The betrayal of Mark Crossley was a body blow, a cynical and calculated act of sabotage that had left us reeling. We had lost our best defender, our leader, our rock. The hole in our team, and in our collective spirit, was immense.

All seemed lost. The dream, which had been so close, so tangible, so beautifully real, was now a distant and fading mirage. The bookmakers, the experts, the entire and deeply cynical world of lower-league football, had written us off. We were dead and buried.

I spent the next 24 hours in a state of deep and profound despair. I locked myself in my flat, I turned off my phone, and I descended into a dark and lonely spiral of self-pity and recrimination.

I had failed. I had let my players down. I had let my chairman down. I had let the entire and long-suffering community of Moss Side down. The weight of the world was on my shoulders, and it was crushing me.

But then, as the initial wave of despair started to recede, it was replaced by something else. Something new. Something surprising.

A tiny, fragile, and slightly insane flicker of defiance.

A voice in my head, a voice that sounded a lot like Emma, a voice that sounded a lot like Frankie Morrison, a voice that sounded a lot like my own long-forgotten and deeply stubborn inner-Mourinho, whispered a single and powerful word: 'Fight'.

I was not beaten yet. I was not broken yet. I was a manager. I was a leader. I was a man who had been to hell and back, a man who had faced crisis, who had faced conflict, who had faced betrayal.

And I was still standing. And I was not going to let Marcus Chen, with his money, with his cynicism, with his dirty and despicable tricks, have the final say. I was going to fight. I was going to find a way. I was going to go down swinging.

I fired up the system. My beautiful and brilliant partner. My secret weapon. My last and only hope. The new and upgraded interface flickered into life, a holographic and deeply beautiful sea of data, of information, of a thousand potential possibilities.

I had a massive hole in my lineup. A hole that could not be filled by any of the players in my squad. My other centre-back was a decent and honest journeyman, but he was slow, and he was clumsy, and he was prone to a catastrophic lapse in concentration.

My only other defensive cover was a 17-year-old kid from the youth team who had never played a single senior game in his life. It was an impossible situation. A situation that required not just a solution, but a miracle.

I spent the entire night poring over the system, my mind a frantic and desperate blur of tactical diagrams, of player profiles, of a thousand complex statistical models. I was looking for something.

Anything.

A loophole.

A glitch.

A forgotten and obscure tactical setup that could give us a glimmer of hope. I was a man on a desperate quest for a magical silver bullet.

And then, just as the sun was starting to rise, just as I was about to give up, to admit defeat, to accept the cold and brutal reality of our situation, I found it.

A tactical setup so obscure, so high-risk, so utterly and certifiably insane, that I had never even considered it before. A tactical setup that was buried deep in the system's database, in a sub-menu of a sub-menu of a sub-menu, under the heading: 'Experimental & High-Risk Tactical Gambits'.

It was a formation that I had never seen before in the lower leagues, a formation that defied all the conventional wisdom of the game. It was a 3-4-3 Diamond, a fluid and complex system that required a unique and highly specific set of player roles and attributes.

It was a system that was designed to create a massive numerical advantage in the centre of the pitch, to dominate possession, to press high, to play a brand of football that was as beautiful as it was risky, as brilliant as it was suicidal.

And it was a system that had one very specific and very unusual player role at its heart. A role that the system called a 'Libero'.

A role that was a hybrid of a centre-back and a central midfielder, a player who was expected to be a brilliant ball-playing defender and a deep-lying creative playmaker.

A role that required a unique and almost impossible combination of tactical intelligence, of technical ability, of physical prowess. A role that was so demanding, so complex, so utterly specialized, that almost no player in the world could play it.

But I had a player who could. A player who the system, in its infinite wisdom, had identified as a perfect and natural fit for the role.

A player with the right attributes, the right personality, the right potential. A player who was not a defender. A player who was not a midfielder. A player who was a 17-year-old kid from my youth team. A kid called Jamie Scott. A kid who nobody had ever heard of.

Jamie was a player I had found playing in a local park, a player who I had seen, with my Enhanced Player Vision, as having a hidden and untapped potential.

He had been released by a professional academy for being "too small", "too slow", "not physical enough". The system had given him a Current Ability of 45, but a Potential Ability of 140. A diamond in the rough. A future star. But also a 17-year-old kid who had never played a single senior game in his life.

The system's analysis of Jamie's attributes was a perfect match for the Libero role. Tactical awareness: 17/20. Passing: 16/20. Vision: 16/20. Positioning: 15/20. Composure: 14/20. Tackling: 12/20. Pace: 11/20.

He was not the finished article. He was raw, he was inexperienced, he was a kid. But he had the attributes. He had the potential. He had the profile. He was the perfect and the only solution to my impossible problem.

***

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