The referee blew his whistle to restart the action.
I scanned the pitch and brought my screens to the forefront of my consciousness. When I was present at a game, the main screen was called Match Overview. It said:
46th minute
Chester 2 Crawley Town 0
Under Chester were the names of our two goalscorers: Colin Beckton and Gabriel, along with the times of the goals, the 17th and 18th minutes.
It told me the weather (light drizzle), the name of the referee (Martin Drysdale), and the attendance (7,273).
I turned to the right. Before me stood my greatest achievement so far - the Harry McNally stand. I had demolished the old one and rebuilt it in my image - larger than life and eco-friendly. Mmm that's terrible, cut that. My creation had a capacity of 4,000 and I loved every inch of it. I'd kept the name because Harry McNally was a maverick former manager and the stories I had read about him made me laugh.
This was our second match in the new-look stadium and the number of fans attending was down. That would normally have made me nervous, but attendances were always lower on a weekday night than on a Saturday afternoon, and Crawley had brought fewer fans than our previous guests.
I brought up a page called Live Scores and checked how our rivals were getting on in their matches. Oxford United looked like being our main competitors for the season. They were winning. I switched to a page called Live Tables. It showed what the league table would be if all the matches finished with the current scores. Chester were first on 34 points. Oxford had 28. You earned three points for a win, so we would have to lose twice for Oxford to even draw level with us. Nice to have a cushion.
I watched the action for a minute. We had the players arranged in a fairly conservative structure, which wasn't the most exciting option but football seasons were very, very long. This was match 13 of 46, and in addition to the league we would play in all sorts of cups. In fact, this was our third game in five days and unlike other managers I wasn't in the business of flogging my players and then complaining they were knackered.
Lee Contreras was having a decent game on 7 out of 10. The Match Overview screen had a tab that showed me the match ratings of every player. My name was there as one of the players who had started the game. It suggested my performance had been worthy of 8 out of 10. Seemed a little bit low, to be honest, but the ratings didn't take into account what you might call the narrative of a match.
The ratings did take into account how many times a player did something well. Lee, being in the middle of the action, was often asked to win a header or make a tackle, but because we were the better team and had more skill than the opposition, what I wanted from Lee was for him to collect the ball and pass it safely to another one of my players.
Okay, I thought. Let's optimise for that.
I crouched and brought up my tactics screens. Short passes are easier than long ones, so I worked to get more players close to Lee. I did this in my head, nudging icons closer together, and even moving a striker far out of position towards the middle of the pitch. Half a second after I did that, Colin Beckton, who had scored one of the goals and always played as close to the last defender as was possible, dropped towards Lee.
Playing God is so fucking cool, I thought. Never gets old.
The problem with being able to control football matches as if by witchcraft was the very real possibility that my secret would be discovered and I would be burned as a witch, so I rose to my feet, waved my arms around, and yelled at my players to do the things I had telepathically told them to do.
Lee was now surrounded by players, but he was just one of eleven teammates who had been trained to share the ball. I opened a menu and made Lee my playmaker. That was a somewhat out-of-fashion role, but one that's easy to understand. A playmaker is the player the others look to. They feed the ball to him and let him dictate the speed of the play, let him decide which avenues to attack.
Lee Contreras was pretty far from being a traditional playmaker. He didn't have craft or guile, but it didn't matter.
I watched, satisfied, as his passing stats went up. In the first half he had made 20 passes out of 25 attempted. The numbers quickly shot up. 25 out of 30. 30 out of 36.
Lee's match rating went to 8 out of 10.