just wide of the far post with Jin arriving a half-second too late to properly clear it. New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
The whole reds exhaled as one when it rolled harmlessly out of play, and somewhere behind the fence, an old man’s voice cut through the settling quiet with the particular satisfaction of a spectator who’d been proven right about something.
“Told you it wasn’t over, not this close to the whistle and a narrow lead.” he said, to young boy next to him that just nodded at his words.
Rui found himself standing shoulder to shoulder with Shun near the edge of the box in the aftermath, both of them breathing hard, saying nothing, an unspoken solidarity of two players who’d spent the last couple of minutes doing work that most of the game had not demanded of them but both knew, without needing it explained by anyone, exactly why it mattered.
Shun thought about how he hadn’t touched the ball in minutes, but right now It didn’t matter, because defending a lead, he was slowly learning, asked something different of a player than chasing one.
His aim, for the rest of the game, was denying them goal rather than attacking to get one, and the reversal felt like the truest test of the so far.
The added minute arrived with the scoreline still 1–0, the referee’s watch the only clock either team could trust anymore, and it was in that final sixty seconds that the blues mounted one last, desperate scramble — a mishit clearance falling to Ryosuke inside the box, the ball bouncing dangerously between three players before Kaito finally hacked it clear under real pressure, sending it out for a throw-in rather than anywhere near goal.
The throw-in itself never properly developed into anything — Renta closing down Naoya fast enough to force a rushed, harmless cross straight to Tomoya’s grateful hands, he wasted time.
The referee, looked at time and blew three sharp blasts that cut clean through the noise of the crowd and settled the game, it is full time.
The reds’ side of the fence erupted into noise that had been building the entire final stretch and finally had somewhere real to go.
Ken sank briefly to his knees before Kaito hauled him back up by the collar, laughing.
Tomoya held his gloves aloft like they’d personally won the match for him, which, in the specific accounting of the last five minutes, they very nearly had.
Yamato hugged anyone within reach despite not having scored a single goal himself all afternoon, shouting something about how he’d “made the runs, at least,” to anyone who’d listen.
Rui stood near the center circle, chest heaving, sweat soaking through a shirt gone heavy with it, and let the noise wash over him without needing to stand at the center of it — the same quiet satisfaction from earlier settling deeper now that the whole shape of the afternoon had actually held to the very end.
Across the pitch, the blues shook hands one by one, gracious in defeat the specific way exhaustion usually managed to kick once the adrenaline finally started draining out of them, murmurs of “otsukaresama” passed between the players, the way the phrase always got passed after something hard-fought — good work, well played, the specific Japanese courtesy that existed for exactly this moment.
Tatsuya, still standing on the far side of the pitch, finally set his own ball down properly and clapped — slow, unhurried, genuine — the specific applause of a man who’d clearly seen considerably better football in his professional life and had, somehow, still found something worth applauding in this particular version of it anyway.
The red team had won, victory belonged to them now, earned in the last five minutes.
Somewhere beyond the fence, the rest of the day’s bracket waited to be completed three more matches, a semifinal, with the eventual final between whoever survived it all — was still waiting, patient, for its own turn to matter just as much.
(Author)
Thank you for reading.
Constructive feedback to improve appreciated.