Football: Maxed Out The Wrong Stat

The second half started with Twente pressing higher.

Preud'homme had decided at halftime that sitting deep had produced a draw but not a win, and that the forty-third-minute chance Schalke had created suggested the deep block was becoming exploitable. He pushed his lines forward slightly — not a full press, but enough that Twente's midfield was ten metres further up the pitch than it had been in the final twenty minutes of the first half.

This was, tactically, exactly what Magath had hoped for.

With Twente higher, the space in behind their defensive line existed from earlier in Schalke's possession. The relay didn't need to work for twenty minutes — it needed to work for five, because the compression was lower.

Mateo received from Jurado on the left side of the centre circle. Two Twente players closing — closer than the first half but further from behind the ball than they'd been. The overlay showed lines: amber to Jones, amber to Per Kluge, amber line forming to Farfán wide right.

He played it to Farfán.

Farfán had the ball with de Jong already moving to close him. He controlled it, steadied, and played it forward to Uchida making the overlap, exactly the pattern they'd drilled. Uchida took it, drove a few metres, cut back inside before de Jong could redirect. Passed to Farfán again, Farfán now in behind de Jong's tracking position.

The gap.

Farfán looked up. He could see Mateo in the central channel and the space that had opened in the middle of Twente's defensive line — Brama had tracked forward to cut the central pass, which meant his cover position was vacated.

He played it to Mateo.

The ball arrived as Mateo turned.

The overlay refreshed. In front of him: Brama closing from the right, Janssen recovering centrally. Both coming from his left. And across the pitch — all the way across, on the left flank — the line appeared.

Red. 87%.

Huntelaar had taken off the exact millisecond Farfán knocked the ball to Mateo. It wasn't a reactive sprint — he was moving ahead of the play, reading the sequence before the pass even landed, trusting blindly that Mateo would whip the ball into the near post if he could just get there in time. He was already ghosting past Twente's right-back, bursting toward the byline just two strides away from the edge of the six-yard box.

Brama was completely focused on cutting off the right channel, which was exactly where Mateo had been staring. His entire body had been angled right, selling the deception perfectly.

Then, he slipped it left.

The outside of his right boot, generating the arc, the same motion as dozens of earlier passes this season. The ball travelled the full width of the pitch — long, curving, dropping into the channel between Twente's last defender and the byline exactly where Huntelaar's run was taking him.

Brama, who had read the right-channel angle and committed his body weight that direction, had no recovery run available.

Huntelaar reached the byline in stride.

He shaped up to cross — opening his right hip and angling his body toward the six-yard box, a motion his muscle memory had carved out over thousands of repetitions on the training ground. But the ball was on his left foot, his weaker side for precision work. Somewhere between his brain's intent and his foot's execution, the delivery snapped: it was too low, caught no air, and stayed completely flat instead of rising into the box.

It wasn't a cross.

It was a shot.

A fierce, low, flat drive blasted — completely by accident, directly at the near post, traveling with the raw, unmoderated power Huntelaar always produced when he wasn't pulling back for accuracy.

The Twente defenders crowding the far post exhaled. There was nothing over there for them to deal with.

The danger was entirely at the near post.

And Mateo had kept running.

He had taken off the exact millisecond he released the pass—not the planned run they'd drawn up on the tactical board, but the pure instinct of a player who had been told to attack the box and simply hadn't stopped after letting go of the ball. He arrived at the near post at the exact microsecond the ball rocketed in.

There was absolutely no time to get out of the way.

He flinched and turned sideways — the universal reflex of registering a fast-moving object heading directly for a very sensitive area and the ball smashed straight between his legs.

[Equipment: Reinforced Compression Shorts — Effect 1 activated. Structural injury prevented.]

He felt the impact instantly. The Reinforced Compression Shorts did their job, dispersing the brutal force across a wider area rather than letting it concentrate on the point of contact, turning what should have been an agonizing injury into a heavy, blunt body blow. It still stung like hell. His legs crossed over each other instinctively as he reeled from the hit.

But the ball, ricocheting off the solid angle of his braced body, sharply changed trajectory.

It flew straight into the back of the net.

SWISH!

Fweet—!

2–1. 48th minute.

[Effect 2: Situational fortune enhancement — active. Goal credited to host.]

Mateo stood there, his legs still slightly crossed, trying to process exactly what had just happened.

The system had handed him that SSS-rank underwear right after his debut. He'd equipped it quietly, not saying a word to a soul, and had worn it for three weeks without a single issue. Now, forty-eight minutes into his Champions League debut, in front of fifty thousand screaming fans, that Equipment Treasure Chest reward had finally revealed its true worth by deflecting a Huntelaar rocket straight into the back of the net via his groin.

So, he thought, that's what the luck stat actually does.

He filed that bizarre piece of information away for later and slowly raised his right hand in a tentative celebration.

The stadium wasn't cheering yet.

Instead, a bizarre hush fell over the crowd as fifty thousand people collectively tried to digest what their eyes had just witnessed, completely unsure of how to react. The ball was resting in the back of the net. The referee was already jogging back, pointing firmly to the center circle. A goal had been scored. Those were the facts.

The exact physics of how it got there, however, remained highly debatable.

Jones was the first to reach him, charging in at a full sprint before slamming on the brakes when he got close enough to see Mateo's face. It wasn't the face of someone in agony.

"Are you—"

"I'm fine."

Jones eyed him up and down, skeptical. It was the look a guy who had spent an entire career absorbing brutal physical contact gives a seventeen-year-old who had just taken a Huntelaar power shot at point-blank range to the groin and was somehow standing there like nothing had happened.

"That was—"

"I'm fine," Mateo insisted.

Raúl arrived a second later. Without making a scene, he immediately slid his body between Mateo and the nearest cluster of television cameras, just a veteran's automatic reflex to protect his teammate. Huntelaar jogged up right behind him, wearing the exact expression of a man who knew he had messed up but couldn't quite figure out how.

"The cross..." Huntelaar muttered.

"It went in," Mateo said.

"It wasn't a cross."

"It's a goal," Mateo repeated flatly.

By now, the rest of the shirt numbers were crowding around them. Farfán looked at Mateo's completely blank expression, looked down at where the ball had made contact, looked back up at the stone-faced kid, and decided it was probably best not to say a single word.

The stadium finally resolved its uncertainty.

The Veltins-Arena went from quiet to full noise in the space of about four seconds — the specific release of fifty thousand people deciding simultaneously that the ball was in the net, their player was unharmed, and the match situation was 2–1.

The noise that came out of it was significant.

Mateo walked to the corner flag and performed the knee slide. The stadium made more noise. He got up, found his teammates, and let the celebration happen around him for the appropriate duration.

Up in the broadcasting booth, Tom Warrick waited for the noise to settle down just a bit before leaning back into his microphone.

"Mateo Silva. A Champions League debut to remember! One assist already, and now he claims the goal—and yes, it'll go down as a deflection, which is technically accurate." He paused, letting out a dry chuckle. "Look, I've been behind this microphone for eleven years. I've described hundreds of goals in my time, but I can safely say I have never, ever described one quite like that."

Another beat, his voice swelling back into match rhythm. "The official stat sheets will record it, the replays will make it glaringly obvious exactly where it struck him, but frankly, whether anyone cares about the aesthetics tonight is a question I'll leave to the travelling Schalke supporters—and by the sound of it, they couldn't care less how it went in!"

The fan feeds were losing it:

[How is he fine. HOW IS HE FINE.]

[The ball went IN off him. Off HIM. That is a Huntelaar shot.]

[I've watched this three times in slow motion and I still don't understand.]

Down on the pitch, the referee blew his whistle for the restart.

Twente could no longer afford to sit deep and absorb pressure.

They were 2–1 down with nearly forty minutes left on the clock, and the match had just changed shape entirely.

Plz Drop Some Power Stones.

For Advance/Early Chapters:

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