The Coaching System-Chapter 270: System Prediction & Match Preparation

The lights in Jake's office were off, save for the pale glow of the system interface reflected in the window. Outside, Apperley Bridge sat in quiet freeze—no wind, no rain, just still February cold. Inside, it was just data and breath.

The interface pulsed slowly, numbers dancing like nerves across the screen.

▌SYSTEM PREDICTION▐

Win: 26%

Draw: 38%

Loss: 36%

Progression Odds: 47%

Jake leaned forward, elbows on the desk. One hand tapped the table in rhythm with the system's heartbeat.

Tactical breakdowns expanded with a single flick—heat maps, pass channels, ball recovery zones, match simulations stitched from AZ's last five games. Blue flares in the half-spaces told the story first.

AZ don't force mistakes. They wait for you to give them.

He clicked into player modules.

Their fullbacks? High push, aggressive overlap. Numbers looked good—but recovery time spiked under transitions. That was a crack. And their keeper—clean shot-stopper, but the grip percentage on crosses sat low. Too low for a knockout tie.

Jake zoomed in on a wide-angle clip—AZ vs Gent.

Minute 67. Their right-back overcommitted, midfielder covered late. Second phase cross came in. Keeper punched it, middle height. Gent scored on the rebound.

Jake paused it.

Spoke into the stillness.

"We won't out-style them. But we'll time our strikes better."

He looked at the lineup grid. Not yet finalized—but the names were there. Silva. Costa. Vélez. Walsh. Ethan. Cox.

Weapons, all of them. But only if used right.

He toggled into the rhythm module—tempo control analysis. The system flagged the ideal match setting as 0.72: Controlled counters, delayed overloads. Force AZ's fullbacks to decide early.

Then?

Exploit whichever one guessed wrong.

He exported the blueprint to the tablet. The plan would load by morning.

Jake sat back in his chair. Didn't move for a long time.

Just stared at the line that ran beneath the system's final note:

→ Possession doesn't win Europe. Patience does.

_____

Under skies that barely remembered sunlight, the cold Tuesday wind sliced across Apperley Bridge with enough bite to keep everyone honest. The pitch glistened with morning frost still melting at the corners. Jake stood on the edge of the training ground, arms folded tight, cap pulled low—not for warmth, but focus. His voice hadn't risen once all morning. He didn't need it to.

The wide break drill was already underway.

Roney and Silva burst forward from midfield pivots, chasing second balls that Vélez and Lowe intentionally misfired into chaos. The idea was simple: what AZ controlled with patterns, Bradford would disrupt with instinct. Each ball was alive, each touch demanding improvisation. Silva snapped his run across the half-line, collected on the half-turn, and drove into space—low center of gravity, one touch to kill it, the next to send it square across the box.

Roney, arriving on cue, skied it over the bar.

No scolding. Just a glance from Jake. A sharp nod toward the sideline.

"Reset it."

They did. Immediately.

On the other pitch, Jake's midfield triad worked in tighter dimensions. Vélez, Lowe, and Ethan played with no more than five meters between them, forced into rotations under pressure. One pass wide, one back, then two touches under a collapsing press. The pressure was artificial—coaches and substitutes filling in the role of opposition shadows—but the strain was real. Every switch had to be instinctive. Every angle mattered.

Ethan clipped a pass too high. Lowe couldn't settle. Jake blew the whistle and walked in slowly.

"Don't follow their flow," he said, pointing toward the invisible shape of AZ's possession press. "Break it. Slice diagonally—create disorder. You copy them, you drown."

No one argued. They just repositioned.

At the far end, Barnes and Kang worked without the ball—shadow-marking drills under Stone's guidance. They shifted laterally with no opponent present, mimicking AZ's surging midfielders and blind-side cuts. Barnes barked commands in short bursts. Kang didn't speak. Just followed, eyes locked on the hips of ghosts.

Jake watched it all from the halfway line. Always tracking shape. Timing. Distance between lines.

Near the medical tent, Soro jogged through his individual recovery work—quick-feet hurdles, pivot-and-reach drills, balance resets. He wasn't in the eleven. Not yet. But Jake kept glancing his way between phases. Insurance.

Across the fence, Richter finished drills on his own with Paul. Cones. Sharp touches. Quick volleys. The striker looked sharp—dangerous even—but Jake had already made the call. Costa would start.

Sometimes, it wasn't about form.

It was about fearlessness.

By noon, the drills transitioned into half-pitch simulations. AZ's shape was projected via mannequins and positional markers, but the speed was live. Every time Silva received wide, Jake had the ball restarted from a different line—testing second-phase movement.

"Midfield late runs! Not early," he snapped once after Ethan overran a layoff. "They're watching the first wave. Be the second."

Later, in a three-phase run, Roney undercut the left back and found a cutback square to Walsh, who buried it near post.

Jake didn't celebrate. He looked at the stopwatch.

Still a second too slow.

Final drill: counter rotation.

Chapman stepped into the box from deep, Vélez flared right, Costa dropped false to drag the center-back. It worked. Barnsley's tracking dummy lost its mark.

Costa didn't finish the sequence—Richter did, crashing in from behind the play.

Jake turned and walked.

Tomorrow, it would have to be tighter.

Sharper.

Cooler. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com

Just the way the system predicted.

Travel to the Netherlands

Leeds Bradford Airport → AFAS Stadion Media Room

The tarmac glinted under a soft morning haze as the squad moved in pairs through the private terminal. No rush. No interviews. Just carry-ons and compression socks.

Jake walked near the rear of the group, his coat folded over one arm, navy folder tucked under the other. Roney had his hood up. Costa had a small speaker clipped to his bag, music barely audible. The air was calm, sharp with the scent of jet fuel.

Inside the cabin, the seating was staggered by role. Defenders front. Midfielders middle. Attackers back. Coaching staff along the aisle. The hum of the engines softened the world into white noise.

Barnes watched a split-screen video on his tablet—Alkmaar's last six corners. Three zonal schemes, three short variations. Kang Min-jae leaned over occasionally, murmuring to himself. Fletcher, just across the aisle, scribbled angles into a blank notebook.

Further back, Ethan and Silva shared headphones. Their screen showed clips of Alkmaar's last three goals. One came from an underlap by the right-back. One from a turnover in the middle third. One from a cutback no one tracked. Ethan rewound the third clip. Twice.

Jake glanced at them from his seat, then closed his eyes for a moment. Let the motion of flight settle his breathing. Thirty-eight percent draw prediction. Forty-seven percent progression. But numbers weren't the point anymore.

They landed by early afternoon in the Netherlands. The bus rolled smoothly through Alkmaar, past red-bricked townhouses and quiet canals. Paul Robert handed out local media packets—translations of the Dutch press coverage.

On the hotel boardroom whiteboard, three words had been written in sharp black marker:

"Don't chase tempo."

By evening, the sun dipped low behind the stadium roof as Jake stepped into the AFAS press room. Clean lines. Club and UEFA branding behind him. Cameras already rolling. The Dutch media were polite—but not soft. They leaned forward with clipped accents and sharpened pens.

UEFA moderator gestured to the first question.

Dutch Reporter (Voetbal International):

"Jake, your side is known for structure. AZ is known for ball dominance. What breaks first tomorrow?"

Jake didn't blink.

"Nothing breaks," he said. "But something bends. And that's where we strike."

A second hand went up—British press this time.

Reporter (BBC Sport):

"You came out of Belgrade with a cold, ruthless win. Can you carry that same energy into an entirely different game style?"

Jake nodded once.

"Belgrade was volume. Tomorrow will be rhythm. Different fight, same rules. Win the next moment."

A pause.

Then a French journalist leaned forward.

Reporter (L'Équipe):

"You've rotated a lot in this competition. Will tonight be different?"

Jake:

"Tonight? We travel full. No experiments. You don't try things in quarter-finals. You prove them."

He folded his hands together on the table. Calm. Still. Like a chess player watching the last pieces drop into place.

One final question came from the Dutch national paper.

Reporter (De Telegraaf):

"Jake, if you had to choose—play beautiful and lose, or be ugly and go through?"

Jake raised a brow, just slightly.

"Who said ugly football isn't beautiful?" he said. "I like clarity. If that looks like chaos to someone else, that's their problem."

He stood before the moderator wrapped the session.

No handshake.

Just a nod to the room. Then he walked out the way he came in—coated, composed, and quiet.

Outside, the wind picked up. The team bus waited. So did a cold Dutch night.

Tomorrow would burn hot. But tonight, everything was ice.