八字万年历

Chapter 394: Tension in the Locker room

“What’s up with those two guys?” one guy nudged his friend and asked in a low tone.

“If you’re asking me, who should I ask?” the other guy responded back in an even lower tone.

It was known in the team that there was no love lost between Jason and Mylo and no one could make the mistake of pronouncing them as friends, especially since they always attacked each other with words and Jason almost always won, but what the players were seeing was a completely different type of banter… in fact, things were too tense for anyone to believe that this was a mere banter.

“What do you mean by that, bro?” Mylo finally responded to Jason’s words, and to the remaining guys it seemed like Mylo was taking a step back.

“You know what I’m talking about, don’t act like you don’t… and I’m not your bro,” Jason retorted, his words sharp without a hint of warmth.

“Seriously man… urgh, that’s personal stuff, this is business,” Mylo shrugged, as if he was annoyed by Jason’s actions and couldn’t understand why Jason was bringing up that matter here.

“Oh? So now you know the difference between personal and business?” normally, Jason would be amused by Mylo’s words, but his anger at Mylo wasn’t allowing any other emotions to take it’s place.

“Wow, what a genius…” Jason’s words were sarcastic and cold and he was about to continue speaking when the manager barged into the room.

“What’s going on here?” the manager had been expecting the room to be filled with the loud and excited voices of the players who would be talking about their win, and he had been intending to make them quieten down and remind the players of what had truly happened in the game.

The players hadn’t been up to par until the last minutes and while some would say that his players had simply been unlucky to be unable to score, he thought differently.

They had simply not moved sharply enough and if not for Jason coming on in the final minutes and managing to jump-start his teammates’ morale, the game would have ended very differently.

The team owed the whole victory to Jason and only Jason, and he had been planning to remind them of that, but coming into the locker room and witnessing the pensive situation between Jason and Mylo, he instantly knew something was wrong.

“Can someone tell me what is going on?” he asked again but no one responded as most of the people in the room didn’t know what was going on between the two new youth talents of their club, while the youth talents themselves weren’t going to say anything directly.

Seeing that no one was saying anything, Pepe decided to take control of the situation and stood up.

“Something’s going on between those two kids,” Pepe whispered to the manager while pointing with his eyes at Mylo and Jason.

“Okay,” Conceicao immediately understood what he was to do next without Pepe saying anything.

No matter what was going on between Jason and Mylo, for now it felt like it was something personal and thus it would be best if it wasn’t aired out in a situation like this.

It could ruin the morale and team chemistry between the players and thus this wasn’t the time to bring up such a matter.

Of course, he also couldn’t afford to leave the issue alone and assume it would blow over by itself, but now was not the time.

“Okay, guys, good work out there,” he changed the topic swiftly as they didn’t have much time to waste just sitting around.

“There were some hitches and we didn’t play as sharply as I would have liked, but we were able to pull out the performance we needed to end up with the win, so that is a start for us,”

“We’ll get to correcting what went wrong in the coming days,” Conceicao quickly addressed the players while keeping an eye on Jason and Mylo.

“Of course, we cannot talk about our win without bringing up Jason’s performance, which is something I want you guys to emulate,”

“A round of applause for him please,” the manager’s words was followed with a wave of enthusiastic applause as the players once again congratulated Jason, their tones jovial as what had happened earlier took a backseat in their heads.

“Of course, not everyone will pull off such cheeky goals, but his work rate on the pitch is something I want to see more of from you guys…”

The manager continued addressing the players for a few more minutes before finally ending his speech and the players were once again free to continue their preparations to leave the stadium.

The locker room once again became rowdy, but all was not forgotten and the Oporto players continuously sent glances over at Jason and Mylo who were at the farthest corners away from each other.

While Jason didn’t pay any attention to what was going on and focused on clearing up, Pepe drew closer to Viera and whispered to him.

“Any idea what’s going on between those two?”

“Nah cap, I didn’t even know they were fighting. They’ve always had their squabbles but this time it was different and it seems something major has happened,” Viera whispered back to the Pepe, not making it obvious what they were talking about, but anyone watching them saw Viera glance over at Jason and immediately connected the dots.

“Any chance you can find out what’s going on?”

“It won’t be good for the quarrel to go on, it’s bad for the team’s morale,” Pepe whispered back.

What he was doing was under the orders of the manager, but it was also something he had to do.

The manager couldn’t directly interfere by asking what was going between Jason and Mylo as it was no longer football business, and Pepe couldn’t do it himself since he wasn’t too close to Jason and his butting in could make the situation worse, hence he had no choice but to ask for Viera’s help as he was probably the closest person to Jason on the team.

“I’ll try to find out, and hopefully, he’ll talk,” Viera sighed as he knew what he had to do.