Maybe their coach, Tony Dunn, is very different from before.

※※※

Because tomorrow is match day, today’s training wasn’t very intense. Two training sessions a day only happen midweek, and only if it’s not a week with two matches. After the morning session ended, Walker let the players go home. The staff, like the players, gradually left after training, and Des Walker followed Dunn back to his office.

“After watching the morning training, any thoughts?” Without waiting for Dunn to say anything, Walker walked in and sat down on a chair, asking casually. He noticed that this Dunn seemed much easier to get along with than before—he was no longer silent and withdrawn, he could smile and shout, and that felt pretty good.

Of course, Dunn couldn’t reveal all the doubts in his heart. His identity wasn’t that of someone watching the team’s training for the first time, a complete outsider who knew nothing about Forest, but rather a coach who had truly come up from within the team—he should be familiar with everything here. Even if he’d suffered a head injury, he shouldn’t have forgotten so thoroughly. “Other than a lack of focus, it was pretty good.”

Only then did Walker notice that Dunn didn’t have his usual notebook with him. “Didn’t you write anything down? Where’s your notebook?” he asked, pointing at Dunn’s hands.

Dunn pointed at his own head and replied, “I remembered it up here.” He wasn’t lying about this—Dunn had always had a good memory since childhood, so even though teachers never liked him much, his grades were still pretty good.

Walker shook his head and laughed, “Seems like you’ve really changed. I’m starting to wonder if the person standing in front of me is really Tony Dunn.”

Dunn felt this was a chance for others to gradually accept him, but he couldn’t be too blunt about it—he needed to be subtle. He feigned surprise and said, “Huh? There are some things I can’t really explain, but they just happened. Is this not good? Then I’ll go back to how I was…”

“No, no.” Walker quickly interrupted him. “This is great, really great, couldn’t be better. You’re much easier to get along with now than before.”

Dunn secretly laughed to himself—this was exactly the result he wanted. He needed someone to introduce the new him to others, and no one was more suitable than Des Walker, who had been with the team for over a decade.

After seeing Walker off, Dunn began rummaging through his office. Since Walker had mentioned the “notebook,” he decided to find it—maybe it could help him.

In the third drawer of his desk, he finally found the somewhat worn notebook. It was only a bit smaller than the tactics board, but very thick. The black leather cover was frayed at the edges, the pages yellowed and fuzzy, and the gold-stamped “Notebook” on the cover was mottled from too much handling—it was clearly quite old.

Dunn carefully opened the thick notebook, afraid that a page might fall out or that the antique-looking notebook might break in half.

“Truly a man from the Middle Ages,” Dunn clicked his tongue with a hint of mockery. In this age of computers and the internet, there were still people using paper notebooks to take notes. Wouldn’t it be better to carry a laptop? More convenient, more stylish, and you could even use it to pick up girls. Just imagine—going to a place like Starbucks, ordering a coffee, sitting alone by the window, opening your laptop, ignoring the noisy surroundings, your fingers dancing nimbly on the keyboard, the coffee giving off a rich, thick aroma…

Dunn shook his head, cutting off this pointless fantasy. He’d never been to Starbucks. Someone like him, struggling just to get by, didn’t have the money or the leisure to go to a café. If he went out, it would be to a bar where he could watch football, or one of the countless teahouses in Chengdu.

He opened the cover, and on the title page was a neatly written sentence. Although the ink had faded, the words were still clearly legible:

Football is not a matter of life and death; football is above life and death.

Seeing this, the sneer on Dunn’s face slowly disappeared.

As a football fan, he of course knew this saying, and understood its weight. Only true fans could appreciate its meaning. Football was no longer just a sport or a street game—it was a religion, a faith, melted into the lives, daily routines, and blood of its fans…

The old Tony had actually written this on the title page, showing just how much he revered this saying. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to call it his football motto. Who would have thought that the seemingly dull, silent “man from the Middle Ages” would actually like such a passionate, even somewhat irrational, quote?

Maybe the real him wasn’t as gloomy as people thought. Maybe deep inside, there was a fire that would never go out.

He flipped through the notebook roughly. Compared to the rigid, stubborn schedule stuck to his fridge at home, the contents of this notebook were much more chaotic. Without dates, it was impossible to tell the order of things. Some notes were even scribbled in the margins, the handwriting mostly messy and rushed. It was clear that some things had been jotted down whenever they came to mind, with no regard for order, just squeezing them in wherever there was space.