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  “Sorry, mate,” said Jamie, holding his ground. “Does it have your name on it?”

  “I’ve been sitting in this seat on our coach for the last twelve years, you fool,” barked Treacher. Jamie noticed that his ashen face seemed to have been stained a permanent yellowy-grey colour by the cigarettes everyone knew he secretly smoked each night. “I was playing for Scotland when you were still in nappies. Show some respect!”

  “Yeah, well, respect works both ways, Ronnie,” replied Jamie. “Instead of just telling me to move, why don’t you try using the magic word for a change?”

  Treacher’s lip started to bend and twitch with fury.

  “Magic word?” he snarled. “Fine: I want you to move … NOW!”

  “Here, Tommy,” said Jamie, handing his gold ring to the Scotland kit man, Tommy McAvennie, as they arrived in the dressing room. “They won’t let me play with it on, so can you look after this for me during the match, please? But be careful with it – it’s the most valuable thing I own.”

  Tommy was a big man with a broad smile. He’d had a bit of a shady past and it was well known that he was a heavy gambler but, for some reason that he couldn’t quite explain, Jamie felt as though he could trust the man with anything even though they’d only just met.

  “No probs,” smiled Tommy. “It’s safe with me.”

  “Thanks,” said Jamie, before proudly adding: “Take a look at the inscription if you want.”

  “Keep the Tartan Pride,” read Tommy, before putting the ring in his pocket and giving Jamie a reassuring grin. “Aye – too right. Who gave you that?”

  “It was my granddad’s,” explained Jamie. “I called him Mike though, because we were mates. He was my top man… Anyway…” said Jamie, catching himself before he slipped into sadness. “I’ll get it back off you after the game.”

  Jamie surveyed the fruit basket in the dressing room and picked up a banana. But, as soon as he started to peel it, he had to put it straight back down. Realizing that there were only forty minutes to go until kick-off, Jamie suddenly started to feel more than a little queasy.

  So much had happened in the last few days that, in a way, the actual match had kind of crept up on him.

  And now it was here. Everything that he had grown up watching: the flags, the painted faces, the packed stadium… He was about to become a part of it… His football dream was about to come true…

  Jamie was about to play at the World Cup finals.

  With his stomach rapidly feeling more and more as though it was on some kind of roller-coaster ride, Jamie headed to the toilets to try to take care of business. The last thing he wanted was to be caught short on the pitch!

  Ronnie Treacher was already standing at the urinals when Jamie walked in. Seeing Jamie, Treacher turned and headed straight out of the toilets, completely blanking him.

  “Where I was brought up we were taught to wash our hands after we’ve been to the toilet,” said Jamie, unable to resist a little dig at the man who’d been so rude to him earlier. He was actually pretty happy to have come up with that line off the cuff, despite his nausea.

  1-0 to Jamie Johnson!

  “Yeah, well, where I come from we learnt not to aim at our hands in the first place,” replied Treacher, shoulder-barging his way past Jamie as he left.

  1-1.

  Now he was alone, Jamie looked at himself in the mirror. His face was a greyish-green colour and he could feel his mouth beginning to fill with sweet-tasting saliva – a familiar warning sign that Jamie’s body was preparing itself to be sick.

  It felt like a dark poison. Swelling first in his stomach, then rising quickly up into his chest and throat. There was no way Jamie was going to be able to stop it.

  He ran into the cubicle and just managed to lift up the lid before the entire contents of his belly projected out of his mouth in a stinking stream of vomit.

  He was sick with extreme violence; half-digested bits of carrot, sweetcorn and orange all spurted so powerfully into the water that they splashed back up and into Jamie’s face.

  Jamie caught his breath and, for a second, tried to calm his tremoring body before another, unexpected wave of vomit rushed from his mouth. He kept retching even when his stomach had nothing left to give.

  Finally, after hanging his limp head over the bowl for a couple more minutes, the heaving of his stomach began to subside, allowing his senses to return.

  He wiped his mouth clean with toilet paper and then went to the sink to splash ice-cold water on his face. He even slapped his cheeks to get the blood racing again.

  Jamie had never believed the stories he’d heard about other players being sick before matches due to nerves. He’d thought it was all made up.

  “How can someone be nervous about playing football?” he’d always joked. “It’s supposed to be fun!”

  But now Jamie understood why. This was the World Cup. The whole world was watching. And after all, he was the “Star Man” – everyone would be expecting him to deliver.

  Jamie tapped the sign above his head as he’d seen so many footballers do on TV.

  THIS IS ANFIELD

  Great players, awesome players, world class players had played upon this turf and now Jamie was following in their footsteps.

  It all happened in a blur. Walking out on to the pitch, the explosion of noise and colour, the deafening roar from the Tartan Army, the national anthems and realizing he didn’t know all the words, the handshakes, the team photo, the referee putting the whistle to his lips…

  Jamie looked around, trying to take in the atmosphere for the last time before the game started.

  That was when he saw her.

  Standing by the tunnel with her notebook in her hand.

  Her hair was tied up and she had make-up on.

  For a second, Jamie forgot where he was. All he could see was Jack. He thought back to when his best friends at school had told him that Jack was untouchable, out of his league.

  But Jamie had never believed them. He knew Jack better than they wished they could.

  He looked at her, smiled and sent her a wave.

  It was at that moment that Jamie’s heart sank. She might have been a long way away, over on the other side of the pitch. And she might have been concentrating on her work, but Jamie had still expected Jack to wave back.

  After the initial roar that accompanied the kick-off, Anfield fell silent. It was waiting… It was expectant.

  And it was to remain that way. Nigeria’s tactics – they were playing three men in the middle of midfield, two of them holding – were suffocating Scotland in the centre of the park, preventing them getting the ball out to the wings. Meanwhile, Nigeria always looked dangerous with their incredible pace on the break.

  At times, Jamie would go minutes without even getting a touch. He tried switching wings as Robertson had told him to but, in truth, it was irrelevant where Jamie was playing if he didn’t have the ball.

  He was in the side to rip opposition defences to shreds with his ferocious speed and intricate skill but, from the very first kick of the game, Jamie knew he wasn’t playing as he could. To be at his best on the pitch, his mind had to be clear – focused only on his feet, the ball and the goal. But today Jack was in his head too and there wasn’t enough room for everything.

  Jamie’s legs and whole body seemed drained. On the rare occasions he had the ball, he tried to put his foot on the gas and burn past the Nigeria defenders with his pure, raw pace, only to find that his engine was empty. The nervous energy he’d expended through all the tension before the game seemed to have robbed him of everything he needed now. There was no turbo boost, no jet-propelled dashes down the line.

  And he wasn’t the only one. The whole team was playing as though they had cement in their boots.

  The interval began strangely and did not get much better.

&
nbsp; Jamie walked into the dressing room to find Duncan Farrell, the big Scotland striker, smashing his head repeatedly against the wall.

  Jamie looked around anxiously. He’d heard that this kind of behaviour was one of the first signs of madness. Had the pressure got to Farrell? Did he need medical help?

  But Allie Stone shrugged his shoulders at Jamie and said: “Oh, don’t worry about him. He does the same thing every game.”

  Brian Robertson was also mad. But in a different way. He was mad at his players.

  “I want to know if you lot truly believe that you deserve to be playing at the World Cup,” he announced. “Because, to me, you look like a bunch of understudies, waiting for the real stars to return… To be the best, you have to believe you’re the best.”

  The game went on, but still the spark was missing. Two touches where one would do… Dawdling on the ball and getting caught in possession… Trying to thread the perfect pass through a forest of legs instead of just keeping it simple. These were the symptoms of Scotland’s illness.

  And, it seemed, the disease was contagious, transmitting itself from the pitch to the stands.

  The Tartan Army was getting impatient. The high hopes were turning to loud groans, the big cheers to sarcastic jeers.

  And, though he hated to admit it to himself, Jamie knew much of the disappointment was aimed at him. The headlines that had greeted his last-minute decision to play for Scotland had built him up to be such a brilliant player that the Tartan Army were probably just expecting him to turn up and score a hat-trick in his first game. But that was a million miles from the case. Not only had Jamie put in one of the worst performances that he could remember, but a part of his brain wasn’t even thinking about football.

  Why had Jack ignored him earlier? Hadn’t she seen his wave? He swallowed and could still detect the acidic aftertaste of sick on his tongue—

  Suddenly a cross was coming over. Jamie was unmarked and the goal was gaping. It was his great chance. All it needed was a good, solid downward header and the goal would be his.

  But Jamie had only seen the ball at the last moment. He didn’t have enough time to set himself and get into the right position.

  The ball hit his head rather than the other way around. The timing was all wrong; Jamie got his head right under the ball, ballooning his effort grotesquely over the crossbar. The Nigerian fans cheered ironically, waving their hands in the air.

  Jamie shook his head in self-disgust and jogged back to his station on the left flank.

  Still, he consoled himself, a 0-0 draw was not the end of the world. A point and a clean sheet was not the victory that everyone had hoped for, but it was a start. A decent platform from which to build.

  And there were still a few minutes left. Jamie could prove his commitment to the fans by working his guts out right until the final whistle. Even if his magic wasn’t there today, he could still win people over with his work-rate. Sometimes a sliding tackle earned way more respect than a step-over.

  However, although his intentions were good, Jamie’s plan to concentrate on his defensive duties was to have utterly disastrous consequences.

  With eighty minutes on the clock, the Nigerian right-winger was leading a bright late break. Jamie decided that he was the man to stop the attack.

  “Jamie’s man!” He roared whilst running back towards his goal at top speed. “I’ve got him!” With that, Jamie launched himself into what turned out to be a quite horrendously timed tackle.

  The winger literally flew five feet into the air and, although he wasn’t injured, it was one of the easiest penalties the referee had ever had the fortune to award.

  Not even the Tartan Army, who had now gone deathly quiet in the stands, could argue that it wasn’t a spot kick.

  And although Allie Stone did his best – wiggling his hips and even sticking out his tongue – the Nigerian penalty-taker was having none of it.

  He pelted the ball straight into the top corner.

  No points.

  No goals.

  No clean sheet.

  No positives.

  GAME OVER.

  Jamie hung his head. It was bad enough to have performed so miserably. But now he’d been responsible for gifting the opposition a penalty, which meant that he had almost single-handedly lost Scotland the game.

  It was a horrific start and the Tartan Army were not happy. Having been promised by Sir Brian Robertson that they would be following a team capable of winning the tournament, all they could see was a national embarrassment.

  And even more criticism rained down from the TV commentators…

  “So the disconsolate Scotland players trudge off the pitch and you can see how devastated both the fans and players are by this result. Just look at Jamie Johnson’s face. The winger, who was supposed to be the missing ingredient, instead turned out to be the villain.

  “This is, after all, the Group of Death and with further tough matches against group rivals France and Argentina looming, it may well be that Scotland’s World Cup journey could already be coming to an end.

  “This may have been the manager’s first taste of World Cup football but it will surely go down as a day of personal humiliation for Sir Brian Robertson and his troops.”

  Group D – Standings

  Match Day 1 Results

  “Sorry to interrupt, boss,” said Diana Budd, the Scotland Team press officer, poking her head hesitantly around the dressing room door within minutes of the final whistle. “It’s TV. That new girl Jack Marshall. She wants to do a post-match interview and they’re entitled to one player from each side. We need a volunteer.”

  All of the players avoided eye contact with her. None of them wanted to have to explain their depressing loss.

  Finally, Jamie said: “I’ll do it, if you want.”

  “OK with you, Brian?” checked Diana.

  “I don’t see many of the other lads putting their hands up,” snapped Robertson, still understandably frustrated by the way the game had gone.

  “OK, Jamie,” said Diana. “Follow me.”

  “Obviously it wasn’t the best of games, so some of the questions might be a bit difficult to answer,” warned Diana as she led Jamie to the interview area. “A few tips for you. If she asks you about—”

  “It’s OK, Diana,” Jamie smiled. “I know Jack. She won’t be like that.”

  While they were walking, Jamie discreetly checked his breath. He hoped there were no traces of vomit still lingering on it from when he’d been sick before the game. It was strange that, even though she was his best friend, Jack still had the ability to make Jamie feel nervous sometimes. He really cared about what she thought.

  As they turned around the corner, Jack was already waiting for them at the bottom of the tunnel which stretched up towards the pitch. She was standing in front of a board with various sponsors’ names on it.

  “Hey, Jack,” smiled Jamie, resisting the urge to give her a hug. “I waved at you before the game but I don’t think you s—”

  Jack put her fingers to her lips to silence Jamie before holding the microphone to her mouth and, in a loud voice, announcing: “Thanks, Jeff. Yes, I’m joined here by Jamie Johnson. So, Jamie, tell us: where did it all go wrong?”

  Jamie looked at her face. It was cold and serious. Her smile was nowhere to be seen.

  “Well, I don’t think that anything went wrong as such…” Jamie stammered.

  “Well, presumably something must have gone wrong,” Jack persisted. “Our stats showed that Scotland only had three efforts on goal during the game, with just one on target. Would you put that down to the manager’s tactics or the players’ performances?”

  “Well, I don’t think anyone’s to blame but, when the whistle goes, we’re the ones who go out on to the pitch – not the manager.”

  “And what about your o
wn relationship with the fans? Are you still sure you made the right decision picking Scotland? It seems like the Tartan Army haven’t accepted you yet. They weren’t exactly cheering your name.”

  Jamie’s mouth hung open. Was this his friend? Was this his best friend? Or had some repugnant alien killed Jack and hijacked her body?

  “The fans can do what they want,” Jamie snapped, firing out the words without understanding their impact. “I couldn’t care less.”

  Jamie went straight up to his room. The coach back to the hotel had been as silent as a morgue. Stonefish hadn’t had the will to break the silence with even the softest of farts.

  Jamie reluctantly filled in the scores on his wall chart before checking all the footy stories on the internet through his phone. As the page loaded, his already sinking heart plummeted to new depths of depression.

  Footy Blogs

  Marshall Mauls Clueless Johnson

  Scotland winger Jamie Johnson capped a miserable international debut this afternoon when he was grilled live on TV by his girlfriend, Jack Marshall.

  The 18-year-old star failed to live up to his pre-match billing as one of the most dangerous attackers in the tournament – and even conceded the late penalty which consigned his team to defeat – before being subjected to an embarrassing barrage of questions by the rising sports reporter.

  When Johnson – who came so close to playing for England – was asked about his frosty relationship with the Scotland fans, he snapped: “I couldn’t care less.”