Football singularity

Chapter 831: Chapter 831 NEVER—Seen Anything Like That

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[28-06-2021 | Arena Națională, Bucharest | 21:36 EET]

[Germany 2-2 Switzerland]

[68’]

Wirtz swept up the ball with speed, cutting in behind the space Mbabu had vacated. The Swiss wing-back turned to chase, but the Leverkusen youngster was already three strides ahead of him, driving into the box from the side.

Elvedi moved to cover, trying to push him wide, but Wirtz chopped the ball past him towards the penalty spot. Werner fought through Akanji’s contact as he struck the ball first time, trying to slot it into the near corner. Sommer, who had been fooled once, was not to be made a fool of again and dropped low to his right, both palms flat, pushing the ball out for a corner.

"Yann Sommer with the heart stopper," Tyler exclaimed at the groans and cheers of the viewers. "He dropped down quick, no second-guessing; he just knew where he had to be."

"Well, he has proven throughout the tournament why he is Switzerland’s number one, and he had to remind us again after the past ten minutes," Smith added as the said keeper could be seen barking instructions at his back line. "Well, they needed that bout of heroics, and it will go a long way to lift morale."

[75’]

The match had shifted into a familiar rhythm of a heavyweight contest, both sides now trading blows in the middle of the park, neither willing to commit too many bodies forward. Petković’s substitutions had injected pace back into Switzerland’s counter, and Vargas was already forcing Kimmich to dig deep into his bag of tricks just to keep him at bay.

Down the left, dragging the Bayern man out of position twice in the space of three minutes, they clashed a couple of times. In the seventy-fourth, Vargas broke down the flank once more, drawing Kimmich toward him before slipping a clever pass inside to Freuler. The Swiss midfielder who had been calm and safe all game suddenly drove at Can, forcing the man to make a choice.

He lunged in as the Swiss man tried to slip by him but ended up clipping his ankle as his opponent suddenly decided he had fast feet. Freuler went down fast like a ragdoll with its strings cut, exclaiming painfully. Fernando Rapallini didn’t need the VAR from his vantage point; he had seen the entire event and immediately blew his whistle.

(FWEEET!)

Rapallini pulled out a yellow and Can could only purse his lips as he walked away with a shake of his head. "Free kick in a dangerous area," Smith noted. "Right call, but the booking might be questionable from Can’s perspective."

Moments later, the Swiss captain stood over the ball with Rodríguez beside him, the two exchanging a brief word as Neuer barked instructions at his four-man wall. The German keeper waved Hummels a yard to his right, checked the line one last time, then bounced twice on the balls of his feet.

Xhaka jogged in first, faked the strike with a stutter step, then peeled off. Rodríguez followed a half-second later, his left foot sweeping through the ball with power. The delivery was vicious, drilled beneath the jumping wall rather than over it, skidding off the wet turf and rising late toward the bottom right corner.

Neuer awakened his prime synapses, which denied the likes of Pirlo, Reus, Ronaldo, and Messi in set-piece situations and committed early. The German captain read the shot’s trajectory like a picture book, throwing himself full stretch at the incoming ball using his right palm to push himself upward at the ball’s sudden bounce.

His right glove caught the ball flush, punching it away from the goal with enough force to send it spinning out toward the corner flag. Kimmich recovered first, hacking it clear into the drizzle before Vargas could pounce on the rebound.

"NEUER!" Tyler roared. "The captain, with a worldy of a save!"

"That is why he is Manuel Neuer, Martin," Smith exclaimed. "Rodríguez placed it perfectly, low and hard, skidding off the wet turf, and Neuer somehow got a strong glove behind it. Simply chef’s kiss."

[80’]

Wirtz collected the ball from Can on the halfway line, took one touch, and slid it to Musiala on the right of centre. Musiala rolled it back to Wirtz. Wirtz sent it to Rakim, who was drifting infield off the left, and he lifted it over Mbabu’s foot to Musiala.

Jamal calmly absorbed the pressure from Gavranović and volleyed the ball down into Wirtz’s run. The Leverkusen man clipped it inwards, finding Emre Can as he lost his marker. He threaded the gap of red bodies to find a waiting Rakim, who laid it off to Musiala.

The three teenagers began to comfortably disassemble their opponents as they systematically moved up the left flank, interchanging positions like a fluid rondo. Despite absorbing the contact from their markers and often receiving the ball from awkward positions, they played one-touch football. The Swiss shape began to bend around them as more red shirts moved to lock them down on the left flank as they approached the edge of the box.

Freuler stepped up to close Musiala first, but the Bayern boy did not even look at him, letting the ball roll under his boot and through the Swiss midfielder’s open legs into Wirtz’s stride. Xhaka lunged across to cover the gap, and Wirtz took it off him with the outside of his left boot in a single touch, dragging it half a metre and rolling it back to Rakim. He let it run across his body, invited Rodríguez to commit, then chopped it behind his own standing leg back into Musiala’s path at the edge of the box.

"What are we watching, Martin?" Smith asked, half-laughing in disbelief. "Three teenagers are playing keep-away with a Swiss side that has been in a knockout tie for eighty minutes."

"Alan, this is not a Round of Sixteen; this is a bloody training session," Tyler agreed. "Look at the tempo for players considered speedy; they are not rushing, not panicking. They are walking them down, and it’s working."

The sequence looked slow from an observer’s perspective, almost lazily. Despite this, for more than a minute, the three of them could not be dispossessed, and not for lack of trying from the Swiss player. Every touch came off the boot with the softness, placing the ball exactly where it needed to be.

At the edge of the box on the left flank, Wirtz and Musiala exchanged a quick one-two, and the tempo suddenly changed. Receiving Jamal’s return pass wirtz fizzed the ball past two Swiss legs as he absorbed a tackle from behind that sent him sprawling. Not glancing at the ball rolling towards him, Rakim dropped his left shoulder, getting his two bodyguards to move first.

Letting the ball roll across his front, he took two quick steps to the right, opening up the angle. As the ball rolled past his right foot, his left leg whipped behind his standing right in one fluid, effortless motion. His left boot met the ball on the run, the rabona sweeping through it with a snap that cut through the drizzle.

The ball left his boot with force, floating over Elvedi’s lunge with delicacy, taking flight into the Bucharest sky. Sommer, who had been creeping toward the edge of his six-yard box at the near post throughout the sequence, momentarily lost sight of the ball in the glare of the floodlights. A moment later, he realised it was looping to the far side and began scrambling backwards in panic.

His feet slipped once on the wet turf, then found their grip, and he flung himself backwards toward his own goal, right glove reaching high above his head. He got three desperate backpedalling steps, then leapt, every fibre of his 6’0" frame straining, his fingers stretching toward the ball that was dropping out of the drizzle toward the far top corner.

The world seemed to stop spinning on its axis fr a moment as the ball neared the gaol missing Sommer’s fingertips by inches. (thud)The soft sound of leather hitting netting sounded in the almost silent stadium, igniting a torrent of raw emotion. At the side, the figure of Rakim, who had struck the ball, could be seen turned to the sidelines performing an elegant bow in tandem with the ball hitting the back of the net.

"OH — MY — WORD!" Tyler’s voice shredded on the vowel, breaking clean in half. "RAKIM REX! A RABONA! FROM TWENTY-TWO YARDS! INTO THE FAR TOP CORNER! AND WAS HE BOWING TO THE CAMERA BEFORE THE BALL HAD EVEN HIT THE NET?!"

"Martin, I have watched this sport my entire life, and I have never — NEVER — seen anything like that!" Smith was half-shouting, half-laughing, all disbelief as pandemonium unfolded below. "We have said it before, and I will say it again, Rakim Simon Rex Is The Special One. What we have seen this young man do on the grandest of stages defies belief, Martin; it simply defies belief. That is not a boy working with his peers. That is a boy playing an entirely different sport."

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TO BE CONTINUED...

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