Chapter 364: The New Number 10

July 15th, 2017

The two days between our arrival and the first match were a strange cocktail of jet-lag recovery, light training sessions, and corporate glad-handing.

The players had their city tour, a carefully managed affair that produced a thousand Instagram posts of them looking awkwardly at temples and smiling politely at Mr. Tan.

We had the reception dinner, a stilted event where I made a short, boring speech and the players tried to avoid spilling anything on the pristine white tablecloths.

But beneath the surface of the sponsored pleasantries, the real work was happening. It was happening in the video analysis room, in the gym, and on the training pitch at Geylang. And it was happening in a quiet conversation I had with Andros Townsend on the morning of the match.

I had called him to my hotel room, a suite with a view so spectacular it felt like we were floating in the sky. He walked in looking wary, like a man who was expecting bad news. I got straight to the point.

“James is going to wear number ten,” I said.

Townsend’s face didn’t change. He just nodded slowly, his expression unreadable. “Okay.”

“That’s your number,” I said, meeting his gaze. “And you’ve earned it. You were one of our most important players last season. So if you want to keep it, you keep it. I’m not going to take it off you. We’ll give him 19, or 22, or whatever’s free. But the club, the marketing department, Freedman… they all want him in the ten. It’s the brand. It’s the statement.”

Townsend stood there for a moment, thinking. He was a good pro, Andros. A hard worker, a team player. He had been at the club for a year, and he had given everything. The number ten was a symbol of that. It was his status, his place in the hierarchy.

“Does he want it?” he asked, his voice even.

“He hasn’t asked for it,” I said, which was true. “But he’s James Rodríguez. He’s been a number ten his whole life. Real Madrid. Colombia. It’s who he is.”

Townsend nodded again. He looked past me, out the window at the incredible, impossible view of the Singapore skyline, the supertrees and the skyscrapers piercing the clouds. “When I was a kid,” he said, his voice quiet, reflective, “I used to pretend I was Rivaldo in the back garden. He wore ten. Then Zidane. He wore ten for France. It’s the number, isn’t it? It’s the one everyone wants.” He looked back at me, his eyes clear. “Give it to him.”

I was surprised by the speed of his decision. “You’re sure? No one will think any less of you for keeping it.”

“Yeah,” he said, a small, wry smile touching his lips.

“I’m sure. Look, gaffer. We’ve just signed one of the best players in the world. A Galáctico. At Crystal Palace. That’s insane. If giving him a shirt number makes him feel at home, makes him feel wanted, helps him settle in… then it’s not even a question. It’s a team game. He can have it.” He shrugged. “What else is free?”

“Fourteen,” I said.

“Fourteen it is, then,” he said, his smile widening slightly. “Thierry Henry wore fourteen. I can live with that.”

> System Notification: [Player Morale]

> Andros Townsend: +10 (Professionalism, Team Spirit)

> Squad Cohesion: +5 (Selfless Act)

I felt a surge of genuine respect for him. It was a small thing, a shirt number. But it was also a big thing. It was a statement of intent from a senior player, a message to the whole squad: we are all in this together. The team comes first.

That evening, the world saw what that meant.

The bus ride to the Singapore National Stadium was forty minutes of barely contained chaos wrapped in a thin shell of professionalism. I sat at the front, next to Sarah, staring out at the city as it blurred past the window.

My mind was not on Singapore. It was on a tactical diagram, the one I had drawn and redrawn a hundred times on the whiteboard in the Geylang training room. Behind me, the bus was alive.

Wilfried Zaha was holding court, telling Ben Chilwell and Aaron Wan-Bissaka that Griezmann was going to hate him. Rúben Neves was silent, headphones on, visualising. In the back row, James Tarkowski and Ibrahima Konaté were deep in conversation, sketching out defensive shapes on a napkin.

As we pulled up to the stadium, the bus went quiet. Not the quiet of nerves, but the quiet of awe. The Singapore National Stadium was a colossal, domed cathedral of sport, its sweeping roof lit up against the night sky.

And it was packed. 50,000 people, a vibrant, seething mass of red and blue and red and white. The noise hit us even through the windows of the bus. A roar, a wall of sound, a physical force.

I saw a group of fans directly outside the entrance, holding up a banner. It read: PALACE TILL I DIE – SINGAPORE Chapter.

Below it, about thirty people in Crystal Palace shirts were jumping up and down, screaming at the bus. One of them had a cardboard cutout of my face. It was not a flattering likeness. I chose to be flattered anyway.

“Look at that,” Connor Blake said, his nose pressed against the glass like a kid at a zoo. “That’s mad. That’s genuinely mad.”

“Don’t get used to it,” Scott Dann said from the seat behind him. “Get used to it, and you stop appreciating it. Always appreciate it.”

Fifteen minutes before kick-off, the stadium was a festival.

The lights had been dimmed. The two giant screens at either end of the ground were playing a slickly produced montage of James’s greatest hits – that volley against Uruguay, free-kicks for Madrid, assists for Monaco.

The music was pumping, a heavy bassline that you could feel in your chest. I was standing in the tunnel with the rest of the squad, who were kitted out in their warm-up gear, watching the spectacle unfold. James was not with us. He had arrived separately, with Freedman and his own small entourage, a bubble of superstardom that moved independently of the team.

The stadium announcer’s voice, dripping with hype, boomed through the speakers. “Ladies and gentlemen! Boys and girls! Please welcome to Singapore… a true superstar of world football! A Champions League winner! A World Cup Golden Boot winner! The man who is about to light up the Premier League! Your new number ten… JAMES… RODRÍGUEZ!”

As his name was announced, a bank of pyrotechnic flame jets erupted from the stage that had been set up on the sideline, shooting pillars of fire twenty feet into the air. The crowd, already at fever pitch, went insane. The roar was a physical thing, a wave of sound that washed over us in the tunnel. And out he walked.

He wasn’t in a suit. He was in the full red and blue home shirt. On the back of his shirt, in pristine white lettering, were the two words that had broken the internet a week ago, and the two numbers that confirmed the impossible was real: RODRÍGUEZ 10.

He walked onto the pitch with that easy, million-dollar smile, waving to the crowd as if he did this every day. The flashbulbs from 50,000 phones went off at once, a dizzying, strobing galaxy of light. In the small section of dedicated Palace fans behind the goal, red and blue smoke flares were lit, casting an ethereal, partisan glow over that corner of the stadium.

The noise was immense. In the tunnel, our players started clapping, their applause lost in the din. I saw Zaha, our own superstar, clapping with a huge grin on his face. I saw the academy kids, Blake and Kirby, looking on with wide-eyed, slack-jawed awe.

Freedman, looking like a man who couldn’t quite believe this was happening to his club, handed him the shirt. They posed for a photo, and James took the microphone.

“Hello, Singapore!” he said, in heavily accented but clear English. The crowd roared back. “I am very happy to be here. Very happy to be at Crystal Palace.” He held up the shirt. “This is a great club, with great fans. I am here to work hard, to help the team, and to win.” He finished with a simple, powerful statement. “Come on, you Palace!”

It was perfect. It was a masterstroke of marketing, of course, but it was more than that. It was a statement of ambition. It was us, Crystal Palace, standing on a stage in front of the world and presenting a genuine, world-class superstar as our new number ten. James wouldn’t play tonight. He was still acclimatising. But he didn’t need to. His presence was enough.

He walked back towards the tunnel, the applause following him all the way. He stopped in front of me, the smile still on his face, but his eyes serious. He held out a hand.

I took it. My grip was firm. “Welcome to Palace, James,” I said, my voice low enough that only he could hear it over the din. “Glad to have you.”

“Glad to be here, gaffer,” he said. “Now, let’s see what this team can do.”

He gave me a nod, then turned and headed up the steps towards the VIP booth where he would watch the game. I watched him go, then turned back to the squad.

“Alright,” I said, clapping my hands together, bringing them back to the reality of the task at hand. “Showtime.”

I looked at Andros Townsend, now in his new number 14 shirt. He caught my eye and gave me a small, almost imperceptible nod. He had done a good thing. A really good thing. He had shown the way. Now it was time for the team to follow.

The whistle to start the match felt like a starting gun. The show was over. The work was just beginning.

CRYSTAL PALACE F.C vs ATLÉTICO DE MADRID

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.

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