Coach Rustam has two sentences painted on the wall of the changing room, and nothing else. No cups, no photographs, no posters of famous players.
1. You don't have to come to training. 2. You mustn't lie to me.
Boys arrive at that team and think the first sentence is a gift and the second one is nothing. It is the other way round.
Omar missed training on a Tuesday in March, because his uncle's shop had no second pair of hands that week. On Wednesday he told the coach exactly that, in eleven words, and looked at the floor.
"You didn't have to come," Rustam said. "You don't have to explain twice, either. Warm up."
Omar played on Saturday.
In April another boy — the fastest player in that team, a boy every coach in the city knew by name — missed two trainings and sent a message about a temperature of thirty-nine.
On Sunday somebody put a photograph in the team group: a wedding, a loud song, and that boy dancing in the middle of it, on the Friday evening.
Rustam said nothing at all. He wrote the boy's name on the paper for the final, then he took a pen and put a line through it.
They lost the final by one goal. The substitute ran until he could not stand, and it was not enough.
In the changing room afterwards nobody looked up. Rustam stood by his two sentences with his hands in his pockets.
"We lost a match," he said. "We didn't lose the rule. A team without trust loses every Saturday for the rest of its life."
The fastest boy in the city sat on that bench for the last twenty minutes of a final he wasn't allowed to play in, and he has thought about it for five years.
He is a coach himself now, at a school in Chirchiq. There are two sentences painted on the wall of his changing room. He doesn't have to explain them to anybody: the boys work it out by October.