Keauno

“For Mikel, the game doesn’t start in the dressing room – it starts in the team meeting a few hours before. On that day, it was the most interesting meeting of my life. I have never seen something like that before and I don’t think I’ll ever see it again,” Zinchenko said in his book, “Believe”. “We had lunch in the hotel where we stay before home games. It’s always the same waiters, the same familiar faces of the staff, whom I guess are chosen for being very discreet. There was one guy, though, I had never seen before, a waiter serving hot drinks. I didn’t think much about it. He must have been a new guy. “In the final match-day meetings, we rarely sit down to watch any clips or look at a tactics board. Mikel is doing them very differently, in his own way. He will have us playing cards or little ball games to get those competitive juices flowing. He wants to switch us on, activate our minds. In the first part of that meeting, he laid out lots of cards on a big table. They had football terms like ‘man on’, ‘set piece’, ‘win your duel’ and so on written on them. He said, ‘Okay guys, we need to start the game with winning your duel. Who’s going to take that first card?’ You had to pick it out before the other team at the other end of the table got there. It doesn’t sound like much, but footballers are such a competitive lot, even a simple game like that becomes fiercely contested.” This is where it gets interesting. “Then, for the second part, Mikel announced it was going to be another ‘players vs staff freestyle battle’. The other day, it had been me against Nicolas ‘Nico’ Jover, our set-piece specialist, and I had won. So the manager says, ‘It’s rematch today. Alex, let’s see if you can do it again.’ So I get up and do a few tricks and so on. Then it’s Nico’s turn. But he’s holding his hamstring, saying he’s injured and can’t play. Mikel looks around the room and says, ‘We need a substitute. Anyone?’ At that moment, that waiter raises his hand. Mikel says, ‘Okay. You can try.’ And guess what? This guy is killing it. He’s basically destroying us. He even nutmegs Saka. Everyone’s is looking at each other like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ Everyone’s cheering him on and laughing. “Turns out he’s a professional freestyler with millions of followers whom Mikel had planted at the hotel as a waiter. You realise how much work must have gone into that behind the scenes. That guy was there for at least three hours undercover, serving up coffee and cakes and waiting patiently for his big moment. The mood in the camp was incredible after that. People were buzzing on the way to the bus. That whole thing really pushed the right buttons. But it happens so often. Every one of Mikel’s meetings is special.” You cannot stop finding a way to win.