beep-beep! beep-beep!
"Fucking hell..."
thud!
The sound of the alarm clock bouncing off the table and falling on the floor reverberated inside of the room.
Will sighed, then bent to pick up the clock before letting out a long yawn. The time was four forty-five in the morning, a little early to be awake but Will was already awake.
His bedroom was cold. Very cold. But that was to be expected. It was November, and the winter was very unforgiving, so in spite of the best efforts of the radiator inside of his room, Will found himself feeling quite chilly.
His room was also quite dark, so he felt around for his clothes, and dressed up, wearing a grey hoodie, with a pair of joggers, and then two pairs of socks worn in quick succession. He laced his trainers on the edge of the bed, doing all that without turning the light on. A thin orange light reflected into his room from the street outside, and from that light one would be able to make out vague shapes in the room, including the Juninho poster on the far side of the wall. There was also a Ferguson autobiography on the shelf which was visibly worn out, also a pair of football boots standing on the radiator with fresh mud stains on the studs.
Will made his way to the kitchen and ate a banana he found lying around on the counter. His mum, Janet, worked night shifts at a nearby university and wouldn't' be home until later. She left him a note with instructions for breakfast before she left. He found it laying with the banana on the counter.
Will's face twitched when he saw the content of the note. He turned it around and then stepped out of the kitchen, into the living room, he picked up an old football laying around. It was white all over, except the Middlesbrough crest that was at the apex of the north and south sides of the ball. He then stepped out onto the street.
November in Teesside...
It was pretty, aesthetically. Actively being there was another matter entirely. It was very cold, and very... grey. It was very grey. The type of grey that poets would try to spin off into meaning something deeper than the plain glum it represented.
The park that Will was headed to was just a few minutes away and he got there without any hiccups. Unsurprisingly, he was the only one there. At five in the morning, it wasn't exactly normal to be in the park.
He locked his bike at the park gates and walked over to a random spot he found.
He opened the bag that he carried along with him and dumped the content outside, causing a small rain which consisted of a football, a few drill cones, resistance band, and a small book. He set the cones in the pattern he used during his frequent trainings, step back and begun his early morning training.
The routine he was currently doing was an invention of his own. He'd built it after watching a lot of YouTube videos of professional training sessions, and a lot of other things.
He began by juggling the ball while alternating his feet. He did a hundred reps on each leg without letting the ball fall onto the ground. He the went on to start wall passing. Also a hundred each, and then went on to do a few sprinting exercises, and touch drills.
By ten minutes past fixe, he was on the floor, panting lightly. He then went on to train for seventy five minutes. In that time, he spoke to no one and thought about nothing except for the problem that he set out to fix. He was currently working on his moving the ball with his left foot when he was under pressure. It was a weakness in his game that he thought was obvious enough to warrant his attention.
Whenever a press arrived from the right side and the natural response was to play with his left leg, his touch wasn't as good as he wanted it it to be. In crude terms, he had a gorilla first touch with his left leg. He had spent the last three weeks working on it and he felt himself slowly improving. And that was the goal. To keep improving until it was no longer a problem.
That was his goal, that was what kept pushing him forward. He had to improve, even if it meant doing these sessions in a a very focused and private state, entirely concentrated on one goal. Discipline.
Other people talked about discipline as something you imposed on yourself against resistance. But for Will, there simply wasn't any resistance, as he wanted to be there. In the park, at five in the morning when everyone else was asleep. The coldness and darkness and complete absence of any spectator were not hardships, they were the exact opposite in fact.
Two years ago, he had been one of the most highly regarded U16 prospects in the Middlesbrough Academy.
He thought about this as he worked through his self made left foot drill, a tinge of bitterness in his eyes as he powered through the drill. He had been rated so highly at sixteen, and was now rated a lot less at seventeen, and there was no excuse in the book for him to turn to. He wasn't injured fatally or anything, it was all on him.
His decision speed hadn't kept up with the academy's expectations. His physical development was a lot slower than a lot of his peers, he was far from composed whenever he was under pressure, and the coaches weren't interested in developing past the point at which they had better options.
He understood what they came from, and he agreed with them.
What he didn't agree with, was the implication that these abilities were fixed. That he couldn't improve his decision speed. That because he wasn't calm under pressure, his composure couldn't be improved. He was seventeen, and he had been working on specific problems with specific methods for the last two years. The gap between who he was now and who he intended to bridge, was bridgeable if the bridge was built with the right materials.
When it was twenty minutes past six, he finally called it a day. He packed his bags, unlocked his bad and then cycled back home under the first grey beginnings of the Teesside morning. When he got home, he freshened up and reheated the breakfast hos mother left him and then dressed and left for school.