Chapter 34: Vs Fiorentina (4)
The second half had begun exactly the way Alex had dreamed it during his sleepless nights. Lecce didn’t just come out of the locker room, they exploded out of it. For ten glorious minutes, they played like men who’d just been told they had nothing to lose. The low block? Forgotten. This was a storm, a siege, a declaration.
And the fans? They were stunned into belief.
Lecce, the underdogs known for grinding matches into stalemates, were suddenly pressing like champions. Passes zipped across the turf. Players pressed like their lives depended on it. For a moment, the rhythm was poetry and chaos wrapped in one red-and-yellow blur.
Banda’s near-miss in the 48th minute, after a sublime through ball from Berisha, had been the highlight. The shot was sharp, angled low and hard, but Fiorentina’s goalkeeper had made himself big and denied what could have been the perfect second goal. It had shocked the visiting bench and sent a ripple of panic across the Fiorentina backline.
Unfortunately, that miss seemed to flip the script again.
Fiorentina weren’t pushovers. They hadn’t climbed the Serie A table on luck. And by the 55th minute, they began to settle. The way a storm settles into a stronger, colder silence. Their midfield trio finally began to click. Short, sharp passes. Angled balls. Diagonal switches. They didn’t look rattled anymore, they looked calculating.
Alex felt it from the touchline. The tide was shifting again.
In the 58th minute, the first major warning came.
Arthur, graceful and patient, slipped a reverse ball through Lecce’s tight line. It was almost invisible to everyone, except Beltrán. The Argentine forward made the run at just the right moment, perfectly threading the gap between Baschirotto and Pongracic. Suddenly, he was in.
["Beltrán! One-on-one with Falcone! This could be it!"]
Alex’s heartbeat shot into his throat.