Caught Out!

"A one-all draw wouldn't be a bad result."

In front of the visiting team's bench at the Bernabéu, Ferguson found himself thinking that.

But just as the thought surfaced, he suddenly felt a chill run through his entire body and began to tremble. A shiver went down his spine.

His many years as a manager told him that this was an almost instinctive ominous premonition.

Why was this happening? Why had he come to think that way?

Because he was satisfied!

Satisfaction often made people conservative. That was human nature.

Football was known as a war without gunpowder, and the football pitch was a battlefield where only one side could survive. On a battlefield, those who played it safe and valued their lives often died faster. That was the iron law of war.

At that moment, even Ferguson himself genuinely felt that one-all was a good result. What about the players on the pitch?

Would they feel it even more strongly?

Would they become even more conservative than Ferguson?

There was no need to answer. Ferguson already knew the answer all too clearly.

Real Madrid was no longer the same team it had been over the past few years.

Under Florentino's management, Real Madrid's strength had undergone a complete transformation in just one summer. Under Benitez's guidance, the team had begun to take shape and was showing tremendous competitiveness.

Most importantly, there was Yang Yang, who had consistently maintained the overwhelming ability of the best player in world football.

Ferguson had been coaching for decades, and he knew better than anyone that when a team possessed a superstar like Yang Yang—someone who could consistently score fifty or sixty goals in a season, or even seventy—that team's results could never be poor. In fact, such a team would become every opponent's