Exposed at the Back Read Online Free PDF Page B

somewhere else?
    Steinar got up and watched the tram going past. There were two questions he couldn’t quite answer, nor get out of his mind. How had Vlad Vidić managed to stay anonymous all these years? And had Arild Golden himself had a hand in what happened to Steinar?

Soccer School
    Benedikte sat in one of the large substitutes’ shelters next to the astroturf ground at Valle. Vålerenga’s training session was officially over, but some of the players had stayed on for a bit of extra practice.
    Per Diesen fired the ball on target. From 20 yards he bent it up in the air, over an imaginary wall, past an imaginary keeper, in off the post and into the empty goalmouth. He put down another ball and sent it curving almost as high into the corner. Per Diesen was the best free kick taker in Norway.
    Benedikte liked to see how carefully he prepared the ball. How he paced it out and how he exhaled before every shot. How high and hard he kicked the ball. Journalists don’t spend enough time studying what footballers actually do, she thought.
    A short distance away, Marius Bjartmann was doing sit-ups. He’d taken off his T-shirt and was using it to lie on. The sweat glistened on his sculpted abs.
    Kalid Jambo was still there too, running a series of 17–13 intervals. He shot along the length of the pitch, turned and went back a good distance in the 17 seconds he was running. Then he walked for 13 seconds to recover, throwing the odd remark over at the players fetching the balls.
    Picking them up were Otto Cana and a couple of the other young lads. It was traditional in most football clubs to give that job to the youngest players. And it was also traditional in most football clubs for the youngest players to moan about it.
    Bang, Diesen hit the crossbar, which rattled.
    He shot off another three free kicks, and Bjartmann finished his strength training. They left together, walking by the Vallhall Arena, the large sports hall next to the pitch, Kalid Jambo tagging along. Aftera couple of minutes’ vaguely focused searching, the young lads found the last ball, then they too headed off towards the arena, where the changing rooms were to be found.
    The structure of the grey and blue arena, with its curved roof, was becoming worn. Pieces kept falling off. When this happened on the wall facing the car park it looked like a large, beached whale with tooth decay. That day, the team had probably done their training outdoors on the astroturf because their next league match was away at Aalesund’s Color Line Stadion, with its artificial pitch. But why, in winter, did Vålerenga’s first-team players prefer to train outdoors in the slush and freezing temperatures, and right next to one of the busiest roads in Norway, rather than inside the warm arena?
    Vålerenga’s development coach, Andrei Sennikov, went over to Benedikte when they’d finished training, as agreed. The development coaches were responsible for the most talented young footballers, with the responsibility of nurturing them into first-team players. The idea was that they would take four to six players in each club under their wing, teach them about nutrition and training, and make sure they went to school and did their homework. A large part of the development coach’s day consisted of making home visits.
    This social care dimension was important, but the development coaches had ever-expanding job descriptions. The less money the clubs had at their disposal, the more they tried to squeeze into these positions, Benedikte thought. Nothing changed for the managers. Goalkeeper coaches went on shooting straight instep drives at their apprentices at the start of training sessions, while the development coaches became increasingly worn out. Hardly anyone stayed in the role past the age of 50.
    The development coaches possessed enormous knowledge. They were the ones who knew the most about what was going on in Oslo’s football world, and if there was anybody who could fill in