Harbinger Of Glory

"No, because explain it to me."

Vittoria threw both hands into the air, nearly knocking her coffee over in the process.

"I stayed awake for that game!"

Leo, lying back against the headboard with his phone balanced against a pillow, opened his mouth, but she pointed at the screen before he could get a word in.

"Don’t start. I’m not finished."

Leo closed it again, a smile playing at his lips as he watched his girlfriend rant.

"Ninety minutes," she went on.

"Ninety whole minutes of Italy passing the ball around like half the team had met the other half in the tunnel."

Leo bit back a smile.

"Then," she continued, counting on her fingers now, "the one person I actually wanted to watch doesn’t even get on the pitch."

"Technically—"

"Leo."

"...Right."

She reached for her laptop on the table beside her and held it up to the camera.

"And now I wake up to this."

Leo caught a glimpse of an article before she started scrolling again.

"’Spalletti’s gamble backfires.’ Fine. That’s football. Then this one says the new call-ups weren’t ready." She frowned. "You didn’t even play!"

Leo laughed quietly.

"Exactly!" Vittoria said, pointing at him as though he’d just made her argument for her.

"How are they blaming people who never left the bench?"

Leo rested his chin against his fist, content to watch her unravel the morning’s headlines one by one.

Every time he looked as though he might answer, she found another article, another opinion, another reason to keep going.

He had learned by now that there were moments when the smartest thing he could do was let Vittoria finish.

This was very obviously one of them.

When she finally paused to breathe, he smiled.

"Thank you for being angry on my behalf," he said as she huffed and then huffed again before finally sitting back down and then looking at the camera.

"What are you doing today?" he asked as she shook her head.

"Nothing. I’m just waiting for you to come back."

"That’s nice to hear. What about that thing the other time? Have you talked to your parents?"

"Well, I have, but just once, and it was to my mother," she said, mumbling a bit through the process, signalling to Leo that it had probably not really been a good conversation.

And hearing her do so, Leo couldn’t help but smile wryly.

"I’m going to get charged with treason one of these days for kidnapping the only daughter of the D’Averna family."

"That’s not funny," she said, but she was already smiling at the edges of it.

A silence filled the space between the two for a while before Leo looked at her through the screen and smiled.

"I will be fine," he said.

"I really don’t think anything extreme can happen. At the moment, it feels like I am the one making you act out, but that’s just how you are."

"Are you saying I’m stubborn?" Vittoria accused, but to her surprise, Leo didn’t deny it.

She sighed a bit before giving a reluctant nod.

"Fine..."

"Good."

Leo waited a beat before smiling a little wider.

"Goodnight, my little girl."

The moment Leo finished saying that, Vittoria’s eyes widened.

"Leo, don’t you da—"

He didn’t let her finish and ended the call.

The last thing he saw was her reaching toward the screen, halfway between pointing at him and trying to stop him from hanging up.

The following morning, Spalletti was already waiting on the training pitch by the time the players arrived.

If the criticism from the night before had reached him, it wasn’t visible.

He stood with his hands behind his back, watching his players drift into position one after another until the conversations faded on their own.

Only then did he step forward.

"We spent the whole camp so far working on one main thing," he said.

"Getting through compact defences with as little as possible. One ball. One moment. That was the training."

Saying that, he looked across the group.

"And then the game started, and you forgot all of it and started playing your own game."

He paused a bit, making sure that what he was saying really got through the players.

"So I want to know why, not to embarrass anyone, but I want to actually know, because if there’s a reason, we can fix it."

After leaving the floor open for any complaints, Spalletti kept quiet, retreating a bit, but like expected, nobody had anything to say, or if they did, they didn’t say it or show it.

Almost a minute later, Spalletti nodded slowly.

"Italy will not qualify for anything just because it’s Italy. That era is over, and we have to understand that.

The Euros are less than a year away, and we are working toward getting there with the right players, with the right mentality, and with a style of play that makes people afraid to face us."

He looked along the squad.

"Some of you might not be in the squad by then. I might not even be the coach, but none of that matters right now. What matters is what you do in the time you have."

"If there’s anything we can do now, it’s making sure that we get back on the stage we won on a few years ago and not looking like a shell of ourselves when doing so."

A moment later, he pulled himself back, catching the length of it.

"Let’s work," he said, and that was all.

The players, having spent the previous night recovering, were once again spent after the session.

Like he had a grudge, Spalletti ran the players through it, making sure that it was something they were going to feel even in their sleep, but he did so while making sure that none of them took it too far.

After the session, he hadn’t bothered to close out as he’d done previously and just walked away, leaving the end of the session to Marco and the rest of the other coaches.

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