Chapter Text
It was a bright and sunny day in Sydney, Australia, when Lina and her team entered the pitch. It was the second game of the group stage the German national team was facing that evening. Their opponent Columbia seemed to be an opponent the team should not fear. But for Lina it didn’t feel like that. Even though the German team had been great in the European Championship a year before, something felt off.
It was not just her personal life that had been turned upside down in the past year after they became vice European Champions. The team was different. It wasn’t visible from the outside perspective but everybody in the team knew. Martina had put so much pressure on them. Lina didn’t even know if she would make it to this year’s tournament more than a few days before boarding the plane to Australia. In the Euros she had been an important player keeping the left back clean of opponents. Her friends on the team always told her not to worry that much. They were sure she was essential for the team’s success, but Martina never made it clear during the preparation where everyone except the big ones just had to worry about their position.
Even though she had even made it into the starting team again, being able to walk onto the pitch with her team, singing the national anthem in front of thousands of fans. As she was only 24 years old this would probably not be her last big tournament even though it was already her third. Her first important international tournament had been the 2019 World Cup in the US. She was 20 and one of the younger ones in the team, mostly sitting on the bench and coming in as substitute.
After they were done singing the national anthem everything went the way it ever went, everything went by routine. They high fived the other team, got into a circle, hyped themselves up and got into their positions.
When the game started, as expected they even dominated the first 25 Minutes but were still not able to score. The Columbian players played a bit dirty and every now and then one of her teammates was down. They got free kicks and carried on, but from the very first start it was not a game she enjoyed playing. One of her opponents, a tall and muscular striker, really liked messing with her and she was not in the mood for that. Lina missed a familiar face in the crowd, she missed someone she could play the game for, someone she was willing to win for.
When the whistle was blown for the break, Lina was happy to leave the pitch for the carbine. She knew that Martina wouldn’t be happy with the game, she knew Martina wouldn’t be happy with her performance. She should be more aggressive, she should be closer to the opponents, she should create better chances, she should press more forward. she knew all of that. Lina wasn’t happy with herself at all. Martinas words were as expected, she was furious, she wanted them to win that game to get out of the group stage safely. Martina told Lina the exact things she knew had gone wrong, but she also told her that she should keep playing and get more vicious.
Back on the pitch Lina got yellow carded after a few minutes in the second half and after that everything went wrong for her. She could not control any of the forward opponents, so she got substituted in the 67th minute of the game. As much as she loved the game and as much as she loved to play and as grateful as she was for being a player in the national team, she was happy to leave the pitch early in that game.
When she sat on the bench, she felt lonely despite being next to the pitch and next to her teammates who were like her not playing. It was not just this very moment of playing badly, getting substituted and seeing her team lose the match unexpectedly that made her feel lonely and weird. Even more it was the fact that she was there, in Australia, far away from home. She wasn’t the kind of person who got homesick fast, but she was the kind of person who needed a comfort person when she got self-doubt. She had many friends on the team, if not even some of them were the people who were closest to her. She knew many of them for years, had learnt to know them even before she even knew she if she would ever make it to the national team. When she first got into a Bundesliga squad back in Essen, her first professional team, she was playing alongside Sara, Lea and Lena. Lena, who was only a year younger than her, had been her best friend until both left Essen to bring forward their careers at different other clubs. Sara had always been more like a mentor to her but since she also moved to Frankfurt two years ago, they became very close friends. Lina knew she could count on her friends. They were there for her especially in the last few weeks when her girlfriend, after a bit over a year, decided that their long-distance relationship was not what she wanted for her future, that she would not be able to see her so much because she would either be having games on the weekends or would be away completely because of international breaks. If someone would have asked her six weeks ago how she would have imagined this tournament, Lina would have told them that they would have the team spirit of the Euros, win the games while having fun on the pitch and when she would come back home, her girlfriend would be there and they would spent a few nice days before she would return to Frankfurt. Now nothing of that was happening. She was in Australia, the team spirit was missing, and she had nothing to look forward for when returning home.
The whistle blew, the game was over and lost. No one would have been able to explain it, rather than it was a bad performance and it was. It was not her fault but the teams, but she was a part of the team. Now they would have to win their next game against South Korea in four days or Germany would be terminated in the group stage.