God Of football

Chapter 1010: Football’s Holy Grail!

Then there was March, and the international break, and the forty-eight hours that Arteta would later describe, in a club documentary filmed at the end of the season, sitting in his office with the late evening light coming through the blinds behind him, as one of the most anxious moments of his entire managerial life.

Spain had called Izan for the break, the first in a while for two friendlies, both in Seville, with neither of them carrying competitive weight aside from serving as a warmup towards the World Cup.

The first had gone smoothly with Spain winning 3-1.

Izan had scored once and assisted once, and the moment he did so, Luis De La Fuente took him off.

The second game, against Brazil, had been going the same way when it happened.

A Brazilian midfielder, going for the ball, slightly mistimed it and caught Izan’s right ankle as he shifted his weight.

This was the image that the cameras caught and that Arsenal’s medical team watched on their phones from a thousand miles away with their hearts somewhere in their throats.

After that, Luis De La Fuente hadn’t wasted any time taking Izan off since he couldn’t afford for the reason why they were going to win the World Cup to get injured.

The scan results came back the following morning, showing that Izan had rolled his ankle and was going to need a minimum of 10 days’ rest.

Back at Colney, Arteta had taken the call in his office and had thanked the doctor before setting his phone down.

And then, according to two members of his coaching staff who were present and who both described it identically in the documentary, he had sat completely still for sixty seconds, staring at nothing, before standing up and going for a walk around the training ground in the dark at half past ten in the evening.

”He didn’t say anything when he came back,” one of them recalled.

”He just sat down and started preparing the next training session. But his face. I’d never seen him look like that before. Like he’d looked over a wall and seen something on the other side that he needed to unsee.”

Izan returned ten days later, exactly on schedule and in his first game back, against Tottenham at the Emirates, he scored a hat-trick in forty-nine minutes.

The third goal, a backheel redirection in a crowded six-yard box that he had absolutely no right to score, prompted Martin Tyler, commenting for the last time in a career spanning four decades, to say nothing for a full four seconds and then simply: ”Well. He’s back.”

The Champions League final for that season was played on a warm Saturday evening in Budapest, a city that carried its own particular narrative.

There was poetry in it, or at least the sports press decided there was, and by the morning of the match, the narrative had been thoroughly constructed and distributed: the city where the world had once changed was now the city where the season would end.

Arsenal faced PSG.

It was, by common consensus beforehand, one of the finest Champions League finals in at least a decade.

Two genuinely brilliant sides, two managers with real tactical intelligence, and the particular frisson that came from knowing stars like Dembele, Doue, and Izan would share a pitch in the biggest club game on earth.

The game itself was not a classic in the way that term is usually applied.

It wasn’t end-to-end chaos, itwasn’t high-wire and breathless from first minute to last.

One could say it was evenly matched, at least for the rest of the 21 players on the pitch, because for Izan, it wasn’t.

It wasn’t even close for him.

Whenever he got the ball, he was marked.

Sometimes, he would be on the grass before he could even get a hold of the ball, but the game still finished 3-1.

Izan scored in the twenty-second and fifty-eighth minutes and created the third for Saka with a pass so threaded and so precisely weighted that the PSG defensive line, watching it split them, had the look of men who understood geometrically what had just happened and found no comfort in that understanding.

At the final whistle, as Arsenal’s players collapsed into each other and the red smoke from the flares in the Arsenal end began its slow drift across the pitch, Dembele found Izan near the centre circle.

They embraced for a long moment before the duo turned towards the cameras flashing at them.

”It seems like it’s going to be yours again,” Dembele muttered, suddenly causing Izan to smile a bit.

”It never wasn’t,” he replied, leaving Dembele stunned as he moved to join his mates.

Arteta found Izan three minutes later, as the trophy was being carried toward the presentation platform and the noise was reaching a pitch that made individual thought difficult.

He put both hands on the boy’s face, a gesture that felt involuntary for the manager.

He didn’t say anything for a second or two, then, ”You’ve done it again!”

Izan looked back at him.

”Yeah,” he said. ”But this is the second of a long dynasty.”

Arteta laughed, surprised and pulled Izan in, held him briefly before he let go.

”Thank you,” he said.

The summer came with the weight of everything the season had been and the anticipation of everything still ahead.

The records had been broken, catalogued and argued over.

The trophies were in the cabinet, and the photographs were on the covers and the walls of bars in countries that had never cared about Arsenal before and now, inexplicably, did.

And in all of that, Izan Hernandez Miura, eighteen years old, son of Komi, brother of Hori, born in Valencia and shaped by everything that city had given him and everything it had withheld, packed a bag for the Spain training camp and thought about the World Cup.

He had been to tournaments before.

He had won the Euros at sixteen, but this was different.

This was the World Cup.

This was the thing that waited at the end of everything else.

He was ready.