Chapter 218: Ready Or Not!

"What the fuck?"

One man had said it, low and disbelieving, but he wasn’t seeing things.

The people around him were already looking where he was looking.

One section rose.

Then the one beside it as the noise climbed in a way that had nothing to do with what was happening on the pitch, and over in the away end, the Bristol City supporters looked at each other with the particular bafflement of visiting fans trying to decode a reaction that hadn’t been caused by anything they could see.

On the touchline, warming up in a Wigan bib, was Leo.

The crowd watched him jog a few paces, watched him stretch, watched him exist in that space between the dugout and the pitch like it was the most natural thing in the world, and the noise built because they didn’t know what else to do with what they were seeing.

"I told you," someone said, three rows back in the lower stand, pointing like a man who had been waiting a long time to point.

"I told all of you."

"Told us what?" the man beside him shot back. "We don’t even know what this is yet."

"What do you mean, what this is yet?"

"Why would they list him as a substitute? Even when he was in the dugout after his injury, he was listed as inactive, so why change it now?"

"I mean, the club haven’t said a word," one woman said after the previous man finished.

"Last we heard, he was four months out, and it’s been less than two."

Further along the same row, another woman leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, still watching Leo on the touchline with an expression caught between joy and suspicion.

"What if it’s for the crowd," she said, not unkindly.

"What if Dawson’s just put him in the bib to give us something to feel, because God knows we’ve had precious little of it lately."

Nobody dismissed the thought outright, which said something.

The form had been what it had been.

The mood around the club had been what it had been.

And in that context, the idea that the staff might offer the fans something to hold onto, even if it was only symbolic, didn’t feel entirely unreasonable.

Then the old man two seats along from her, who had been watching Wigan since before half of them were born, shook his head slowly.

"I haven’t seen them get up like this for one. Not in a long time. And not for a seventeen-year-old."

Up in the gantry, the commentators had found a more interesting thread than the game had given them in over an hour.

"Well, this is something we did not expect to see tonight,"

the lead commentator said.

"Wigan’s teenage sensation, Leo, is warming up on the Wigan touchline, a Wigan bib on his back, and unless this is purely precautionary, it would suggest that the seventeen-year-old’s recovery has moved significantly faster than the timeline the club gave us when he first picked up the injury."

"Significantly faster,"

the co-commentator echoed, with a short laugh.

"That’s one way to put it. The word coming out at the time was four months, roughly. It has been just under two. Now I’m no medical professional, but—"

"Neither am I,"

the main commentator interjected before letting his partner continue.

"But that doesn’t happen in football. That sort of turnaround doesn’t just happen without its giveaway"

The lead commentator considered it for a moment.

"Maybe it did this time. Or—"

he let the thought develop

, "he might be playing with a bad leg for all we know."

Then the game interrupted them.

Bristol City had worked the ball into a promising position down the left, and now the winger was cutting inside.

A second later, he did what was asked of him and slipped it to the striker arriving late into the box, and for a second, it looked like Wigan’s defensive attention had drifted along with everyone else’s toward the touchline.

Except for Joe Bennett, because the full back went to ground cleanly, got his body behind the challenge, and took the ball off the striker’s foot with the timing of a man who had been defending in this league long enough to do it on instinct.

The ball rolled into touch as Wigan conceded a corner and nothing more.

"Bennett,"

the commentator said simply.

"One of the few senior heads still standing in this Wigan side, and he does exactly what a senior head is supposed to do."

But the crowd had barely registered it.

Their attention was still divided, still partly on the touchline, and then something in the atmosphere shifted again because Wigan, almost collectively, seemed to feel it.

The noise from the stands had changed.

It had a different quality now, something warmer and more alive, and the players on the pitch felt it too.

Wigan started playing like a team whose crowd had finally given them something.

They started making Bristol City uncomfortable in ways the first hour had offered no evidence they were capable of.

The ball stuck in the right areas.

The challenges went in harder, and the game, for the first time all evening, had a pulse.

And on the touchline, with a grin of a maniac, Dawson made his moves.

Fletcher came off up front, replaced by Ezra, who took up his position in the forward line before drifting naturally to the right flank.

A couple more changes followed in quick succession as the bench emptied of what it had, yet Leo still hadn’t come on and not even after the clock hit the 84th minute.

In the stands, one fan snorted.

"Gimmick," he said, folding his arms. "Told you. It’s a gimmick."

But the word had barely finished leaving his mouth when the penalty box erupted.

Ezra, not five minutes after stepping onto the pitch, had got onto the end of something in the area, gone down under a challenge, and the referee’s arm went straight out.

"Oh, it’s a penalty. Oh, what a saving grace for the Latics."

"Wigan’s academy,"

the commentator said, riding the noise,

"has been nothing short of a revelation throughout this incredibly difficult period. Time and again, the young players at this club have stepped into the breach when the senior options simply weren’t there. And tonight, within minutes of coming on, Ezra has won his side a penalty."

Like adding fuel to the flames, the fans saw the board and the number showing on it.

But most importantly, they saw Charlie Hughes, the defender, jogging toward the touchline.

And with that, the

Latics

chant started somewhere in the lower stand and spread upward in about four seconds flat.

"I genuinely cannot believe what I’m looking at,"

the commentator said with a little skip in breath.

"Leo is coming on. Leo is actually, genuinely coming on."

His co-commentator said nothing for a moment.

"Well,"

he managed eventually.

"There you go for the unbelievers."

On the touchline, Dawson stood beside Leo, both of them facing the pitch.

Then Dawson turned his head toward him, just briefly, and kept it simple.

"Are you ready?"

Leo looked at him before just turning to face the pitch.

Dawson, seeing this, smiled and then moved back.

Charlie Hughes came off the pitch and found Leo waiting at the line.

He gave the kid a single nod and touched his hand on the way past as Leo finally stepped onto the pitch.