Entry III: The Raised Hand

At 6:55 I was walking back from the toilet, which is not where you want to be five minutes before your first competitive futsal match. My team was already on court warming up. I had done none of it. I told myself I would finish it on the bench.

I got two minutes. Then I looked up and we were 1–0 down, and the coach was waving me on while I was still stretching.

That is how my first tournament started.

A court with no voices

There is one thing you need to know before the rest of it makes sense. Every player in our team was deaf. So were the teams that had travelled in from the other cities. Four teams in the group, one hall, and nobody in it shouting for the ball.

We had arrived early, because the association elections had to be settled before any football was played. When they finished we were put straight into the first game, so we went down to warm up — which is when my stomach caught me, and I will spare you the details.

If you have played any team sport you know how much of it runs on the voice. Man on. Turn. Time. Pass. Take that away and the game does not simply get quieter. It gets harder in a way that never shows up on the scoreline. You cannot fix a decision after it has started. You cannot warn anybody. Everything has to be seen, and it has to be seen early.

I am a tennis player. I do not play futsal. I had joined this team as a participant and, honestly, as an observer — I wanted to see how players carry themselves through a competition, what they feel, what sits behind their eyes. What I got instead was three matches in which I ran until my legs buckled, scored one goal, and finished the day by putting the ball into my own net.

First match

At 2–0 I decided to go on before it was too late. Dimitris came on with me — my closest friend in the team, and the best dribbler we have. Give him a defender and he will go past him. So the coach now had two attackers, one in midfield and one at the back.

This is futsal. You cover everywhere. From the moment I stepped on I was sprinting, because at 0–2 the attackers defend too.

The attacks were good. The finishing was not. Every shot ran into three bodies standing in front of the goal. I told Dimitris to use his dribbling and that we would take it phase by phase. Then I watched him beat two players and not shoot. He was waiting to be completely open. At 0–2 you do not get completely open — you shoot, and you accept that it might be blocked.

I wanted to tell him. That is the whole problem in one sentence. Calling for the ball does nothing here, so I put my hand up in front of me instead. But his eyes were down on the ball, which meant he could not see my hand any more than he could hear my voice. Two channels, both closed. This is exactly why coaches have to teach children to play with their heads up, and to teach it young. On a hearing team it is a refinement. On ours it is the entire communication system.

Half-time arrived and my legs had swelled up. Five straight minutes of sprinting on a two-minute warm-up will do that. And it is worth stopping on, because it is the argument I would make to any player who thinks a warm-up costs him energy he will need later: the fatigue arrives either way — you only choose where to spend it. I once went into a friendly with no warm-up at all and was ready to drop inside twenty minutes. When I warm up I get tired, and then I am ready. If the fatigue arrives instead in the middle of a match, you get a shock — why am I this tired, I am fit — and you lose your concentration. Spend it early. How much depends on the player.

The break helped. We came back out under instructions to hold the score. And then we found something: the opponents were bunching in front of their own goal, which meant there was empty space behind them. Dimitris took the ball, drew them onto him — a deliberate, clever move — and lifted it over the top to me.

We got two attempts out of it. The first hit the side post. The second I struck cleanly, the way Mbappé takes them, and it went in.

1–3. Time ran out.

One more thing I got wrong, and I only saw it afterwards. I played that whole match as an attacker and a defender and never played my own game. I can play as a playmaker. We simply did not have one on court — and it turns out the role matters far more than I had assumed.

Second match

On paper the second team looked stronger than the one that had just beaten us. I refused to treat that as an excuse in advance.

This is something I believe from tennis and I will say it plainly: it does not matter who has beaten whom. A strong player wins steadily for months, loses once to somebody visibly weaker, and suddenly every player in the draw is saying he is finished, I could beat him easily. Then he wins again and the whole thing is forgotten inside a week. The only opinion worth holding is the one about your own progression.

So we changed the plan. I would play as playmaker. Dimitris would stay high and watch for the moment I could feed him. Everything else stayed as it was — you do not change too much at once, or the match turns into confusion.

I started on the bench. The idea was that our defenders would drag out the clock and tire the opponents before we came on. We conceded once in five minutes, and I do not think five minutes tired anybody except our own back line.

Then I went on as playmaker, and the game changed completely.

I felt connected to it in a way I had not felt in the first match — as though I could see the shape of the thing instead of only chasing it. The shots came from Dimitris and our other attacker rather than from me, which was the point. Then a gap opened and I put a pass through to Dimitris with nobody near him. He took his time. 1–1.

I cut out several of their attackers when they tried to come past me. Then I tried a dribble of my own, which surprised them, because until that point I had done nothing but pass. I got through, saw open space and ran at goal — and then something came in from my right at full speed, like a truck. Carrying that much momentum there was nothing to be done. He tackled me, I went down and rolled several times, and got up fine.

Our attacker hit a long shot and scored. 2–1. With four minutes left we dropped into maximum defence. We saw one chance to go forward, but I stayed back, because I had seen two of their players pushing up. At the end the ball ended up in the air and one of their defenders put it into his own goal trying to clear it out of play. This is why striking a ball out of the air is dangerous — we are not trained for it, and by that stage everybody is tired.

3–1. A good game.

Then thirty minutes of rest, which was nowhere near enough. Recovery is one of the clearest lines between an amateur and a professional: the amateur tires quickly and needs longer to come back, the professional exactly the opposite.

Third match

We looked at the group table. We were second, and we were about to play the team in first. A win would take us top — but above all, the mind had to stay on our own game.

I started this one. They were strong and they moved the ball well between them. They scored early and I did not fully understand how, which is its own kind of warning.

We found our rhythm and stayed with them. Then came the best phase of the day: I played a pass into Dimitris, he went past three players and hit a shot from an absurd angle, and it went in. 1–1.

I tried my own dribbling again. It did not work as well as his, but something came of it. Then we lost the ball for no reason at all. Their player carried it down and hit it with everything he had. 1–2.

They celebrated. We did not wait for them. The moment the referee whistled for the restart, Dimitris and I went like lightning — one pass, and he lifted it over the goalkeeper before their defence had turned around. 2–2. If we had not done it in that first second, it would never have happened.

And then the thing that actually decided the match, which was not tactical.

Our second attacker broke. Not physically — psychologically. He began doubting that we could hold on, and started hitting the ball long from the middle of the court. In futsal that fails twice over: the opponents simply collect it, and the goal is small enough that the keeper cuts out anything hopeful. Meanwhile Dimitris and I were running, because we assumed the long balls were lobs meant for us.

They were not. We burnt our last energy into the sky.

By the time we understood, the ball was back on our side with everybody around it except me. That was the moment I realised how much of my running that day had gone nowhere — sprint after sprint, without stopping and without reason. It buckled me.

I gave my legs whatever was left and got back to defend. I made it into position. Dimitris won the ball and swung his foot to clear it out of play.

He had not seen me. I was directly in his line, and we were packed so tightly around our own goal that the smallest thing would cost us. The ball hit my leg and went in.

An own goal. All that running, and what it produced was an own goal against us. Fortunately I was not in a World Cup final, where they would make your life hell for it.

We lost 2–3.

Summary & takeaways

We finished second in the group, and for a first tournament that was enough. Preparation is where anxiety goes to die: if you have studied properly for the mathematics exam, the studying itself takes the worry out of you — you already know you can answer the equations; if you have not, you walk in hoping for an easy paper. Sport is identical, which is why the player wishing for a weaker opponent is wishing for the wrong thing. Do not go from nothing to maximum: my legs swelled because I went from two minutes of stretching straight into five minutes of sprinting, and high intensity held over duration puts real strain on a body that is not conditioned for it. A team needs a playmaker: I spent the first match as an attacker and a defender and never played my own game, and the moment I moved into the role the second match opened up — that is about the role existing, not about me. Defending, hold your distance: running straight at the attacker is exactly how he slips the ball to the man beside him. The ball in the air is where the amateur shows: most players avoid it, partly because it escapes them and mostly because they do not want to be seen failing at it in front of everybody; I tried it anyway, excused as a tennis player, and found I could control it cleanly with my foot and could not strike it at all — even though the same shot is clean in training. Nobody performs above their training: the great players are the ones who reproduce in a match the best of what they have already done in the session, and nobody exceeds it, so make each session one step better than the last — that step is what becomes your ceiling on match day. Next entry: back to training, with three matches of evidence to work from.

— G.S.