Football: Maxed Out The Wrong Stat

Vardy came downstairs at 6:45 AM.

Mateo was already back from his garage session, showered, and putting on his Schalke tracksuit for the drive to the training ground. He looked up from his mug to find Vardy standing in the kitchen doorway wearing tracksuit bottoms, a hoodie, and a pair of white socks, holding a half-eaten piece of toast.

Vardy looked at Mateo's track jacket, then down at his own watch, looking thoroughly confused. "Hold on a second, mate. You said you train at four-thirty, right? Did I get that wrong or are you heading out to train again now?"

"I train in the garage at four-thirty," Mateo explained, zipping up his jacket. "Now I am getting ready for club training."

"Ah, right. Yeah, well, I set my alarm for six anyway," Vardy said, chewing his toast. "Thought I would, like, get a proper jump on the day. Can't have you thinking I am lazy."

Mateo looked at him. "Nobody thinks you are lazy. I know you worked factory shifts and played non-league football at the same time."

"Well, yeah, that is exactly why, innit?" Vardy shrugged. "Do not want to lose the habit, do I?"

Mateo almost chuckled. He had expected Vardy to be direct, unpolished, and maybe a bit awkward, but this seven AM enthusiasm was a genuine surprise. He reached over to the peg by the front door and handed Vardy a spare Schalke rain jacket.

"Farfán is picking me up in ten minutes," Mateo said. "You can ride with us if you want."

Farfán pulled up at 6:58 in his Passat, wearing dark sunglasses despite the pitch-black January morning. He grinned broadly through the window at the sight of Vardy piling into the back seat.

"So he actually moved in, then?" Farfán asked.

"Blame yourself," Mateo replied. "You are the one who told him about the room."

"Hey, I did him a favour," Farfán laughed, pulling away from the curb. "He was living in a hotel and eating expensive room service every night."

"To be fair, the room service was bloody dear," Vardy chimed in from the back.

"See? Total favour."

The heater in the Volkswagen struggled against the freezing cold air. Gelsenkirchen's streets were quiet at this hour, the sky pitch black beyond the orange glow of the streetlights as light snow drifted down onto the icy asphalt.

Vardy leaned forward between the two front seats, inspecting the dashboard with the keen interest of someone who had only recently discovered that cars came with heated leather seats.

"So, uh, Jeff," Vardy started, scratching his neck. "Are you staying in some apartment the club sorted for you, or what? Why don't you live closer to the ground?"

Farfán snorted loudly. "First of all, nobody calls me Jeff. But hey, it's fine, you can call me that," he laughed, shaking his head.

"Right, cheers mate," Vardy grinned.

"Second of all, I have a very nice place in the city. But I actually like the morning drive," Farfán said, glancing sideways at Mateo. "Plus, I have to keep an eye on this kid. If I stopped picking him up in the morning, he would probably walk all the way to training."

"It is only four kilometers," Mateo said calmly.

"See? He would walk it!" Farfán laughed. "He would do it just to squeeze in extra cardio."

"I would take the bus," Mateo insisted.

"There is no bus running at seven in the morning, mate! And even if there was, you would walk anyway and pretend the bus was late."

"Now you are just making up stories."

Vardy looked between the two of them, thoroughly amused. "Right proper comedy act, you two, aren't ya?"

Farfán and Mateo answered in the exact same flat tone at the exact same time: "Shut up, Jamie."

Magath was already standing on the touchline when they pulled up to the facility, holding a clipboard alongside his assistant while watching the first group of players jog their warm-up laps. He glanced over at the three of them climbing out of the Passat, made a quick scribble on his paper, and did not change his expression one bit.

Ten laps to start. Then Magath called the squad together at the center circle.

"Champions League knockout stage in ten days," Magath said, his voice cutting across the frost of the training pitch. "First leg is away. We cannot afford tired legs. So this weekend against Hoffenheim, I am rotating the squad."

Silence dropped over the group. Every player stood frozen for a split second, mentally calculating whether their name was about to be called or if they were heading back to the bench.

"Neuer stays in goal," Magath said. "Escudero, Plestan, and Sarpei come in for Metzelder, Uchida, and Schmitz. Rakitić starts. Pliatsikas takes right midfield. Bujerab..."

Bujerab's head snapped up.

"...starts. Number ten."

A brief hush rippled through the squad, followed by a low murmur. Nobody looked directly at Bujerab. Nobody needed to. He had not been named in a starting eleven since September, and the last time his name appeared on a first-team sheet, Mateo had not even made his professional debut yet.

"Gavranović up front," Magath continued. "And Vardy..."

Vardy's head came up so fast he nearly clipped Farfán's chin.

"...you are on the bench. You are not quite ready to start yet. But you are in the matchday squad, and if the match goes well, you will get minutes. Prove you can actually play at this level, and I will seriously consider you for the Champions League roster."

Vardy gave a single, sharp nod, the quiet acknowledgment of a young lad who knew the exact value of what he had just been handed.

Magath turned his gaze to Mateo. "You are on the bench too. Full rest. We need you completely fresh for Valencia. If we are losing by three at halftime, I might throw you on. Otherwise, you are staying in your tracksuit bottoms."

"Understood, coach."

"Good." Magath clapped his hands together once, the sharp crack echoing in the cold air. "Back to positions. Let us go."

The A-team versus B-team session that followed was, for the first time all season, genuinely fierce.

Bujerab, finally restored to his favored position, played with the tightly wound intensity of a man who had been handed a single bullet and intended to make it count. Pliatsikas pressed sharply on the right flank. Rakitić was quietly, patiently brilliant in the pivot, anchoring the tempo with the kind of understated class you only noticed when you watched him for ninety minutes. Escudero bombed down the left-back slot with the raw freedom of a player who rarely got the nod.

The B-team held their shape for the first fifteen minutes before fatigue began to drag them down. Bujerab, however, refused to slow. He was running on pure adrenaline and four months of bottled-up frustration, making him sharper and more dangerous than he had been all of last season.

Vardy, watching from the touchline beside Mateo, leaned in and squinted across the grass.

"That lad playing ten," Vardy said quietly, nodding toward Bujerab. "He is playing like he's got a proper point to prove, isn't he?"

"He does, yeah."

"What happened to him, then?"

Mateo kept his eyes on the pitch. "I mean, I took his spot. Then he got injured. And only just got back."

"Ah, right," Vardy muttered, watching Bujerab effortlessly slide a pass through two defenders into Gavranović's path. "That's rough."

"He is a good player though."

"Yeah, can tell that. Just proper unlucky, really."

"Yeah."

They stood in silence and watched the rest of the session play out. Mateo felt a strange twist in his chest, something close to a clean, quiet respect for a bloke who was refusing to vanish from a squad that had already moved on without him. Bujerab was not going to get many lifelines, but Magath had just tossed him one. If he took it against Hoffenheim, the rotation hierarchy might just shift.

Football was a brutal business. But once in a blue moon, when nobody was looking, it gave you a fair break.

As the session wrapped up, Vardy walked back toward the changing rooms alongside Mateo, his jaw set tight in the concentrated way of a young player who had just been told he was on the bench for his first-ever Bundesliga match and was already stressing over every detail.

"Bench, like," Vardy said, mostly talking to himself as much as Mateo. "Still, I'm on the sheet, aren't I? That's something, I suppose."

"That is massive," Mateo said. "Most players don't even make the bench three weeks after turning up from non-league."

"I know, I know. It's just..." Vardy let out a long breath. "When I get on, I want to score, mate. First appearance, I want to bag one."

"Well, when you get on the pitch, just score then."

"Oh, is that all it takes, is it?" Vardy snorted. "Dead easy, that."

"Pretty much. Don't overthink it."

Vardy gave him a sideways look. A sharp flicker of pure belief crossed his face, a look quiet and fierce. It was the expression of a lad who had spent years being told no by managers and scouts, now finally letting himself imagine what a yes felt like.

"Right then," Vardy muttered, pulling off his muddy boots at the locker door. "Score a goal. Got it sorted."

He headed off toward the showers. Mateo watched him go, hoping quietly that Bujerab got every single one of those seventy minutes tomorrow. Hoping the same for Vardy, and for anyone else carrying a bit too much weight on their shoulders.

He grabbed his bag and headed out into the cold.

You know what time it is! Drop those Power Stones to keep us climbing the ranks!

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