God Of football

Chapter 874: Distractions.

As Doue approached, Raya straightened in his goal, his knees bending slightly, already calculating the angles.

Saliba and Gabriel were retreating fast, their eyes darting between Doué and the two danger men to his sides.

Dembele was drifting toward the right edge of the box, calling for it, while Vitinha ghosted into the left channel, waiting for a cutback and behind him, too, was Kvaratskhelia, keen like a cobra ready to strike.

”Arsenal caught out again! Doué wins it high, and now PSG have numbers forward!” the commentator shouted, his voice rising with the pace of the attack.

Doué drove forward, the white shirts scrambling in reverse, their lines bending dangerously close to their own area.

The noise in the Paris end was deafening now, their chants morphing into a deep, rhythmic rumble.

For a moment, it looked like Doué would slip it sideways to Dembele, who was free near the arc.

But instead, he steadied himself, drew his leg back, and shaped to shoot.

”Doué... he’s going for it!” the broadcast erupted, voices climbing with the movement, every camera trained on the ball that now hung in the split second before contact came, and when it came, the breaths in the stadium caught.

Doué’s strike left his boot like a shot from a slingshot, clean, rising, and wickedly fast.

The ball sliced through the damp air, spinning toward the top corner, the sound of its contact still echoing a split second after it flew.

Raya saw it early, moving across his line with perfect form, one arm already stretching, his body coiled like a spring.

For a heartbeat, it looked like he had it covered.

But football lives in small margins.

The ball clipped Gabriel’s thigh on its way through, changing direction in an instant.

Raya’s momentum carried him the wrong way, his boots skidding across the wet turf as he tried to twist back.

His gloves reached, strained, but it was too late.

The ball spun cruelly, almost lazily, inside the near post before bouncing once and rolling over the line and into the net.

The stadium exploded.

A roar tore through MetLife like a wave, shaking the stands, drowning out everything else.

PSG’s navy section erupted in smoke and light, flares bursting red against the low ceiling of grey clouds.

Thousands of voices screamed Doué’s name, some still unsure if the ball had actually gone in until they saw the net ripple.

On the pitch, Doué froze for half a second, disbelief painted across his face, before dropping to his knees and sliding toward the corner flag.

The turf peeled beneath him, his arms outstretched, his scream swallowed by the storm of noise.

Behind him, Dembele was the first to reach, jumping onto his back, followed by Vitinha and Ruiz, then Kvaratskhelia, who almost toppled the whole group as they piled in.

”Paris Saint-Germain draw first blood! Doué with the strike, and what a start for Luis Enrique’s men!” the commentator shouted, voice cracking over the sound of the crowd.

”A wicked deflection, completely wrong-footing Raya, and Arsenal are stunned inside five minutes!”

The replay filled every screen in the stadium, showing the ball’s deflection in slow motion, the faint change of angle, Gabriel’s desperate leg stretch, and Raya’s helpless twist back toward goal.

The Arsenal fans in red and white were motionless, hands on heads, the kind of stunned silence that follows a blow nobody saw coming.

”Unfortunate for Gabriel there,” the other commentator added.

”He’s just trying to block it, but Doué won’t care. That’s his first Club World Cup goal, and what a moment to get it.”

Down on the touchline, Luis Enrique turned sharply to his staff, clapping once, eyes gleaming as if he had known this would happen.

On the other side, Arteta stood still, jaw clenched, his arms folded.

The camera found him on the Jumbotron, his face calm, but the tension in his neck giving him away.

He blinked once, slow, almost deliberate, before turning back toward the pitch.

”This isn’t how Arsenal imagined it, but that’s football for you. A cruel deflection, a perfect storm, and now they’ll have to chase the game against a team built to counter.”

As the PSG players finally peeled away from their celebration, Doué stood and looked up toward their section of the stands, hands pressed to his chest, mouthing something only he and the fans could understand as the chants from the Paris fans grew louder, echoing around the bowl of the stadium.

For a brief moment, it felt as though the entire night was theirs.

All over the world, from bars in North London to crowded apartments in Lagos and São Paulo, Arsenal fans let out the same low groan as the Paris goal rippled the net.

It wasn’t anger, not yet.

It was that familiar, half-resigned sound they made whenever things started rough.

A few seconds of silence, then the noise of belief crept back in.

Someone in a pub shouted, ”It’s fine, lads, this always happens!”

Another added, ”We’ll come back. We always do.”

The chant of Come on, you Gunners began again, this time more out of faith than certainty.

Back in the stadium, as the players reset for kick-off, Arsenal looked unsettled.

The whistle went, but every time they tried to play forward, something went wrong.

A touch too heavy.

A pass too slow.

A press too quick.

The ball kept finding its way back to Paris’s boots.

Izan, though, seemed untouched by it all.

Every time the ball came his way, the noise softened.

He played with that strange calm of his, finding gaps no one else saw and slipping passes between shirts like he had more time than everyone else.

On the bench, Mikel Arteta stood with his arms folded, eyes darting between his players and Luis Enrique’s technical area.

He wasn’t angry, just curious.

Something about the shape of Paris’s press was bothering him.

Their front three pushed hard when Arsenal had possession, but their backline didn’t follow up.

They dropped instead, deep and tight, shrinking the field.

It wasn’t a high press or a low block; it was both.

Arteta whispered under his breath, testing the thought aloud.

”Divide them.”

He followed the movement again, watching as Martinelli tried to combine with Izan, only for three Paris players to swarm.

”They’re isolating the zones,” he muttered, almost to himself. ”Divide and conquer.”

Carlos Cuesta leaned forward from the bench, having caught it.

”They’re cutting the middle. We can’t connect the thirds.” He glanced at the monitor, then back to Arteta.

”It checks out. What do we—”

Before he could finish, the stadium erupted.

A sharp rise in noise, a kind of collective gasp, turned into a roar.

Both men looked up.

Izan had the ball again.

He’d just spun out of a challenge near the touchline, a perfect roulette that left both Dembele and Doue stepping into empty air.

Then, instead of releasing it, he held on, body swaying, eyes low, teasing them.

He nudged the ball sideways, drew another defender, then shifted again, almost dancing.

The Paris players hovered around him, unsure whether to close in or back off.

Arteta straightened on the touchline, watching the boy’s calm turn chaos into rhythm.

He exhaled slowly, a faint smile breaking through the tension.

”Distractions,” he murmured.

”And I think Izan might have thought of that before we even did.”

Izan shifted the ball one last time to draw the final challenge, then released it to Ødegaard, who found himself surrounded almost instantly.

Paris closed like a trap, shirts pressing from all angles.

But Ødegaard reacted before the danger could reach him, flicking the ball first time over the closing defenders with a perfect little dink that carried just enough weight as Izan, already moving, took it on the bounce, cushioning it onto his left foot before sliding the ball between Fabian Ruiz’s legs.

The whistles from the Paris end rose sharply, half in frustration, half in disbelief as Izan then swept the ball out wide toward Martinelli, before bursting forward again, sprinting past Joao Neves as though he’d never been there.

”Oh, cheeky Izan. No mercy even for a fellow countryman,” one of the commentators said as Martinelli caught the ball on the run, his first touch sharp, and his second stable.

A few moments later, Izan joined him, combining with that same one-touch rhythm that had burned Chelsea weeks earlier.

The passes were short, fast, and full of intent, Martinelli to Izan, Izan back again while Paris tried to adjust, dropping into a tight low block, but Arsenal’s tempo didn’t slow.

Izan darted into a half-space, waited half a second, then slid a threaded pass between the bodies with impossible precision.

It broke the line cleanly, the kind of pass that looked simple only because he made it so.

Havertz saw it, took one stride, and burst through, getting to the ball first, but his effort side-footed low toward the near post, while Donnarumma reacted like lightning.

He threw himself forward, chest wide, smothering the shot cleanly before it could roll through.

The ball rebounded off him and spun out of play for a throw, the goalkeeper rising with a clenched jaw and a relieved exhale as he called for his backline to get into shape.