Glory Of The Football Manager System-Chapter 363: The Lion City II

"Mr. Walsh!" he exclaimed, his voice a high, enthusiastic squeak.

"A pleasure! An absolute pleasure! We at the Singapore Tourism Board are so, so thrilled to have Crystal Palace here in the Lion City! The buzz, the excitement, the media value... it is simply phenomenal! And the James Rodríguez signing! A masterstroke! A coup! Our social media impressions alone have gone through the roof!"

He was practically vibrating. I nodded, trying to arrange my face into something that looked vaguely like polite interest. "We have prepared a full itinerary for the squad," he continued, producing a thick, laminated folder from somewhere and pressing it into my hands. "A city tour, a visit to the Gardens by the Bay, a reception dinner with our sponsors from Singtel and Singapore Airlines, a ..."

"Mr. Tan," I said, gently but firmly. He stopped. "We are grateful for the hospitality. Truly. But my players are here to train. The city tour and the reception dinner are wonderful, and we will attend them. But the football comes first. Always."

Mr. Tan blinked. Then his smile, remarkably, widened even further. "Of course, of course! The football first! Absolutely! That is exactly the kind of focus and professionalism that makes Crystal Palace such a wonderful partner for the Singapore Tourism Board!"

I was not sure he had heard a single word I said.

In a conference room with a view that could make a man believe he could fly, I gathered the squad. They were tired, jet-lagged, and still processing the fact that there was a boat in the hotel lobby. I kept it short.

"Alright, listen up," I said, my voice cutting through the weary fug.

"I know you’re tired. I know it’s been a long flight. And I know that this is a long way from home. Enjoy it. Enjoy the hospitality. Respect our hosts. But do not forget for a single second why we are here. We are not tourists. We are not here for a holiday. We are here to work. We have two weeks to become a team. Two weeks to get ready for the biggest season in this club’s history. So get your keys, go to your rooms, get some rest. Because tomorrow, the real work begins."

The first team meal was a culinary adventure that not everyone was prepared for. The hotel had put on a vast, sprawling buffet, a culinary map of Southeast Asia.

There was beef rendang, and chicken satay, and chilli crab, and a hundred other dishes that smelled extraordinary and looked terrifying in equal measure. I watched Benteke, a man who was usually a cautious eater, pile his plate high with something that glowed an alarming shade of red. He took one bite. His eyes went very wide.

He said nothing. He simply reached for his water glass and drank the entire thing in one long, desperate pull. Pato, on the other hand, looked at the buffet with the deep suspicion of a bomb disposal expert before eventually settling on a plate of plain pasta.

Navas, who had spent years in Spain and had presumably eaten actual food before, loaded up on the satay and ate it with the quiet, contented satisfaction of a man who knew exactly what he was doing.

After dinner, I gave them the night off, with a strict 10pm curfew. They needed to decompress, to find their own space. While they retreated to the air-conditioned comfort of their rooms, I took a walk.

The Singapore night was warm and alive, the air thick with the scent of frangipani and the distant hum of the city. I walked along the waterfront, the city lights painting the sky in a thousand impossible colours, and I thought about Emma.

About her fiery red hair and the easy, comfortable silence we shared. I had barely seen her in weeks, a series of snatched phone calls and brief, hurried texts the only thread that connected us.

I found a small, ridiculously expensive jewellery shop in the mall beneath the hotel and bought her a necklace, a delicate silver chain with a single, perfect pearl. It was an inadequate gesture. But it was all I had.

The next morning, the work began. The Geylang Training Centre was a functional, no-frills facility, the pitch a patch of green in the middle of a sprawling, concrete landscape. The heat was already a physical presence at eight in the morning, a shimmering, oppressive weight that made the air shimmer above the grass. And the jet lag had arrived with a vengeance.

I had warned them. Rebecca had warned them. But there is no amount of warning that truly prepares a human body for the experience of being thirteen hours out of sync with the world. Milivojević, who was usually a model of focused, disciplined professionalism, turned up to training with his shirt on inside out and did not notice for twenty minutes.

Tomkins jogged a lap of the pitch, stopped, looked around with the glazed, bewildered expression of a man who had no idea where he was or how he had got there, and then jogged back. Chilwell fell asleep sitting upright on the bench while Rebecca was explaining the warm-up routine, and only woke up when Wan-Bissaka nudged him with a boot.

I kept the session deliberately light. There was no pressing drill, no tactical work, no high-intensity running. We did possession exercises, simple five-yard passes, one-touch, two-touch, keep the ball moving, keep the body warm, keep the brain engaged.

The point was not to train. The point was to remind their bodies that they were footballers, that this was a pitch, that a ball was a ball even on the other side of the world. It was maintenance, not construction.

But even in this gentle, low-intensity session, I was watching. I was always watching. I saw how James moved, how he found space instinctively, how he was always half a second ahead of everyone else.

I saw how Neves controlled the tempo of the possession drill without even trying, his first touch so clean and precise it looked like the ball was on a string. I saw how Eze, even exhausted and jet-lagged, had a brightness to his movement, a natural, irrepressible energy that the heat and the tiredness could not quite extinguish.

And I saw how Bojan, quiet and focused, worked through the drill with a concentration that was almost meditative, as if he was using the simplicity of the exercise to rebuild something inside himself, one pass at a time.

After an hour, I called a halt. The players were drenched, their faces a mask of exhaustion and relief in equal measure. I gathered them in the centre of the pitch.

"Good," I said, my voice calm and even.

"That is enough for today. Rest this afternoon. Eat well. Drink water. Sleep. Tomorrow, we start the real work." I paused, looking around the circle of tired, sweating faces. "We have twelve days before we fly home.

In twelve days, I want this squad to be a team. Not a collection of individuals, not a group of talented players who happen to wear the same shirt. A team. That starts here. It starts now. It starts with the small things. A good first touch. A clean pass. A run made for a teammate who might not even see it. The small things are the big things. Remember that."

I looked at them for a moment longer. Then I nodded, and they dispersed, dragging themselves back towards the bus, towards the air conditioning, towards the blessed, merciful cool of the hotel.

I stayed on the pitch for a moment, alone, the heat pressing down on me like a hand. I looked out at the empty training ground, at the neat, green rectangle of grass, and I thought about the season ahead.

About the qualifier. About the work still to be done. About the gap between where we were and where we needed to be. It was a wide gap. But it was not unbridgeable.

I picked up a ball that had been left behind, balanced it on my foot for a moment, and then flicked it up and caught it in my hands. The work was not over. It had barely begun. But for the first time in a long time, I felt something close to peace.