Capital

young man made to skin defenders on the outside; to suck them in to tackles and skip past them and then cross the ball; to cut inside and shoot; to lay the ball back for a midfielder coming forward at pace; and then do it all again and again, full of running and full of trouble, and gifted with the one thing which every defender in the world most hates to play against: startling, authentic speed. The speed meant that for an opponent there was no chance to recover from a mistake, and no forgiveness for a lapse of concentration. Blink, and Freddy was gone. His ungainliness, his deceptive air of being about to trip over his own feet, helped too. He would run towards a defender, looking as if the ball were about to get away from him at any moment, and simply kick the ball past. It would, to the defender, be completely obvious that the ball was now his: no way Freddy could get there first. He would turn and chase – and then Freddy would be beside him, past him, his leg would flick out, and he’d be gone. Once he was half a metre past, it was over.
    When Freddy first arrived it was clear he needed to put on a few kilos in his upper body, otherwise the bigger and older men would be able, if and when they caught him, to muscle him off the ball; and maybe the extra weight would mean he lost a yard of speed. That had happened before with many other young footballers. But it didn’t with Freddy. Not that he put on the bulk; it turned out that he didn’t need it. His running style was so odd, so unpredictable and awkward and elusive, it was as if it short-circuited something in defenders’ brains. He was like an eel. They just couldn’t get a proper hold on him. The manager was very reluctant to believe this, but he finally accepted the evidence of his eyes, gathered over many fractions of games, leading up to entire second halves. OK, he eventually conceded. Freddy was ready. Or even if he wasn’t ready, he was still going to play.
    Freddy, in his match-day strip and tracksuit, sat on the bench by his locker and did up his boots. On Mickey’s advice, they hadn’t yet signed a contract for the boots, so he was wearing a pair of Predators with the logos blacked out. If today went well, and there were other days like today, his shoe contract would be worth many millions. Freddy couldn’t care less about that, because he already had all the money and all the stuff he would ever need, but it mattered to Mickey and to his father, so he did what he was told. The only thing that mattered for Freddy was football. Everything else was to some degree fake.
    A pair of shiny brown shoes appeared in front of him. Freddy looked up. It was the manager with the owner of the club behind him. The owner did not often come to the dressing room and this was, in nine months at the club, only the fourth time Freddy had met him: the others were when he’d first arrived, at an end-of-season club event, and once in the dressing room when Freddy had come on with fifteen minutes to go against Blackburn, and scored the winning goal. The owner smiled down at Freddy in his uneasy way, his eyes moving about as they always did, his air as always that of a man who wished to be somewhere else. Freddy caught a look in the manager’s eyes, and stood up. The owner waved him back down again but Freddy stayed standing.
    ‘Good luck today,’ the owner said in his slow, clear English. ‘Be fast!’
    ‘Yes sir. Thank you. I will try my best.’
    ‘More than try!’ said the owner. ‘Do!’ He was laughing; this was a great joke. He turned to the manager. ‘Do!’ The manager joined in his employer’s laughter. Still laughing and nodding, the owner moved on. Freddy sat back down. Across the room he caught the eye of the club’s longest-serving player, a central defender who had come up through the club’s youth system nearly twenty years ago, and never left. He winked at Freddy.
    Then they were into the pre-match ritual: the walk on the pitch, the stretch and warm-up, the last words from the manager, who said what he always said, a saying that was partly a good-luck charm, partly a mantra, and partly a piece of good advice: ‘We are better than they are. The only way they win is if they work harder than us. So if we work harder than them, we win. So that’s what we’ll do.’ And then they were in the tunnel, the noise level changing as the crowd sounds filtered back into the enclosed space, the other team there too, jogging on the spot, their