"Again!"
De Bruyne said defiantly.
Lin Quan thought his defending was a bit poor, but no matter how poor it was, he was still better than a stationary dummy, right?
So he readily accepted the challenge.
This time, Lin Quan was supposed to defend while De Bruyne attacked.
But De Bruyne was determined to steal the ball from Lin Quan. He gave up his chance to attack and remained in the defensive position.
Clearly, he was not someone who gave up easily!
After receiving the ball, Lin Quan used the same trick again. This time, De Bruyne was still fooled by Lin Quan's feint, but he did not make a move so readily.
Clearly, he had realized that Lin Quan could interfere with his judgment by shifting his center of gravity. If he assumed Lin Quan would break through in a certain direction merely because his center of gravity had moved, he could very easily be deceived.
But what De Bruyne had not expected was that while he stayed still, Lin Quan moved.
With a touch forward, he instantly accelerated and burst past De Bruyne like a gust of wind.
By the time De Bruyne reacted, it was already too late. He had not only lost the chance to stick out a foot and disrupt the ball, but also missed the timing for a physical challenge.
After completing the dribble, Lin Quan stopped the ball and looked at De Bruyne strangely.
"Kevin, when you saw my center of gravity shift, why didn't you stick out a foot to disrupt me?"
De Bruyne was reflecting on the question as well.
"I was fooled by your feint before. When I saw your center of gravity change just now, I worried it was another feint, so I reacted a beat too slowly."
Lin Quan nodded, accepting his answer.
This was not De Bruyne's problem alone. It was a shared problem for every defender facing Messi.
Messi's movements were quicker than those of ordinary players. Combined with his exceptional talent, that allowed him to shift his center of gravity with ease and make all kinds of deceptive feints.
If a defender noticed his change in balance and blocked the direction he intended to break through, Messi would use his faster rhythm to rapidly change direction in an extremely short span of time. By then, the defender's body would struggle to keep up with his tempo and could only watch him go.
If the defender was not fooled and did not block his route, then it was even easier for Messi.
He only needed to continue his forward run to get past the defender with ease.
After all, Messi's movements were already faster than those of most players. If you could not keep up with him on the first step, it was absolutely impossible to catch him on the second.
Simply put, compared with ordinary attacking players, Messi combined the two steps of feinting and breaking through into one.
Ordinary attacking players needed to make a feint first, deceive the defender, and then exploit the defender's mistake to get past him.
Messi was different. He fused those two actions together, making every movement seem like a feint. No matter what choice you made, he could get past you.
Therefore, defending against Messi could not rely on experience. It required prediction.
Only defenders with Top Prediction had a chance of stopping Messi.
And in modern football, such people were exceedingly rare.
"Again. I refuse to believe I can't find a way to defend against you!"
De Bruyne had witnessed Lin Quan's skill, but it only fueled his fighting spirit further.
The other guy was only sixteen or seventeen at most, probably just a Werder Bremen youth player. If he could not even defend against someone like that, he might as well buy a block of tofu and bash his head into it.
Half an hour later.
"I'm done. I'm exhausted!"
De Bruyne collapsed onto the ground, limbs spread wide, staring blankly at the sky as he began to question his life.
Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing?
Why had I been dribbled past by a little brat seventy whole times without making a single successful tackle?
Could I even play football?
Lin Quan was exhausted too. Repeatedly dribbling past someone put a heavy strain on his knees.
Even if De Bruyne had not called for a stop, he would have done so himself.
He had no idea how Messi had kept this up for so many years. Lin Quan felt that with such frequent acceleration, changes of direction, and dribbles, his knees would break down sooner or later.
Ever since his deep conversation with Allofs, Werder Bremen's Head Coach, Thomas Schaaf, had relaxed his mindset and stopped putting so much pressure on himself.
However, letting go of the pressure did not mean he was simply going to give up.
He cared about the team and did not want it to be relegated under his watch.
So even though the hand he held was not particularly strong, he still tried his best to make changes, combine the pieces at hand, and bring out their greatest power.
As for whether Werder Bremen could remain in the Bundesliga after the season ended, that would be left to fate.
Because many veteran players had left before the new season, while quite a few new players had arrived on loan, he needed to adjust the team's starting lineup.
To choose the most suitable starting lineup, he needed a thorough understanding of the young players in the squad.
It would be best to complete this work before the new season's training camp began. That way, once training started, he would understand each player's technical characteristics.
If any players failed to meet his requirements, he could still use the summer transfer window to strengthen the team.
So he ended his holiday early, drove to the club, and planned to get back to work ahead of schedule.
As he passed the training ground, he saw Lin Quan and De Bruyne training.
Seeing the two training together, Schaaf felt a little curious.
The two should have been competitors within the team. He had thought they would find it difficult to get along, yet they had become so familiar so quickly?
Out of curiosity, he watched from the sideline for a while.
After watching, he found himself unable to move away.
Half an hour later, both young players had collapsed from exhaustion, while Schaaf at the sideline was so excited that he could barely contain himself.
Seventy times. A full seventy successful dribbles past an opponent, while the other side had not managed a single successful defense.
It shocked him so much that it felt like he had watched a science-fiction film.
Although De Bruyne had some flaws in his defending, Lin Quan had not made a single mistake. Every attempt had succeeded, and he had even used more than ten different dribbling techniques.
Was such powerful dribbling ability something someone that age should possess?
Wasn't this ridiculously outrageous?
How could Barca bear to loan out a player like this? Weren't they afraid another team would lure him away?
Had their team just picked up a dribbling king for free?
A player like this would be a future winger core cultivated by any team.
The kind of core a team could be built around, just like Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo!
But Schaaf remembered that this guy had played as a defensive midfielder in Barca's youth team!
Was Barca's eye for talent really that poor? Did they simply not know how to use him?
Or had a cosmic team like Barca already developed some brand-new tactic of playing wingers as defensive midfielders?
Before you continue