Lucas walked towards the penalty spot with his heart pounding. He took a deep breath, trying to calm the whirlwind that was forming inside him. He looked at the opposing goalkeeper, a tall boy whose eyes seemed not to blink, fixed on Lucas with a menacing intensity.
Lucas knew that all eyes were on him. He knew that his teammates placed the same trust in him that he had placed in Nishida and Kenji. Now it was his turn to carry all that weight. But unlike many other times, Lucas felt a calm come over him. It was as if, at that crucial moment, everything he had trained for, all the afternoons he had spent on the pitch perfecting his skills, had been condensed into a single simple gesture: the kick.
'Breathe, concentrate and shoot. Nothing else matters now,' he thought, repeating the words Yamamoto always said during penalty shoot-outs.
