There was no time to properly celebrate a win, and that was the cruelty of a tournament assembled in a single morning, because while Team Red and Team Blue had barely managed to catch their breath, word came down the fence that the next game was already preparing to start.
The message travelling from one spectator to another until it reached the players who were still gathered around the edge of the pitch, some drinking from half-crushed bottles and others wiping sweat from their faces with the bottoms of their shirts.
The goal was still being discussed in overlapping voices, with different versions of the counter already forming depending on who had watched it, but the tournament had no patience for replays, arguments, or celebrations that lasted longer than the people running it were willing to tolerate.
The crowd, still buzzing with excitement after the opening match of the morning, began shifting toward the touchline as the next players made their way onto the same stretch of ground where Red and Blue had been fighting over every metre only moments earlier.
There were no changing rooms for anyone to disappear into, no separate entrance through which the next teams could make their arrival, and certainly no second pitch waiting somewhere nearby to keep the tournament moving while another match finished.
Everything ran through the same battered piece of ground, one match replacing another almost immediately, because there was simply nowhere else in Nishinari for them to put it.
A group of players wearing worn shirts, with gold and green bibs pulled over them respectively, stepped onto the field for the second game of the morning, their boots scraping against the dry surface as they began spreading themselves across the pitch.
Some were older than the boys who had just finished playing, some were younger, and a few looked as though they had borrowed whatever shirt happened to be available before leaving home, but none of that mattered once the ball was placed down.
The tournament had been built around what people had rather than what they lacked, and the same philosophy extended to the players themselves.
There were still two quarterfinal matches to be played after the opening fixture, although the participants for those games could not yet be seen anywhere near the fence, which would have seemed strange in a more organized competition where teams were expected to wait beside a designated pitch with numbered shirts and officials keeping track of time.
Nishinari had never been interested in that sort of organization, however, and the absence of the players did not mean they were missing; it simply meant they were somewhere else.
The Rec was divided into two parts, after all.
The larger section was the familiar stretch of cracked ground where the morning’s football had been taking place, a surface patched and repatched by years of use, with dry grass struggling through the edges and sand collecting in the places where the concrete had finally given up. Find the original chapter at g.com.
The other half was smaller and flatter, marked by the fading white lines of what had once been a basketball court, although the hoops themselves had disappeared years ago and nobody seemed to remember exactly when they had been removed.
The old markings had gradually been repurposed into a futsal court, with the basketball lines overlapping the newer chalk marks until the whole surface looked less like a proper sporting facility and more like several generations of children refusing to let a piece of ground become useless.
That was where the remaining teams had been waiting.
Same place Green and Gold had been passing the ball in a rondo while some of their teammates stretched, called for the ball, and occasionally argued over whether a pass had actually crossed one of the faded lines.
The other four teams were scattered around the edges, their respective coloured bibs making it possible to identify them from a distance even when their shirts underneath were almost identical.
Yellow, Black, Pink, and Purple had been drawn into the remaining quarterfinals, with Black facing Pink and Purple facing Yellow.
Nobody had bothered to create a complicated schedule, Tatsuya just told them to do it like every Sunday, thus someone had simply drawn the names and had shouted them out.
The players remembered who they were supposed to play, and that was considered sufficient.
The afternoon was awaiting the semifinal matches and after those, tucked in the hottest part of the day, it would be the final that everyone had already begun talking about despite the fact that nobody could possibly know who would reach it.
The expectation was that the everything would be wrapped when the light started turning gold, when the harsh brightness of midday had softened and the long shadows of the surrounding apartment blocks began stretching across the Rec. Read this novel at novelping.com for the best experience.
Today was a whole day tournament, that will be funneled through one patch of sand and dry grass between two apartment blocks, but for the people watching from the fence, a the lack of facilities had never made the tournament feel smaller.
Lacking was not new for them and If anything, it made every match feel closer akin to front row seats, their very own court-side seats, similar to a basketball game and the noise had nowhere to disappear, because every shout and argument could be heard.
Children climbed the fence to see over the shoulders of adults, older men stood with their arms folded while enjoying themselves with no care to who won, and women who had come down to collect younger children found themselves staying another half hour because some of their kids were playing.
A few shopkeepers watched from across the road whenever there was a lull in customers, while teenagers who had no intention of participating in the tournament nevertheless hovered around the perimeter because being near football was better than spending the Sunday somewhere else.
The first game had changed the atmosphere as, before and while team Red and Blue played, people had been talking over one another, eating, arguing about the draw and calling across the Rec to friends they had not seen since the previous Sunday but after Kenta’s Olympico attempt, everything stopped and football had become the centre of every conversation.
Rui was waiting on his team, so they could go to the ‘futsal’ court, by the pitch with his shirt clinging to his back and a bottle of water hanging loosely from one hand while his eyes followed the players entering the field.
He could still feel the match in his legs, particularly a final run from the edge of his own penalty area through the centre of the pitch, but the sensation was already beginning to fade beneath the strange restlessness that always followed a game.
He had expected the tournament to be enjoyable, but he had not experienced nor expected it to feel so alive.
(Author)
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