The pressing starts from the first whistle.
Farnetti Calcio come at Vittoria Milano the way a team plays when they've decided the only route to anything is chaos every pass in the middle third hunted down before it can settle, every touch punished. Vittoria Milano's midfield can't find two seconds of calm anywhere, and the ball keeps coming back, back, back, until it lands with the back three and stays there, recycle it finds a lane and recycle it again.
Marco is the release valve. He always is. Except tonight the valve keeps sticking.
He receives it wide, no passing lane in front of him, Rinaldi too far up the pitch to offer an easy ball and Conti pinned by a runner he can't shake. Marco drifts, the way he's drifted a hundred times in his career, buying himself a half-second by taking the ball backward toward his own goal instead of standing still and inviting the press.
This time the press arrives from both sides at once.
Two strikers, one from each shoulder, closing the gap faster than he's tracked them. He feels them before he sees them the wrong way round, always the wrong way round when it goes badly and by the time his head comes up to find Conti, the picture has already changed underneath him.
He hits it anyway. The pass he saw a half-second ago, not the one that's actually there.
It's short, it's soft. It has no chance of reaching anyone in a red shirt.
The second Farnetti striker doesn't have to work for it. He steps in front of Conti, takes the ball in stride, and it's just him and the goalkeeper now, . He doesn't rush it, he doesn't need to.
1–0.
COMMENTATOR (broadcast, translated): "Santos. That's Santos, gifting it straight to Bertoni. You cannot do that. Not there, not at that height of the pitch, not as the last man."
The stadium exhales as one organism half of it in delight, half of it in the specific, ugly quiet of a home crowd watching their own team's gamble look expensive in real time.
Marco doesn't put his hands on his knees. He doesn't put his hands on his head. He turns, walks back into position, and gets on with the restart, because there is nothing else to do with forty minutes of football still in front of him.
Nothing else happens. Vittoria Milano push, get a corner, get a half-chance that dies in the six-yard box, get nothing. Farnetti sit on their lead like it's the only thing they came to defend, and it is, and it works.
Full time. 1–0.
The mixed zone is a different kind of pressing.
REPORTER 1: "Marco, talk us through the pass."
REPORTER 2: "Was that a communication breakdown with Conti, or was that entirely you?"
REPORTER 3: "Three points, gone, on one mistake. How do you respond to people saying you were bought too early for a role this big?"
He answers all three the same way, in different words, because there is only one true answer and it doesn't need decorating.
MARCO: "It was my mistake. I saw a picture that wasn't there anymore, and I played the pass to it anyway. That's on me, not Conti, not anyone else. We lost three points because of a mistake I made. I'm not going to pretend otherwise to make it easier to hear."
It doesn't make it easier to hear. By morning it's everywhere anyway.
GAZZETTA (translated): "One pass. Three points. The most expensive ninety minutes of Marco Santos's short Serie A career, and the questions about the transfer that looked bold in July are starting to sound different in October."
@SantosWatch: "Called it. Nice league you grew up wanting, Marco. Shame it doesn't care how much you wanted it."
PANELIST 2 (post-match, translated): "This is what happens when you hand a rookie the hardest job on the pitch and hope experience arrives on schedule. Sometimes it doesn't arrive at all."
Mister Greco fronts the press conference alone the next day, no assistant beside him, which is its own kind of message.
MISTER GRECO (press conference, translated): "It is expected, for people to make mistakes, no matter how costly. It is still the beginning of the season. There is a lot of football left to be played. Marco will learn. Trust him, I do."
REPORTER (follow-up): "Trust him with what, exactly? A back line that's already conceded from his own error?"
MISTER GRECO: "With the job I gave him. That hasn't changed since and it hasn't changed since Tuesday."
It's the kind of answer that buys time without spending any conviction on it either way nobody watching can tell if Greco believes it or if he's simply not willing to be the one who says otherwise out loud.
The next match, Cortessa away, is a smaller version of the same problem wearing a different badge a mid-table side who've decided the way to beat Vittoria Milano is to make Marco's afternoon as uncomfortable as Farnetti did.
It nearly works twice.
The first time, Marco reads it late again receives under pressure, half-turns instead of committing, and for a moment the whole stadium seems to lean forward waiting for the mistake to repeat itself. It doesn't quite. His pass is heavy, not wrong, and Conti has to stretch to intercept what should have been a clean ball, knocking it out for a corner instead of losing it outright.
Nothing comes of the corner. But the second half tells the same story with different actors Marco caught flat, a through-ball he should have snuffed out ten yards earlier, and only a last-ditch slide from Rinaldi keeps it out. It's not a mistake that costs a goal. It's a mistake wearing the costume of one, saved by somebody else's recovery run.
Rinaldi jogs past him afterward, taps him once on the shoulder not a word, just the pat and gets back into position.
Full time. 0–0. A result that reads, on paper, like nothing at all happened.
PANELIST 1 (post-match, translated): "Twice now the warning signs have been there and lucky his teammates has kept the scoreline clean. "
GAZZETTA (translated): "The question being asked in every corner of this club now isn't whether Santos will improve. It's whether he can be trusted to hold the position until he does."
Nobody says it to his face in the dressing room. Nobody has to. He can feel the shape of the question in the way conversations shift when he walks into a room a half-second too early, in the specific silence that follows a mistake nobody's brave enough to name out loud.
Rico shows up unannounced on Marco's day off, no warning text, just a knock on the door of the rented apartment and a face Marco hasn't had to explain anything to in months.
They end up on the back step with two cups of coffee that go cold before either of them drinks much of it the kind of quiet that only exists on a Tuesday with nothing on the calendar.
RICO: "Tell me about the pass."
MARCO: "Which one."
RICO: "You know which one."
Marco turns the cup in his hands instead of answering right away.
MARCO: "I saw Conti. Or I thought I saw Conti by the time I'd made the decision, the space wasn't there anymore, and I hit the pass like it still was. That's the whole mistake. A yes that should've been a no, arriving half a second too late to take back."
RICO: "And the one after. The one that didn't go in."
MARCO: "Same disease, different symptom. I felt them coming and I got rid of it before they'd even arrived. I made the mistake before the pressure showed up. Do you understand what that feels like? I'm not reacting to the game anymore, Papa. I'm reacting to the fear of what might happen in it."
Rico doesn't answer straight away. He looks out at the street like the next sentence is out there somewhere, walking toward him slowly.
RICO: "You think the job is not making mistakes."
MARCO: "The job is being the last man. If it goes wrong, there's no one behind me to clean it up. So yes, I think about it. Every ball that comes to me, some part of me is already asking what happens if I get this wrong, who's exposed, who pays for it. I never used to carry that. Now I can't put it down."
RICO: "That's not thinking. That's flinching before you've been hit. You've turned every touch into a test you can fail, so your body's decided the safest thing to do is get rid of the ball as fast as it can and fast isn't the same as good. Fast is just fear, wearing your jersey number."
Marco looks up at that.
MARCO: "So what — I stop caring if I get it wrong?"
RICO: "No. You stop needing to be certain before you act. You were never certain, Marco. Not once, not on any pitch, anywhere, in your whole life. You've always played half a step ahead of certainty that half-step is what made you good enough for this job in the first place. Somewhere between Graystone and here, you decided that wasn't allowed anymore. That the last man doesn't get to guess. But you were always guessing. You were just guessing right, because you weren't busy being afraid of guessing wrong."
MARCO: "And if I guess wrong again."
RICO: "You will. Not because you're bad at this. Because you're human, and this is football, and the ball has never once cared how badly you needed that touch to be clean." He leans forward, elbows on his knees. "The question was never whether you'll make another mistake. You will again, probably more than once this season. The real question is whether you spend the rest of the year playing scared of the next one, or whether you actually play."
Marco says nothing. Rico lets the silence sit for a moment before he finishes it.
RICO: "Give the fear back to the game, Marco. It was never yours to carry by yourself. Let it be the game's problem too it's big enough ." A pause. "You didn't fly across a continent to play it safe. Play like yourself. Whatever comes after that, comes after that."
Marco doesn't say much for the rest of the visit. He doesn't need to. Some things get said once, properly, and then just have to be lived with until they're true.
The away trip to Bissoni feels, for the first twenty minutes, like it's building toward exactly the kind of afternoon everyone's been quietly expecting.
The home crowd has clearly done its homework every time the ball rolls back to Marco, the noise climbs a register, a stadium full of people leaning forward on the same collective instinct: make him panic, and he will give it to us for free. Their striker press him early and often, the way Farnetti did, the way Cortessa tried and failed to.
The first time it happens, Marco doesn't drift. He doesn't rush. He lets the striker close the distance, waits a beat longer than feels comfortable, and rolls a simple ball to his goalkeeper before the press ever really arrives. No fanfare. No moment. Just a solved problem.
It happens again in the eleventh minute. Again just before half-time. Each time the crowd's noise climbs, and each time it has nothing to feed on.
COMMENTATOR (broadcast, translated): "Composed again from Santos. Nothing spectacular and that might be the most important word in his season so far."
The moment that actually turns heads comes just after the hour mark the same striker who's been hunting him all match closes fast, certain this time will be the one, and Marco simply doesn't let him arrive at all. A touch inside, past the outstretched leg, four yards of space opening up in front of him that wasn't there a second ago, and he carries it himself into midfield before laying it off simple and clean.
It's nothing on a highlight reel. It's everything to the people who've spent three matches waiting to see if he could still do it.
The fans behind that end of the pitch cheer like he's scored.
Vittoria Milano win it 1–0, a scrappy header from a corner in the second half deciding a match that was mostly fought in the space around Marco rather than anywhere near either goal. Nothing about his performance makes a back page. No headline calls it a redemption. There's no dramatic music playing anywhere except in his own head.
@SantosWatch: "Quiet game from Santos today. In the good way, for once. Sometimes boring is exactly what you want to see from a guy who's had a rough month."
MISTER GRECO (post-match, translated): "Today he did his job. Not the highlights, not the headlines the job. That's what I've been asking for since the day he walked in the door."
Marco showers, dresses, and doesn't check his phone until he's back on the team bus, watching the floodlights of a stadium that didn't fall in love with him today shrink in the window behind them.
He doesn't need it to. He just needed it to stop being afraid.
END OF CHAPTER 36