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▎𝖬𝖮𝖭𝖳𝖩𝖴𝖨𝖢 𝗦𝗔𝗧𝗨𝗥𝗗𝗔𝗬, 𝟮𝟴𝗧𝗛 𝗢𝗖𝗧𝗢𝗕𝗘𝗥
THE FIRST HALF OF THE MATCH had been bad. Victoria could see how tense everyone around her was and, since Barça had scored, the mood had been down. Her mother, Eva, was next to her, assuring her father, Alfonso, that Real Madrid would do something to turn the score around.
Victoria, on the other hand, felt the game was as boring as she would have thought. She was lost and didn't know much about the current line-up of the two teams that were playing, apart from what she had heard from her family. On top of that, nothing interesting had really happened.
The players of Real Madrid seemed frustrated when they were walking out of the field and towards the dressing rooms. When they got there, Ancelotti, the team coach, was waiting for them. He didn't seem angry, but focused.
His plan was to give them some advice instead of just scolding them for their performance during the first half. So, he tried to make the players understand how they could get the right side of the other team and gave them some feedback regarding what he had thought about some moves they had made. At the end, he tried to give a small comment to each player individually, about how they could make more efficient passes or how they could defend better.
"And Jude, I think you just need to focus." he concluded.
The mentioned one nodded. To say the start of the season had been amazing for him would be an understatement; he had scored in almost every game since LaLiga started, but, for some reason, he seemed out of it today.
Ancelotti thought that he must have been nervous; it was his first Clásico after all. He knew better than anyone that Barça was a tough team to read, but he trusted that Jude would be able to dominate the field like he seemed to have got used to do.
The football player approached his physiotherapist next, who helped him do some exercises to relax his muscles before the second half started. The first one had felt nothing like other games. It was not because he was nervous, but because the Barça players seemed to use a strategy other teams didn't; he didn't feel free at all to play his game, they made sure someone was on him at all times.
Because of that, he had started looking at the technical area for indications sooner than he had expected. He had watched carefully the coach's gestures signalling him what to do, until something else had caught his attention. Or someone, actually.
She was sitting next to who he had recently met as the Castros, one of the big families that invested some of their money in Real Madrid. As far as he knew, they were invited every game to be at the reserved seats, just behind the technical area. However, he had never seen her before and she wasn't talking to them much, so he assumed they were probably not related.
