八字万年历

Chapter 299: First Leg against Olympiacos

The days flew by quickly for Jason who had settled into a monotonous routine of waking up early every day, having a quick yoga routine before going to have his bath, and then heading to CTFD Portogaia for training.

He usually made sure to arrive earlier than everyone so he could get a lot more personal training done before the rest of the team arrived.

Jason had finally started arriving at the training grounds earlier than Fabio Viera, but Jason didn’t take that milestone to heart as the person he strived to surpass was not someone who compared to Fabio Viera… No offense to Fabio of course.

After training with the team until later in the day, the team training for the day was usually over, but that didn’t hold for Jason who always waited behind to train until almost 8 pm every day.

Only then did he usually head home and even then he usually had a quick meal before heading to his makeshift gym to do more training; usually physical training.

It was a rigorous and monotonous routine and Jason’s social life was feeling the brunt of it, but Jason didn’t have much of a social life in the first place so he didn’t care much.

The only thing that concerned him a bit was progress in his relationship with Sofia which had slowed to a crawl.

For some strange reason, their relationship felt overly complicated sometimes, and at other times it felt clearer than still water.

To Jason, there wasn’t much else he could do after taking the bold step of kissing her and it felt a bit weird(to him) to ask her to be his girlfriend as in his mind his thoughts went like,

‘He already made the bold move of kissing her… What could be a clearer indicator than that that he liked her and wanted a deeper relationship?’

‘Was she purposely acting ignorant of what was happening?’ he asked himself, but there was no answer to his question.

Sometimes, Sofia acted like they were a week from getting married to each other while on other days, it seemed like there was an unseen boundary between them.

Jason had determined that the best way to deal with his emotional insecurities was to make the bold move of asking the ‘question’…

That’s where the problem was, he didn’t want to ask a question that would make things become very linear.

Asking a girl that question could only go one of two ways.

It was either a YES or a NO.

The so-called ‘give me time to think about it,’ response was just a veiled rejection compared to the worse rejections like;

‘Ewww’,

‘Are you kidding?’,

‘Why would you ask me something like that?’

‘Don’t do that to us,’

‘You’re like a brother to me.’

Of course, Jason didn’t think he would get any of those answers by virtue of who he was, but the fear of rejection was still present for Jason.

He was Jason fu*king Bolu… But he was still scared of rejection no matter how miniscule the chances of hearing it may be.

He didn’t need emotional turbulence in the middle of the season, especially now that things were beginning to go so well, so Jason had decided to put off asking the question till further notice.

***

Putting aside the inner thoughts that had swarmed up as he listened to the head manager discuss the game plan for the match, Jason refocused his attention on the manager’s instructions.

Porto would be going up against Olympiacos for their second game in the group stages of the Champions League and the Porto team was currently having their last tactical meeting before they headed out for the match to start.

The manager had already informed the players of the lineup and the starting lineup was as follows;

Goalkeeper: Augustin Marchesin,

LB: Zaidu Sanusi,

RB: Wilson Manafa,

CBs: Pepe, Chancel Mbemba,

CMFs: Otavio, Fabio Viera,

LMF: Jason Bolu,

RMF: Jesus Corona,

CFs: Moussa Marega, Mehdi Taremi.

After giving out a few more instructions concerning their shape and their roles in every part of the field, the Porto players finally began heading out to the tunnel to get ready for the game.

The tunnel was soon filled up with the players from the two teams going against each other in the match a few minutes later, the two sets of 11 players were done with the pre-match formalities and had already arranged themselves around the field, waiting for the referee’s whistle to kick off the game.

*Fweeeeeeee*

The Porto kicked off their second match day which was being held at their home ground, Estadio do Dragao.

It was an advantage for the Porto team to be playing on their home ground, but considering their pedigree as a team, it was their opponents who needed advantages in this match against the Portuguese football giants.

The match unraveled exactly as one would expect with Porto taking control of the game early on and beginning to push the boys from Greece back into their own half.

Hardly ten minutes after the game started, Porto had already sent three shots at the Olympiacos team with two of them being on target, but the Olympiacos goalkeeper had showed up to work with as much professionalism as he could, making sure to do his job and keep the balls from getting past the goal line.

Unfortunately for the Olympiacos goalkeeper, the Porto attackers had shown up to work with even more professionalism and kept striving to send shots his way, and soon another goal-scoring chance appeared for Porto.

#11th minute…

The Porto players had been passing the ball around in midfield when they had suddenly shifted their momentum when Jason had run into the center of the midfield to help the midfield overload the center.

Jason quickly received the ball from Fabio Viera and sent a forward pass to Moussa Marega who returned the ball back with a first touch pass, confusing the Olympiacos players who were running after the ball.

On receiving the ball, Jason chose to hold onto the ball, giving Fabio Viera time to make a run from the midfield and just as he was about to get past the last man, Jason released a through pass behind the Olympiacos defense line.