Chapter Two
As she ladles an enormous helping of chickpeas onto my plate, Sabiha Iqbal smiles. “It sounds like it went very well.”
Amina, her daughter, snorts. “Yeah, except for the part where you said you don’t give a shit about the place where she works.”
Mrs. Iqbal uses the chickpea spoon to gently rap the back of Amina’s hand. “Language.”
The Iqbals are family friends from ages ago when my dad studied abroad here.
They live closer to Manchester than to Liverpool, but staying with them seemed far preferable to me spending untold days staring at the wall in a drab hotel room, and comes with the added benefit of Mrs. Iqbal’s excellent cooking.
Amina is my age, and we’ve kept up a slow but consistent correspondence over the years, progressing from handwritten letters to AOL instant messages to emails and texts interspersed between occasional hops across the pond.
Mrs. Iqbal is fighting an uphill battle with the language issue, though, as more than two decades of friendship can attest. Amina is tiny—barely over five feet—but packs an unbelievable amount of personality in that petite body.
She’s some kind of lawyer (“one of the boring paperwork ones,” she told me once), and I can only guess how hard it must be for her to censor herself in the briefs she writes.
“Yeah,” I say. “That probably wasn’t my best move. But I managed to turn it around, and now I basically have two days to learn everything there is to know about soccer. Football. The one with all the kicking.”
Amina’s younger brother, Hassan, stares into the middle distance, a look of grim determination on his face. “This is my Everest.”
“Oh God, here we go,” Amina mutters.
He steeples his fingers under his chin. “Where do I even start? It must be with the Dutch concept of totaalvoetbal.” He looks up at me, eyes aglow. “I assume you’ve heard of Johan Cruyff?”
I grimace in something like an apology.
Amina rolls her eyes. “Hassan, we have a day, not a decade.” She turns to me. “You’ve played table football, with the little men on rotisserie spits?”
“We call it foosball, but yeah.”
“Great, then you’ve got the gist of it. The big bloke alone in front of the goal? That’s the keeper.”
“The goalie!” I say with the pride of a three-year-old announcing they’ve just gone potty on their own.
“Exactly. His job is pretty self-explanatory: Like my mother until my wedding night, keep balls away at all cost.” The chickpea spoon makes another attack, but this time Mrs. Iqbal herself is laughing.
Amina goes on to explain at a high level all the players on the foosball table. Keeper, defenders, midfielders, and forwards—up until now, I’d merely twirled their pegs with wild abandon, not contemplating the part they each played in the overall strategy.
Amina continues: “Then clone that set, face them in the other direction, and you’ve got the other team. Everyone is on the pitch at the same time. And none of your horrible American breaks for adverts every ten seconds. You get to have a wee at the half, and you hold it for the rest of the match.”
“Thanks, because I’m sure optimal bathroom break timing is going to come up in the next interview,” I snort. “But what about the rules? Like, what does offsides mean? Is it the same as American football?”
“Offside,” Hassan says, hitting the “D” sound like a frustrated German teacher correcting a student’s pronunciation. “Never with an S.”
“Okay, that’s going to take some getting used to. Offside. Anyway, is it complicated?”
Amina shakes her head. “There are, like, nine official rules.”
Hassan is immediate with the correction. “Seventeen.”
“Fine, seventeen, whatevs. Basically: Don’t touch the ball with your hands, you get in trouble if you intentionally fuck with someone, you get in big trouble if you intentionally fuck with someone when they’re close to scoring, and…I don’t know, that’s it, really.”
He bites down on his knuckle. “That’s so not it…”
“Oi, mate, she’s got to tweet about it, not kit up for the national team.”
“Yeah, sorry Hassan. Your talents will be wasted on me at this point.”
I let him console himself by giving me a primer on all twenty teams that play in the Premier League, though most of it goes in one ear and out the other, since he doesn’t even bother rating the teams by player hotness, which is about the only thing I’m capable of grasping at this point.
I want to describe the man I met in the parking lot, to see if Hassan can identify him, but I can’t get a word in edgewise.
In the middle of a stultifying tangent about the change in set-piece tactics by a team called Leicester City, Amina interrupts and actually begs him to put us out of our misery.
Chagrined, he wraps up his speech and we all push back from the table, grateful for the reprieve.
Amina heads back to her flat, where her husband Faizan will soon be returning from his shift at the hospital.
They got married a few months ago; Steven and I came to the wedding on what would turn out to be our last vacation together.
Hassan goes home as well, leaving me alone with the senior Iqbals, both of whom have gone to bed.
But my body’s all wonky from jet lag and keyed up from the interview and aching from the last week of mental torment, so sleep is the furthest thing from my mind.
I do some time zone math and realize that my mom will probably be home babysitting two of my nieces; normally I never pass up an opportunity to see their little faces, but something tells me that would just make me sad tonight, here in this place where everything feels so foreign and they’re so far away.
For the next two days, I need to keep any non-football-related thoughts out of my mind.
When I emerge from my study session as the world’s foremost expert on the sport, talking to my family again will be my reward.
Until then, no contact with the outside world.
I prop myself up in Amina’s childhood bed and open my laptop.
Like a mom in 1997 who’s just gotten her first AOL CD in the mail, I start by simply searching for “football.” I have no idea what I’m expecting to find, but the good news is that Google only turns up four billion results, so at least I’ll be able to read it all in two days… .
The information gushes at me like water from an open hydrant, and after disappearing down several Wikipedia rabbit holes, I come up for air.
I haven’t crammed this hard since college, but there’s actually something kind of pleasant about it.
Every click brings some new avenue, some new insight, some new incredibly attractive man.
Holy fuck, these men. I spend a terrific thirty minutes looking at various BuzzFeed iterations of “The 25 Hottest Players at the World Cup,” pleased to see that a couple of them are currently on the Mersey roster.
Something Charlotte Collins said in the interview tugs at the back of my mind and I search for “wag”: “WAGs (or Wags) is an acronym used to refer to wives and girlfriends of high-profile sportsmen.”
Bingo. WAGs are the beautiful women attached to the beautiful men who play the beautiful game.
Posh Spice is a WAG, maybe the Original WAG.
This I can handle, this I know. We have WAGs in America, after all, though we lack such a great term for them.
At the Sox, I personally fielded dozens of calls from angry baseball WAGs demanding that an unflattering picture of their husbands be removed from Twitter or—more frequently—angling for their own profile to be boosted by our official accounts.
Over here, though, it’s on a different level.
The tabloids are full of stories about these women, there are dozens of Instagram accounts detailing their exploits, there are TV shows and photo shoots and cover stories—it’s an entire industry.
I’m relieved to realize I didn’t lie to Charlotte about my own WAG aspirations: Dating one of these mega-hot multimillionaires is so far beyond the realm of possibility it’s hard to even wrap my head around.
And there’s not enough collagen in the world to make me look like these women.
Feeling that my emotional stability will be improved more by looking at hot men than by doomscrolling WAG Instas, I turn to the list of potential signings Charlotte gave me:
Aliou Diouf
Xavier Martínez
Lachlan Ramsay
I recognize Aliou Diouf from some of the BuzzFeed listicles.
He’s a defender for a club in France, and he deserves every single column inch about his hotness.
Tall and thick and sturdy like an oak tree, he has a dazzling smile and the most incredible thighs I’ve ever seen on a man.
I wonder how horny I’m allowed to be in my follow-up pitch to Charlotte, because I can think of a couple easy pitches for this Adonis.
Next up is Xavier Martínez: a compact, powerful midfielder who currently plays for his boyhood club in Spain but is rumored to be looking to move to England.
After watching a few videos of him on YouTube, even I—complete novice though I am—can see why.
He tears through what I now know to be the midfield, the ball practically glued to his foot, bobbing and weaving through men seemingly twice his height.