June 13th, 2017
Tomorrow had arrived. It was Tuesday morning, and I was sitting in the back of a lecture hall at St. George's Park, listening to a presentation on defensive phase transitions.
The instructor was a sharp, experienced coach from a top-tier academy, and the content was good. But my mind wasn't on the screen. It was two hundred miles away, in a small office at the Beckenham training ground, where Dougie Freedman was about to make the most important phone call of our summer.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I glanced down. A single message from Freedman.
Going in now.
I took a breath. The first move. The first piece of the puzzle. Everything I had presented last night: the system, the vision, the entire architecture of the team I wanted to build, depended on getting the right components.
