It was match day morning, and the home dressing room at Oakwell was a tomb.
The usual pre-match ritual—the loud, thumping bass of a playlist, the cheerful, rowdy insults, the sharp, electric smell of anticipation—was gone.
Today, the only sound was the funereal, rain-slicked clatter of studs on concrete as players walked in one by one, their faces grim.
Michael stood in the corner, a silent ghost in a club suit, his presence barely registering.
His "Braves," his giant-killers, looked like a defeated army. They were broken.
The press, of course, had seen to that.
On the large TV in the corner of the canteen, muted, the 24-hour sports news was playing on a loop. The headline was a brutal, all-caps gut punch:
"THE COLLAPSING CLUB: Barnsley Manager in Hospital, Midfielder Fails Doping Test."
The story was a vulture's feast. It painted a picture of a club in freefall, a "circus" whose luck had finally, tragically, run out.
