Harbinger Of Glory

Down on the touchline, Reyes sat and watched Leo place the ball on the turf.

His arms were folded beneath his thick puffer jacket, but after seeing the foul, an almost wretched smile formed on his face.

”...Fuck,” he muttered before shaking his head.

James McClean, sitting right in the seat next to Reyes, turned toward him.

”What?”

At that, Reyes nodded toward Leo.

”Lucky bastardo.”

McClean frowned before looking at the pitch and then back at Reyes.

”What are you talking about?”

Reyes snorted before nodding once more at the pitch where Leo was walking towards the spot of the kick.

”If what I’ve seen so far from him in training is anything to go by,” he said, almost sighing, ”then it’s as good as a goal!”

McClean raised a brow before he turned and watched Leo take a couple of measured steps back from the ball.

”I’ve seen him stay behind after training when everyone else has gone home, and all he does is free kicks and shooting, like he’s a striker or something!”

”Oh, that,” McClean muttered, remembering some of Leo’s horrendous shooting attempts when he first came into the senior team.

”When he joined us, all he could do was pass,” McClean recounted to Reyes, who nodded.

”Sometimes an hour, sometimes just half,” Reyes continued with a nod.

”Just hitting free kick after free kick until it got dark.”

”Seriously?”

”He’d miss one...” Reyes said, ”...then make himself score the next three before he’d let himself leave.”

He shook his head with an amused smile.

”I stopped joining him after my first week at the club. He’s obsessive when he wants something!”

”That’s where the confidence comes from.”

James McClean nodded once more, before turning to look at the pitch.

By then, the referee had finished pacing out the distance.

He shuffled Everton’s wall half a step to his left after another round of protests, ignored the complaints that followed, then blew sharply on his whistle for silence before pointing at the spray line.

Pickford stood behind the wall, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet.

He shifted one defender and then another before he crouched to peer around the outside of the wall, never taking his eyes off Leo.

Around the penalty area, bodies jostled for position before gradually settling, and while they did, the crowd quietened almost instinctively.

Leo, behind the ball, looked at Pickford between the posts.

”He’s just a keeper,” he muttered right as the referee came to stand beside him.

The official, after another round of inspecting, nodded in satisfaction and then blew his whistle as the commentary came in quietly on the broadcast.

”Leo Calderon has a free kick at Goodison Park. The position is dangerous but not central. Pickford has the wall set to his left. The obvious delivery is over the wall toward the far corner!”

”Yes, it is, but I won’t count on it,” the co-commentator said. ”I think he’s going to pass to Jake or to Ezra on the other side of the edge of the box.”

With a breath, Leo covered the distance to the ball quickly, and the moment he got to the ball, he coiled his form back before wrapping his right leg around the ball.

The ball left his foot and curved, and every person in the stadium read the trajectory in the first fraction of a second and concluded the same thing: that it was going toward the left side of the goal, the far corner, the obvious target, and with that thought Pickford’s weight began shifting that way before he’d consciously decided to move.

But then a second later, what they’d seen earlier felt like a hallucination.

The ball that had been heading left a while ago suddenly spun right and began heading towards the opposite side, continuing its arc and moving not away from Pickford but back toward him, back toward the top right corner where he’d just been standing.

The move was so sudden and unprompted that by the time Pickford had registered what was happening, his weight was completely wrong, committed to a direction the ball had no intention of going.

He flung himself back trying to utilise every ounce of his agility, but before he could even think of tipping the ball away, it grazed the underside of the crossbar and settled into the top right corner like that was where it belonged all along.

The sound that followed from the Goodison away section was physical, something that shouldn’t have been possible with their numbers, but there they were, screaming on top of their lungs as the ball rolled through the net and settled back down.

”OOOOOOOOOOOOOHOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH GOOOAL. MAGNIFICENT!! A GOAL OF THE HIGHEST ORDER, MADE BY LEO CALDERON AND WHAT AN EFFORT THAT IS!”

By the time the commentary finished, Leo was already running toward the corner flag.

He slid as he reached it, the grass taking him forward, before he rose in the same motion without breaking and turned toward the Everton home section, veins popping on his neck and the side of his head as he roared at them and then spread his arms.

Before he could take the jeers in, his teammates came from every direction to join him, piling in front of the home crowd with reckless abandon, not even caring about sportsmanship anymore.

”THE FREE KICK DECEIVED PICKFORD COMPLETELY,” the commentator was saying, his voice still at the top of its range.

”He moved to his right, and the ball went to his left, and there was nothing he could do once his weight had gone. That is an exceptional piece of technique from an eighteen-year-old.”

”Leo Calderon is really turning out to be something in his first season in the Premier League.”

While the Wigan players celebrated, Ashley Young arrived at the corner flag and got right in the face of Leo.

”Don’t do that,” he said, and shoved Leo on the shoulder.

Leo stumbled slightly and then looked at Young and then looked at what he had just done, the corner flag behind him, the home fans in front of him.

He understood in the same moment that the spur of it had carried him here without much conscious input, but he wasn’t going to apologise.

So he took a step back.

Before he could do so fully, the referee arrived, pushing Young aside gently but firmly, and then turning to Leo with the card already in his hand.

A yellow card for inciting the crowd.

Leo took it without argument and walked back toward his half, and as he did, he glanced up at the scoreboard.

Everton 0 — Wigan Athletic 2

The smile that arrived on his face was wide enough that he knew the cameras were getting it, and if anything, he wanted them to get it.