Harbinger Of Glory

Dinner came around at half seven, the way Dawson had said it would.

The dining room the hotel had put aside for them was large enough that the squad spread out naturally across the tables without too much obstruction.

The hotel had taken the dining assignment seriously, so much so that the players ate well and talked, temporarily forgetting the reason they were in a different country.

That was true, at least until Nolan appeared at the doorway and said, ”Conference room when you’re done,” and the reason came back.

About 20 minutes later, the Wiga players began filtering into the conference room, which had been rearranged to accommodate them.

As they began to sit down, all eyes went to the front where Nolan stood at the projector with one of the hotel’s AV staff.

There was a brief technical exchange between them that involved a cable being unplugged and replugged before the projector responded and the room settled.

Dawson stood at the front with his hands in his jacket pockets and waited till the staff had exited the room before he began to address his men.

”Right,” he said.

”We know what this is. We’ve been working on it for the past week, and tonight we top it up with what’s on the screen, and then that’s it until the game.”

After that, he glanced back at the projector, where the screen lit up with a series of pitch diagrams that Dawson had drawn himself, as well as the shapes and arrows of player positions laid out so simply that even a person without too much football experience could understand.

He walked them through it without rushing, pointing and explaining, asking questions when he wanted to know if it was landing and adjusting when it wasn’t.

The players, too, leaned forward attentively and started asking questions, trying to grasp every bit of it until the session ended.

When he was done, he looked at the room.

”Try your best to follow this,” he said, ”and we won’t have any problems against them.”

The players nodded as the projector began winding down while Dawson spoke with his men for a few more minutes before he told them to get some sleep and left the room to them.

Dortmund, the next day, felt more like a ghost town than the semi-lively city they had come into.

When they had arrived, it had been a regular city doing regular things, people moving through streets with the ordinary purpose of an afternoon.

But that morning it was different.

The yellow and black was everywhere.

Shirts, scarves and flags.

People moved toward the same point from every direction.

And while this went on, the Wigan team coach moved through it, and in it, the players sat with their faces turned toward the windows, watching them go past.

Fletcher was the first to say what most of them were thinking.

”All this for a pre-season game?”

The coach pulled into the inner outskirts of the Signal Iduna, where a member of the stadium staff was waiting to meet them and lead them in through the away entrance and down through the corridors that all football grounds seemed to have.

When they got there, the away dressing room looked functional and clean, unlike most teams that intentionally made their dressing room unhospitable so as to have a psychological advantage before the game.

After they settled, the players immediately began changing into their warm-up kits.

Even before the door opened to the tunnel, the noise was present.

The bellowing seeped in through the walls and met the players before they had even stepped onto the pitch.

A while later, one of the staff working on the grounds appeared and cleared the Wigan players, who immediately got onto their feet and began walking out of the dressing room and into the tunnel, where they stepped out onto the pitch a moment later.

The Signal Iduna Park received them without warmth but without hostility either.

They needn’t because just the sheer scale of the yellow and black stands going up and down on all sides was enough to rattle most.

The Wigan players were now simply in a different territory.

Dawson stood on the touchline and looked at his players moving through their warmup shapes and said, ”Focus. Don’t let it get in your head. It’s atmosphere, that’s all it is.”

But then the Dortmund players began walking out, and the Sound that came down from the stands when the home side emerged was not the same sound that had been there before.

The Yellow Wall behind the goal announced itself with a full-throated collective voice that moved through the ground and through the people standing in it, whether they wanted it to or not.

Ben Amos stood beside Nolan on the edge of the technical area and watched it for a moment.

”How,” he said, ”are we supposed to not feel overwhelmed?”

Nolan looked at the stands, then back at the pitch where most of the players stood still, eyes up at the modern-day Spartan-like crowd behind the goal.

Back in Wigan, it was a working day, which meant most people were fitting it around something else.

A pub near the DW had the stream pulled up on the screen above the bar, and three men who had rearranged their lunch breaks to be here sat with their drinks and watched the teams moving through their warmups on screen.

In a barbershop on the high street, the owner had his phone propped up against the mirror and was cutting hair with one eye on the stream.

In an office on the other side of town, two men had a laptop open between them on a desk that was supposed to be for something else, and the small speakers were turned just low enough that the room could pretend it wasn’t happening.

A man in a flat above a launderette had been sitting in his chair since the stream went live and hadn’t moved since.

His friend knocked and came through the door and looked at the screen.

”It’s starting,” the man in the chair said.

And all across Wigan, in the spaces people had carved out of their ordinary Tuesday, entertainment or reality beckoned, and they couldn’t wait to watch.