Gold changed after the goal, becoming more careful, like a boxer who had cornered his opponent against the ropes only to watch him counter and slipping through his guard at the last moment.
Nobu started dropping even deeper to collect the ball, pulling both center backs wide with him to stretch Green’s compact block, and within five minutes the whole rhythm of the match had tilted decisively in Gold’s favor — patient, probing possession, ball recycled from one flank to the other looking for the exact half-yard of space that Green’s disciplined shape kept refusing to give up cleanly.
“They’re playing like their leading,” one of the spectators said, watching Gold string together another passage of twenty, thirty passes without ever quite breaking through.
“Too careful, Somebody needs to just shoot.”
“Somebody will,” the man beside him said.
“Give it time, Gold are working out how to beat Green’s low block.”
“Haram ball, I know Diego Simeone would be proud.”
Another laughed “Or Mikel Arteta, twelve years ago.”
The three spectators, continued with the banter but watched the match unfold.
The first man wasn’t wrong about Gold’s approach, as Reiji found half a yard in the eighteenth minute that hadn’t existed a minute earlier, driving at Kosei with the ball glued close before slipping a pass through to Masaru, whose first-time shot from the edge of the box forced Masaki into a full-stretch save that had the whole fence rising as one.
The ball spilled loose rather than settling in the keeper’s hands, and for a moment the six-yard box turned into exactly the kind of scramble that had produced Green’s own goal twenty minutes earlier — except this time it was Fumiya who finally hacked it clear, the ball sailing out for a corner with three Gold shirts still crowded around the box looking for a rebound that never came.
The corner itself nearly did more damage than the shot had.
Toma rose highest at the near post, a flicked header that Masaki somehow adjusted to at the very last instant, tipping it up and over the bar with fingertips that seemed, to everyone watching, to arrive a half-second later than they had any right to.
The save drew genuine applause even from a couple of Gold’s own bench, the specific grudging respect a crowd extends to quality it recognizes regardless of which side it happens to be helping. The source of this chapter is novelping(.)com.
“Naisu sēbu,” somebody called out, and it carried the same warm, generous weight it always carried on a day like this, an audience long past caring which color actually deserved the credit.
Green weathered wave after wave of it through the next 5 minutes with Gold camped almost entirely in the attacking half now, Yuji and Reiji interchanging positions to confuse Kosei and Shingo’s marking, Akio and Shoma both cutting inside from their flanks to overload the box whenever the ball found its way wide.
It was patient, intelligent football, considerably more so than anything a Sunday match produced, and twice more Masaki was forced into saves that had nothing routine about them — once diving low to his left to turn away a deflected shot that had changed direction twice before reaching him and once simply being brave enough to smother a low cross at Masaru’s feet before the striker could properly get a boot to it.
But it was on the counter, twice in that same stretch, that the real danger flipped entirely the other way.
Green broke at pace in the final minutes, Hikaru and Haru combining in a give-and-go that split Gold’s high defensive line wide open.
It was a desperate last-ditch recovery run from Eiji, dragging Haru down just outside the box, that stopped a clean run at goal from turning into something considerably worse for Gold’s own scoreline.
The free kick came to nothing, cleared by a combination of bodies rather than any real organization, but the warning had been delivered clearly enough to Gold that their dominance had a cost attached to it, and that cost lived in the space they kept leaving open behind their own advancing lines.
It happened again in the twenty-ninth minute, sharper this time — Haru winning the ball back high up the pitch through nothing more than sheer refusal to stop chasing a lost cause, feeding Hikaru in space with Gold’s entire back line caught upfield and exposed.
Hikaru’s shot, rushed and off-balance, should have been a formality for any competent keeper to deal with but Masato dealt with it anyway, as he came off his line fast, closing the angle down before Hikaru had even properly set himself, and smothered the shot at his feet with the calm of a keeper who’d clearly done this exact job more times than a Sunday games in Nishinari should have reasonably prepared him for.
The whole fence made a single sharp intake of breath, the particular collective gasp of a crowd watching a goal get taken away from them a half-second before it would have happened. Visit novelping.com for the full chapter.
“That’s twice now,” somebody along the fence said, genuine wonder in it.
“Today’s keepers are showing up.”
“Yeah, are they from here, Gold’s keeper is familiar but I’ve never seen Green’s keeper before, ” another voice answered.
“And you’d think you’d know a keeper that good if he’d ever played around here before.”
The conversation rippled a little further down the fence, picked up and turned over by two or three more voices and none of them landing on anything more certain than the first exchange had, that the goalkeepers kept the teams alive.
Gold were on the front-foot again almost immediately, unwilling to let the missed chance cost them any momentum, Reiji driving at goal himself this time rather than looking for a pass, a shot that curled just past the far post with Masaki fully beaten and grateful for the width of the goal rather than his own positioning.
The rebound off the side netting rolled harmlessly out of play, and the crowd seemed to understand exactly how razor-thin the margin between the two scorelines had actually become.
The half wound down with Gold still camped in Green’s territory, still probing, still finding half-chances that refused to become whole ones, and somewhere in the middle of that pressure, with the whistle for halftime a minute away and nobody along the fence could have said with any real confidence whether Gold’s relentless pressure on Green will lead to an equalizer that it had been building toward, or whether Green’s stubbornness was somehow going to help them survive the half.
Green still had hope, and with the halfway line to the finish finally coming into sight, they could almost begin to believe that their narrow lead might carry them through to the whistle.
Then the referee raised his hand and held up three fingers, signalling three minutes of added time, and suddenly the finish that had seemed close enough to touch moved just a little further away.
(Author)
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