At training, Ilyès Benamar always began by lying reasonably to his body.
He pulled the tape around his left ankle to the exact point where skin stopped being skin and became an instruction. Not too tight: he hated white toes and physiotherapists who said *I told you so* with the modest pleasure of people whose job was to be right afterward. Not too loose: he wanted to feel the tape when he shifted his weight, a tiny, almost superstitious resistance where his ankle had first turned at nineteen.
Paco, the equipment manager, placed his training jersey on the bench beside him.
“Number ten, for His Majesty.”
“You can stop that.”
“I can. I don’t want to.”
The blue fabric was still cold from the air-conditioned storeroom. Ilyès pulled it over his head and smoothed the heat-pressed square of his number in the middle of his back with his thumb. Around him, the national team’s locker room woke in separate sounds: soles slapped against tile, shin-guard Velcro, a speaker connecting too loudly, laughter from a shower stall where no one was showering. Outside, New Jersey was already baking beneath a milky sky. In three days, France would play its quarterfinal. In ten, if everything went to plan, there would be the final.
“If everything goes to plan” was a phrase Ilyès had always found lazy.
He preferred knowing what could go wrong.
On the field, the fitness coach had laid out four small squares for high-intensity play. Ilyès saw it immediately: the distances had been shortened since yesterday. Eighteen meters, perhaps seventeen and a half. The sort of detail that meant nothing to a journalist and changed everything for a player who had to repeat twenty starts in thirty minutes.
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