Page 2 of The Striker (Gods of the Game 1)

Five.

An attempt to steal the ball back failed.

Four.

Flashes of news headlines and TV snippets blared in my head.Traitor. Judas. Sellout.Was I worth the record 250-million-pound transfer, or was I the most expensive mistake in Premier League history?

Three.

By some miracle, I got the ball on the second attempt.

Two.

No time to think.

One.

I kicked.

The ball went wide to the shrill of the final whistle, and the stadium fell so silent I could hear the rush of blood in my ears.

All around me, my team stood, stunned, while the Holchester players jumped and whooped in celebration.

It was over.

We’d lost.

My first season with Blackcastle—the one where everyone expected me to bring home a championship—was over, and we’dlost.

My surroundings blurred into a muffled stream of noise and movement, and I barely felt the soreness of my muscles or a teammate’s consoling slap on my back.

I barely felt anything at all.

No one spoke during our walk to the changing room, but the dread was palpable.

The only thing worse than losing a match was facing Coach afterward, and he barely gave us a chance to sit before he went off.

Frank Armstrong was a legend in the football world. As a player, he was famous for his string of hat tricks in the nineties; as a manager, he was famous for his innovative approach to leadership and his hair-trigger temper, the latter of which was on full display as he laid into us.

“Are those the standards you play with?” he demanded. “Are those the fucking standards? Because I’ll tell you, they’re nowherenearPremier League level. They are fucking shit!”

Lack of focus, terrible teamwork, no cohesion—he touched on all the issues that had plagued us since I transferred in mid-season, and it didn’t take a genius to know why.

Even as Coach berated us, heads swiveled between me and Vincent, who sat on the opposite side of the room.

Team dynamics had been fucked since I joined. Part of that was the natural consequence of incorporating a new member into a tight-knit club; a larger part boiled down to the fact that I, the league’s top scorer, and Vincent, the club’s star defender and captain, despised each other.

We played different positions, but our rivalry was infamous. He was the only true competition I had for press, status, and sponsorships—important things in our world—but the biggest source of our contention was what happened at the last World Cup.

The dive. The fight. The red card.

I tried not to think about it. If I did, I might punch him in the face, and I doubted Coach would appreciate me doing that in the middle of his rant about teamwork.

“DuBois! Donovan!”

My head snapped up at the sound of my name, and Vincent’s did the same.

Coach had apparently ended his speech because the rest of the team was shuffling off to change while he glared at us.