Chapter 813: Can’t Hold Him.
"LAMINE YAMAL!" Drury’s voice burst through, a mix of shock and poetic tragedy.
"Seventeen years old, not the youngest on the night, but he has just ripped the joy straight out of Arsenal hearts!"
The Barcelona bench erupted, players streaming toward the corner as Munich’s blue half convulsed with sound.
"Two-one!" Tyler barked, voice straining to be heard above the roar.
"They’ve hit straight back, straight from kickoff in somewhat the unluckiest of circumstances for Arsenal!"
Camera flashes burst across the stands, fans with hands over their mouths, others screaming in disbelief as Drury, calmer now but still awed, breathed into the mic.
"It’s the cruel symmetry of football. One prodigy lights up the sky... and another answers, seconds later."
Yamal, running toward the camera, pointed once at the Barcelona crest on his shirt, his expression a mix of pride and defiance.
His teammates caught him, arms around him, laughing, shouting, pulling him down into the embrace.
In the Arsenal half, Raya knelt in the grass, head low, exhaling hard while Saliba stood with both hands on his hips, staring toward the goal as if trying to replay every second in his head.
Rice slapped his palms together furiously, shouting something to rally the team, but the look on his face told the story.
Momentum, once theirs, had vanished like smoke.
Tyler’s voice came low and measured now, the excitement melting into awe.
"It’s end-to-end, it’s chaos, it’s cruel. Arsenal had the world at their feet for sixty seconds... and Barcelona have just stolen it back."
Drury added, softly, almost reverently:
"One Spaniard’s brilliance had given Arsenal a dream, and another’s has turned it into a nightmare."
This was a Champions League final, and both sides had just set it ablaze.
"Come on, guys, you gave that away too easily," Arteta called from the touchline, clasping his hands together as Raya picked the ball from his net and hurled it towards the centre of the circle, where Havertz picked it up, setting right on the spot while the referee walked up beside him.
And when the whistle blew again for play to resume, it was as if the floodgates opened.
From that point on, the half became Izan’s again.
Arsenal’s front line pressed high, almost recklessly, but Izan was deeper, orchestrating, carving, pulling Barcelona apart not with brute force, but with ideas.
His passes came from impossible angles, like a painter working from instinct rather than sight, and it was causing all sorts of problems for Barcelona.
"Look at that weight... that’s outrageous," Martin Tyler murmured as Izan slipped a disguised ball between Cubarsí and Balde, threading a needle no one else even saw.
"He’s just drawing patterns that aren’t supposed to exist," Tyler called as Saka darted onto it, perfectly timed, or so it seemed, but the flag went up.
Saka turned towards the official, calling out the decision and asking for it to be rechecked, but what he got was a warning instead, as the officiating referee approached, with Drury filling the silence over the broadcast.
"Saka is getting warned by the official for misconduct here. He’s beaten the shape, beaten the press... but not the line. Barcelona are living dangerously, but just barely within the law."
After Barca restarted with the free kick, it wasn’t long until Arsenal came again.
Rice won the ball high, fed Ødegaard, who turned, and there again, was that low hum from the stands again, the one that rose whenever the ball reached Izan.
He dropped his shoulder, let the ball roll across his body, and in one sweeping motion, pinged it across the grass, slicing open Barcelona’s high line.
This time, Trossard broke through and was onside.
"Now this is the chance!" Tyler cried. "Leandro Trossard!"
The Belgian took a touch, steadied, but Szczęsny was already there, charging out like a madman with his arms wide.
Trossard struck low, precise, but the Pole’s leg kicked it away, a reflex save that brought the crowd to its feet.
"Oh, my word!" Drury gasped.
"That’s defiance from Szczęsny! He’s just kept Barcelona in front by instinct alone!"
Trossard slammed a fist into the turf, furious as Ødegaard shouted a few words of encouragement.
The Barcelona players, on the other hand, swarmed Szczęsny, slapping the keeper on the back for saving a chance they all thought might have been Arsenal’s second.
But they couldn’t do so for long, because the ball was already back with Arsenal.
Izan again.
He turned, saw the whole field in motion, the lines, the gaps, the breath between defenders and waited.
Not for a pass but for a pattern.
He drifted left, then clipped a curling ball behind Koundé’s shoulder, finding Saka perfectly in stride.
"Brilliant vision from Izan again, he’s seen that a mile away!" Tyler said as Saka, calm, brought it down with his chest and hit it early, with a low drive to the far post.
But Szczęsny’s hand came down again, sharp, unbelievable, like a wall that refused to fall.
"Oh, he’s done it again!"
Drury shouted, his voice almost incredulous."Twice in two minutes, this is unreal from the former Arsenal man! He has singlehandedly kept the scores as is from the past 2 attempts to change them"
Szczęsny rose from the ground, pumping a fist as Barça’s defenders roared their approval.
The fans in blue chanted his name while the Arsenal end answered with applause out of sheer respect.
Barcelona tried to string a few chances together to weather the storm of attacks, but they weren’t really threatening.
Passes fizzed, tackles flew, the tempo was manic.
Every red and white shirt seemed driven by one heartbeat, and its rhythm was set by Izan.
Even Flick, on the touchline, had stopped shouting instructions.
He was just watching now, arms folded, eyes fixed, as the teenager in red seemed to bend the whole tempo of the game around himself.
Tyler spoke low, almost reverent now.
"He’s dictating this entire match, isn’t he? You just... You can’t take your eyes off him."
Drury added softly, "It’s like he’s not trying to force the game, he’s conducting it."
But Barcelona’s line held.
Barely.
Every run met a whistle.
Every half-chance met Szczęsny.
Every break, got some last-ditch foot from Koundé or Martínez.
The minutes drained.
Forty-four... forty-five with Arsenal still pushing, still suffocating the Catalans in their own half, but the equaliser refused to come.
Until the referee finally saw that it was enough and decided to blow his whistle.
The noise cracked through the tension like glass shattering as the commentary came once again.
"That’s the half," Tyler sighed.
"And what a half it’s been."
The camera panned across the pitch, Saka with his hands on his knees, breathing hard.
As well as Ødegaard rubbing his side, while Izan, still upright, still calm, was walking off like a man with unfinished business.
"It has never gone exactly the way of the gunners whenever these twosides have met, but they’ve forced this dominant Hansi Flick side onto the back foot even though Barcelona lead by two goals to one," Drury narrated softly.
"This is one of the rare instances in football where the scoreline doesn’t reflect the performances we’ve seen on the pitch. Arsenal have found something in these final minutes, a rhythm, a pulse, a fury. And somewhere in all that chaos, a boy in red is making the impossible feel entirely within reach."
The screen caught Izan glancing up once at the scoreboard as he walked off, his expression unreadable, neither frustration nor satisfaction.
Just a generic expression, before he walked off into the tunnel, joining some of his mates who had already entered.
.....
Far away from the stadium, a house sat quietly on a narrow street in the Catalan capital, its windows dim, curtains drawn, the faintest flicker of television light leaking through the gaps.
To a passerby, it might have looked empty, lifeless, even.
But inside, the air was thick, heavy with tension.
A family sat pressed together on a couch, eyes locked on the screen, the reflection of the green pitch dancing across their faces.
No one spoke.
Not for the last 10 minutes, at least.
The only sounds were the commentators’ voices echoing through the living room and the collective rhythm of shallow, uneven breaths.
It sounded like being caught in the undertow of something you couldn’t pull away from.
The father leaned forward, elbows on knees, his fingers laced so tightly they were turning pale.
His wife sat beside him, half-covering her mouth with both hands while their teenage son hadn’t blinked in ages, his eyes wide and unblinking, the way one stares at a miracle happening in real time.
Then the father exhaled, long and shaky, and muttered, "Madre mía... I can finally go to the bathroom."
The words broke the spell.
The mother laughed first, then nudged him on the arm.
"You weren’t the only one holding it in," she said, standing up with a weary stretch.
"Same here," the boy blurted, still dazed, eyes glued to the replay that had just begun.
"I swear, those last minutes... I couldn’t even move. Every time he touched the ball"
"—you thought something was going to happen," his father finished for him, shaking his head, a grin tugging at his lips.
"And he is even younger than you, too. How on earth do they keep coming up with kids like these?"
The mother gave a small, incredulous scoff as she gathered the empty glasses from the coffee table.
"Scared of a seventeen-year-old. I thought you said we were going to win, dear," she said, walking behind the couch.
"He’s setting the canvas on fire, and from what I saw in the first half, Barca do not have what it takes to douse that fire."