Tackle Page 3

  It might not be the biggest sport in America, but I was convinced that it deserved more than just this cursory, dismissive coverage. With a newsroom run by Grant Adams, and in which even young, ambitious women like me were just seen as eye candy, though, I guess I really didn't have much choice.

  "You wish, Mike." I pretended to laugh. "And thanks from WBC in Barcelona." I paused for a couple of seconds until the red light on the camera flickered off.

  "What an asshole," my cameraman – Tim – murmured.

  "You're telling me," I replied, gently massaging my jaw. Every time I had to hold that false, rictus smile for the camera, I felt like my face was about to seize up! "You need any help packing up, Tim?" I asked.

  "Don't worry about it." He smiled. "I'm fine – I've been here a few days already. You look like you need to climb into bed! Jetlag hitting?"

  "Tim!" I exclaimed. "Didn't your mother ever tell you not to say things like that to a woman?"

  "She tried," Tim grinned, "but I guess I wasn't listening."

  "No prizes for guessing why you're single then…" I said grumpily.

  "Go get a night's rest," Tim said gently. "You'll feel better in the morning."

  "Oh, alright then." I grimaced. "I'm going to take a walk around the stadium first, okay?"

  "I'm not your boyfriend." He smiled. "You don't need to ask my permission…"

  "I wasn't asking for it."

  I walked away to the sound of Tim's infectious belly laugh, glad that he couldn't see the smile that was tugging at the corner of my lips. He was a good guy, even if he could be a little abrasive at times.

  The stadium towered above me. As the evening drew to a close, lights all around the stadium began to flicker on. There would be workers in here late into the night, I imagined, getting ready for the first game day of the season. The stadium itself was behind locked gates, so I walked around the path that snaked around the entire circumference of the massive building. It was undeniably impressive; already the size of the Rose Bowl, I knew that there were plans to expand it even further in the next couple of years.

  I kept walking around, imagining how monstrous a place it would be after the expansion, and finally came across a large set of gates, behind which I saw a merchandise shop, a couple of bars and a sign that indicated the place to buy tickets for the stadium tour.

  "Can I help you, señorita?" a man, I assumed a security guard, asked me in accented Spanish.

  "When can I take a tour?" I replied in that same language, my eyes still transfixed on the giant stadium that dominated the skyline in this part of Barcelona, already a relatively flat city. Part of my mind puzzled over where in Spain my conversation partner was from, because he certainly didn't sound like any of the native speakers I'd met so far.

  Then again, I thought to myself, this was Catalonia, and Catalonia was different than the rest of Spain. They spoke differently, ate differently, and had huge pride in their region. To be fair, if I was from a place as beautiful as Barcelona, so would I!

  "I'm not sure," he said, surprising me with his frankness. "I'm pretty sure you can't do them on match days, though, so you'll have to wait. How long are you in town?"

  "Where are you from?" I asked, turning my head. "And how do you know I'm not a local?"

  The man laughed. "Enjoying your holiday?"

  "Uh, I guess…" I replied. Of course, I wasn't actually on holiday, but the moment of confusion set up the rest of our encounter nicely.

  I had to blink in order to process the sudden, unexpected appearance in front of me of the man I'd been flown five thousand miles to cover. He was in shorts and a training shirt, both wearing the red cross and stripes of the Barcelona logo, and he was soaked with sweat.

  "Alejandro Rodriguez?" I asked, feeling a sudden need to confirm what my eyes were telling me.

  "Please, it's Alex!" He laughed. "How do you know who I am?"

  "I knew you weren't from Barcelona." I laughed.

  "Oh, my accent isn't good enough for you?" he asked with a smile on his face.

  "No, it's fine," I said, "just different. Why did you speak to me in Spanish, anyway?" I asked, switching to English. "I don't look like I speak it, do I?" My mind was suddenly whirring at a thousand miles an hour, and the language change was a deliberate ploy to distract him and avoid answering his question. I had my reporter's hat on now, and the last thing I wanted was for him to close up after finding out who I was. This was the kind of golden opportunity to make a career that reporters dreamed about at night.

  "You're right, you don't." He smiled confidently. "But can I be honest with you?"

  He had the look on his face of a man who didn't need to ask permission.

  I nodded.

  "I was hoping to impress you with the fact I spoke both." He smiled. "I guess it's less impressive now I know that you do, too… Your turn."

  "Turn to do what?" I asked, succumbing to his confident charm. I felt like I couldn't concentrate on asking the questions I wanted to because I was so swept up by his undeniable attractiveness.

  "Answer a question. How do you know who I am? Even if you did get my name wrong…"

  "Oh, that." I smiled. This was crunch time – I needed to make a decision: was I going to be honest, come clean and tell him that I was out here because of… him? Or was I going to play the part of the naive, attractive tourist and hope he let down his guard enough for me to find the kernel of the story?

  Being a reporter on a national sports channel was all I'd ever dreamed of, and that cinched it.

  "You're famous, you know?" I said, smiling. "You're in all of the papers over here!" Strictly speaking, it wasn't a lie. Alex was in all of the papers – driving an expensive looking sports car directly at a pack of photographers. It probably wasn't why he would have wanted to get his name in print, but then again, there was no such thing as bad publicity.

  "Oh yeah, that." Alex smiled without looking remorseful in the slightest. "I was late for practice, and those guys…" He tailed off. "They’re like rats, you know? They'll do anything for a photo or a story, or better yet – a scandal."

  "Photographers?"

  "Yeah, them. The press in general." Alex grimaced. "They've been making my life a misery ever since I arrived in this damn city. The whole place is soccer crazy; I can't get a moment's peace. Hell, it's even the same at training!"

  My ears perked up. I had the makings of half a dozen different stories here – Alex Rodriguez admits the pressure's getting to him, or Rodriguez calls Barcelona ‘miserable’. The one I wanted, though, was contained in the last few words of his rant – "It's even the same at training". For a quick half-second, I pondered how ethical it was for me to continue to allow Alex to labor under the false impression that I was a vacationer, rather than a journalist. Of course, there was only one conclusion to that question – it wasn't. But in that moment, as far as I was concerned, there was no way an inconvenient truth was going to get in the way of a good story.

  "What do you mean?" I asked.

  "About what?" he replied. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to come here and chew your ear off – I guess I'm just a bit more stressed than I thought."

  "You said you were having trouble at training?" I asked, adopting a worried tone. "Is everything okay?"

  He studied me for a second, as though trying to work out what my motives were. Apparently I passed the test, but somehow that didn't make me feel good – in fact, quite the opposite – I felt dirty, unclean. I banished the notion from my mind. After all, I reasoned, how the hell was I going to make a good reporter if I wasn't prepared to at least bend the rules?

  "Nothing really," he sighed. "Just a bit of a," he paused, "what's the word – conflict, yeah – conflict, with one of my teammates. Nothing major, but I think he must be turning the rest of the squad against me because the boys haven't been passing me the ball much in training. That's why I was out here, actually. I figure that if I'm not going to be training much with the team, then I can at least be fitter th
an everyone else, so I've been running the steps in the stadium."

  I was shocked – this was gold dust. This kind of scoop just didn't happen!

  "Who did you fall out with?" I asked slyly. "Must have been someone important if it's not going so well for you with the rest of the team…"

  Alex's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "Do you know much about soccer?" he asked.

  "Not really, no," I lied. "I'm more of a baseball girl myself. I don't really know the rules of soccer, to be honest."

  The suspicion drained out of Alex immediately. I felt kind of sick at how good a liar I was quickly becoming, but I didn't let the internal turmoil show on my face.

  "Sorry," he apologized, "I guess I'm just a bit on edge – I've gone from being nobody back home to some kind of superstar here, and I haven't even kicked a ball for the club yet. Just a guy called Ramon. I'm sure we'll work it out."

  Holy shit – this was big. If Alex had got on Ramon Garcia's bad side, then it would take a lot to dig himself out of this hole. Ramon was Barcelona's captain, one of their most famous players, and a legend to the entire city. If I went public with this, they'd whistle Alex off the pitch. He wouldn't just have to win his captain over, he'd have to win over the entire city.

  "Well, I hope you work it out," I said. "Listen, it's getting late – I should probably go."

  "Oh," he said genially, "I'm sure it'll be fine. It was nice to meet you—" He paused. "What did you say your name was?"

  "I didn't." I smiled. "It's Diana."

  4

  Alex

  I was used to lighting games on fire, not warming the bench.

  I sat in a comfortable chair that looked more like a racing seat than a substitute's bench and smoldered to myself. We were playing Deportivo, for God's sake, not one of the big teams – this should be the kind of match the coach was more than happy to play me in, to test me out and find out what I could offer him.

  Instead, when I looked at the team sheet pinned up in the locker room earlier that afternoon, I'd seen my name listed among the seven substitutes. The worst bit was that the team wasn't even playing well – we looked nothing like one of the best teams in the world.

  "Adelante," the coach shouted in front of me, urging the players on the pitch to add some speed to the game. The match was crying out for some inventiveness, more precision in passing, but most of all – someone to just take a chance. Seventy of the ninety minutes of regular time had already passed on the clock, and the score was still obstinately nil-nil. Not a single goal scored. Not a great start to the season.

  "Alejandro!" the coach shouted over his shoulder, startling me out of my irritable reverie. I looked to the player to my right questioningly, and he urged me to stand up.

  "Yes?" I replied, startled.

  "Warm up," he barked without looking at me, still studying the game intently. "And you, too, Rodrigo. You're on in five."

  I looked back at Rodrigo, my only friend in the dressing room, and noticed that he looked, if anything, even more startled than I did. I didn't let the emotion control me for long, just pulled off my jogging pants in a hurry and pulled a yellow, numbered bib over my head so that the referee wouldn't confuse me for one of the players on the field. I ran the length of the field twice at a low speed, just getting the legs stretching, before putting my head down for a couple of short ten-yard sprints.

  I felt a dull ache in my hamstrings from the previous night's efforts running up the hundreds of stairs to the top of the stadium and back, time after time – but it was nothing that I couldn't deal with.

  "Ready, coach?" I asked, feeling suitably warmed. Rodrigo stood next to me, looking nervous enough to throw up. I got the sense that he hadn't played in many senior games.

  "Don't let me down out there, Alejandro," he said in reply. "You remember what we worked on in training?"

  I nodded, stifling the response I wanted to give – that I knew what he wanted me to do, but because of Ramon's interference, I hadn't actually practiced it… Still, I knew talking wouldn't get me anywhere, but taking my chance would.

  A groan echoed around the stadium as the number flashed up on the substitution board. I looked up at it in surprise. I knew I was young and green, but I hadn't imagined that my substitution would cause so much concern.

  "Ignore them," the coach said, clapping his hands on my shoulder. "You'll do fine."

  My eyes searched for the board, and as soon as I saw it, I understood why the crowd's reaction had been so intense. My number – thirty, was on top in green. Underneath it, in red, was none other than Ramon's – the number ten.

  "Fuck," I muttered. The last thing I needed was for him to hate me any more. I already suspected that part of the reason he'd taken such an immediate dislike to me was that, in a sense, I was supposed to be his replacement. I was supposed to be the future of the team, and for a man who’d dedicated his entire life to the club, the growing realization that his body could no longer reach the heights it once could must have been jarring.

  He came off the field with a face like thunder. I raised my hands in a double high-five – the customary greeting in a substitution, but he just looked at me and spat on the ground before storming to his chair.

  "Fuck," I repeated before running onto the pitch, followed closely by Rodrigo. Regardless of their disappointment the moment before, the crowd were nothing if not consummate supporters, and I was greeted by a roar of support that shocked me. It was one of the loudest things I'd ever heard – like a jumbo jet was taking off inside my head. It was incredible, sexual, and it had adrenaline pumping into my body at a rate I'd never experienced.

  I was a forward player – an attacker who could play in any of the advanced positions on the pitch: whether at striker, on the left or right wing, or my favorite position – the number ten, just behind the striker where I could exploit the space opened up by the striker's movement and rush in on goal. Ramon had, only a few seconds before, occupied the ten role, and I slotted in.

  "Pelota," I called, instantly screaming for the ball. My teammates might not have respected me in training, but they knew that their job on the field was to support me, because I was a match-winner, not a defender. The ball was pinged into my feet at pace, and I cushioned it to a dead stop. Suddenly, I only had eyes for the goal. Two defenders lay ahead of me – big, six-foot-two men who looked like denizens of a different area of soccer. They were slabs of muscle, and a lesser player than me would have been nervous and looked to offload the ball before they received a crunching tackle.

  I ran straight at them. Judging by the expression of surprise on their faces, they weren't expecting it.

  One of them came out towards me muttering something loudly. "Cabrón," was the only part I caught.

  What the hell is it with these people and calling me a bastard?

  I kept the ball glued to my foot. To take it from me, the defender was going to have to tackle very delicately or commit a foul – and he looked like the kind of brute who didn't know what the word delicate even meant.

  "Hey, coño," I shouted. He looked to me, rage flooding through him.

  "Who are you calling a pussy?" He spat at me. "You better watch out, kid."

  I slowed to a halt, vaguely aware that everyone else on the pitch was twenty yards away. I had a couple of seconds at least before they caught up. I feinted, dropping my shoulder to make it look like I was about to sprint to my right, and the defender's left. I watched as he committed himself, planting one of his heavy legs in the turf and lurching towards where he thought I was heading.

  I wasn't.

  "Lo siento," I muttered, but in truth, I wasn't sorry at all. With him out of the way, leaving only one defender to beat, it was like child's play. The other defender stood in front of the goalkeeper, not knowing whether to run at me or back to his goal. I put him out of his misery.

  The ball thundered, low and hard, into the back of the net, hitting the material so hard it made a rattling sound against the goalposts. The crowd e
rupted in pandemonium, and I wheeled away, tugging my shirt over my head and spinning around in circles as I ran towards the nearest stand.

  "Oh my God," I screamed, sliding on my knees and flexing every muscle in my body as I slid to a halt. I'd just scored a debut goal – the stuff dreams are made of – and not for a tiny club, either. I'd just scored for Barcelona!

  "What a goal!" Rodrigo shouted into my ear as he slid towards me, this time on his ass. He grabbed me into a massive, celebratory hug as I watched the fans in front of me go mental, hugging each other and spilling beer everywhere. "You're crazy, man!"

  The rest of team joined us, and I stood up into one massive hug. I felt drunk with power, hazy with adrenaline, and almost turned on at the speed with which I'd turned myself into a fan favorite. I walked over to the stand, raised a fist and shook it happily, sending the fans into a state of rapturous, delirious excitement.

  I heard the referee whistle, and turned him in surprise, only to see that he was brandishing a yellow card over his head.

  "What the hell was that for?" I shouted.

  "For taking your jersey off," he said, shouting back just to make headway over the noise of the now angry crowd.

  It was a stupid rule, but the last thing I wanted was to get a red card and be sent off, so I shrugged, put the jersey back on and walked back into formation. I knew, even with the yellow, that this would be the best moment of my life. Not because I would never score another goal – because I expected to score hundreds, but because it was the first.

  "The fastest goal ever scored by a Barcelona player on their debut," the stadium announcer thundered, "Alejandro Rodriguez!" The stadium erupted with joy one last time, and the whistle blew for the game to recommence.

  Happy as I was, I couldn't help but notice that there was one man in the stadium who wasn't wearing a smile on his face – Ramon Garcia. He looked like he would happily strangle me.

  5

  Diana