Schmidt called it the preparation window.
Three weeks between the legs. Enough time to be dangerous if used correctly. Not enough time to rebuild anything from scratch, which meant the work was not about starting over but about finding what was already there and making it sharper, more deliberate, more precise.
The Monday session after Madrid was light by design. Bodies that had played ninety minutes in the Bernabéu needed two days before they could be asked to work at full intensity again. Schmidt understood this as a physiological reality rather than a concession and treated it accordingly — technical work, short passing sequences, nothing that taxed the legs beyond what the legs were ready to give.
Richard went through the session with the quiet focus he brought to everything and said very little.
Afterward, walking to the car park with his bag over one shoulder, Lukas fell into step beside him.
"You sleep alright?" Lukas asked.
"Fine," Richard said.
Lukas studied him briefly. "You watched the match back."
It wasn't a question.
"Twice," Richard said.
Lukas nodded slowly. "What did you see?"
Richard was quiet for a moment. The car park was half empty, the afternoon light thin and grey, Dortmund in March still making its mind up about warmth.
"The spaces were there," Richard said. "First half especially. Between their lines. I found some of them. Not all of them." He paused. "The movements around me weren't always right. Not the players' fault. The structure."
Lukas said nothing for a moment.
"Schmidt watched it four times," he said finally. "I know because he was in the analysis room when I arrived at seven Tuesday morning and the timestamp on the system said he'd been there since five."
Richard looked at him.
"He doesn't miss things," Lukas said simply. "Whatever you saw — he saw it too."
They reached the car. Chidi was leaning against the driver's side with his phone out, scrolling, looking up as they approached with the expression of someone who had been waiting long enough to have formed several opinions about the wait.
"Finally," Chidi said. "I've been standing here so long I've started reading football twitter and it's done something to my brain."
"What did you read?" Richard asked, opening the passenger door.
"Comparisons," Chidi said, getting in. "Someone made a graphic. You, Yamal, some others. The under-eighteen generation thing."
Richard pulled his seatbelt on. "And?"
"And your numbers per game are better than everyone on the list." Chidi started the engine. "But they're pointing out you've played six matches and Yamal's played thirty." He glanced sideways. "The Yamal people are very loud."
"Yamal is very good," Richard said.
Chidi looked at him. "That's it? That's your response?"
"He's seventeen and he's doing things in La Liga and the Champions League that most senior players can't do. He's very good." Richard looked out the window. "I'd rather be compared to him than not compared to him. It means people are watching."
Chidi drove in silence for a moment.
"You're going to make me gray before I'm thirty," he said finally.
Richard smiled. "You're already going gray."
"That is because of you specifically," Chidi said, and turned onto the main road.
Wednesday's session was where the first shift happened.
Not dramatic. Not announced. Just a quiet adjustment in the structure of the tactical work that Richard felt before he fully understood it.
Schmidt set up the shape differently for the afternoon's positional play. Richard's starting position was slightly higher than it had been in previous weeks — not dramatically, perhaps five yards — and the instruction given to Guirassy was different. Instead of holding the line between the center backs, Guirassy was asked to move across the face of the defense laterally, pulling the defensive shape with him, creating movement rather than occupying a fixed point.
The effect was immediate and visible.
The space that movement created in behind the defensive line — the exact space Richard had been arriving into for goals and assists all season — opened more consistently and more predictably. Instead of finding it by reading the game in real time, Richard was finding it because the structure was designed to produce it.
He ran the pattern four times in the positional play phase.
Four times the space appeared.
Four times he arrived into it at the right moment.
Schmidt watched from the technical area with his arms folded and his expression giving nothing away. He stopped the drill once, adjusted Brandt's starting position two yards to the right, and ran it again.
The fifth time the space was even cleaner.
Schmidt said nothing.
But he made a note.
After training Richard showered and sat in the canteen with a coffee and his tactical notebook, working through what he had felt in the session. He was halfway through his second page of notes when Jobe Bellingham dropped into the seat across from him with a plate of food and the unhurried ease of someone who had decided the conversation was happening regardless of whether it had been initiated.
"You felt it today," Jobe said. Not a question.
Richard looked up. "The shape change."
"Small. But real." Jobe ate for a moment. "He does it gradually. Schmidt. He doesn't announce things. He just moves something two yards and watches what happens." He paused. "By the second leg it won't look like the same team."
Richard considered that. "How do you know?"
Jobe looked at him with an expression that was several things at once — older than his age, familiar with something Richard hadn't experienced yet, privately certain about something he wasn't going to state directly. "Because I've seen what happens when a manager builds a system around a player properly. The player doesn't always know it's happening until it's done." He picked up his fork. "Just keep doing what you do. Let him build around it."
He ate.
Richard looked at his notebook.
Outside the canteen window the Brackel training ground was quiet in the late afternoon, the pitches empty, the floodlights not yet on, the sky the specific shade of grey that meant rain was coming but hadn't decided when.
He wrote one more line in the notebook.
Then closed it.
The Thursday press conference before that weekend's Bundesliga match against Leverkusen brought the first direct media question about the generational comparisons.
Schmidt sat at the table with his press officer and answered questions with the economy of a man who had been doing this long enough to know which questions deserved full answers and which deserved shorter ones.
A journalist from a French publication raised his hand.
"There has been significant discussion this week about Richard Blake in the context of the current generation of young players — Yamal, Zaïre-Emery, others. How do you see him in that conversation?"
Schmidt looked at the journalist for a moment.
"I see him as a Dortmund player preparing for a Bundesliga match on Saturday," he said. "The other conversation is for other people."
A brief pause in the room.
"Do you think he belongs in that conversation?" the journalist pressed.
Schmidt's expression did not change. "I think he belongs on the pitch on Saturday. That is where my interest is."
The press officer moved to the next question.
Afterward, in the corridor outside, one of the Dortmund media team relayed the exchange to Richard before he saw it reported.
Richard smiled slightly.
"That's the right answer," he said.
Saturday was Leverkusen.
Third in the table. A team that had steadied after their wobble and arrived at Signal Iduna Park with the specific intent of a club that understood exactly what the match meant for both sides.
Schmidt named Richard in the starting eleven, which was expected. What was slightly less expected was the shape on the teamsheet — a subtle variation from the usual structure, Brandt sitting marginally deeper, Richard given more explicit license to operate between the lines, Guirassy's movement instructions visible in the way he set up from the first whistle.
It was not a revolution. Nobody in the press box would have written about a tactical shift. But Richard felt it from the first minute — the shape breathing differently around him, the spaces appearing in slightly different places, the whole structure humming at a frequency he was beginning to recognize.
The match was hard. Leverkusen were organized, physical, and deeply aware of Richard's influence from the first whistle. Their defensive midfielder dropped into a specific position every time Dortmund built through the center — a position designed, clearly and specifically, to cut the passing lane to Richard's feet.
Richard recognized it on the third Dortmund possession.
He adjusted on the fourth.
Instead of dropping to receive centrally he began drifting wider on the right, pulling Leverkusen's midfielder with him, which opened the central space for Brandt to arrive into. Brandt found it on twelve minutes, drove forward, and played Guirassy through one-on-one.
Guirassy's finish was clean.
One-nil.
The stadium rose.
In the press box a journalist turned to her colleague and said: "Blake didn't touch it but that goal came from him."
Her colleague nodded. "That's the point."
Richard's goal came on thirty-four minutes.
A corner won by Adeyemi on the left, taken by Brandt with the inswing that the Leverkusen goalkeeper had to come for and didn't quite get to. The ball dropped to the edge of the six-yard box where it should have been cleared and wasn't — a Leverkusen defender's header too weak, too straight, falling back into the danger zone rather than away from it.
Richard arrived late. Exactly as trained. Exactly as the new shape was designed to produce — his run beginning from deep, his timing keeping him onside, his arrival at the ball happening at the precise moment the defensive clearance became inadequate.
He hit it first time, on the volley, with his right foot, low and hard across the goalkeeper.
The net moved before the goalkeeper had fully processed what was happening.
Two-nil.
Richard turned toward the south end and the Yellow Wall greeted him with the specific warmth reserved for a player it had decided belonged to it. He raised one hand. Kept running. Returned to position.
In the canteen afterward Sabitzer found him and said simply: "The run timing is getting better."
Richard said: "I felt it."
Sabitzer nodded once and moved on.
Dortmund won two-nil.
Third place. The gap to Leipzig now one point with twelve matches remaining. The table moving the way Schmidt had said it would move — as a consequence of performance rather than a destination chased.
In the dressing room afterward the mood was good but controlled. Schmidt allowed it for five minutes. Then he stood and the room came to attention.
"Good," he said. "Leverkusen are a good team and we were better today." He paused. "The second leg is in ten days. Everything between now and then serves one purpose." He looked around the room. "Everything."
He left.
Can looked at Kobel.
Kobel looked at Guirassy.
Guirassy looked at Richard.
Richard looked at the floor.
Ten days.
Three goals.
Signal Iduna Park.
That evening Chidi drove him home through a Dortmund that had the particular energy of a city that had watched its team win and was still carrying it — yellow scarves in windows, a group of supporters outside a bar singing something Richard didn't fully understand but felt the warmth of anyway.
"Yamal scored today," Chidi said, merging onto the main road.
"I know," Richard said. "Saw it at half-time. Good goal."
"Two goals and an assist against Atletico." Chidi paused deliberately. "The graphic people are going to update the graphic."
"Good," Richard said. "He deserves to be on it."
Chidi drove for a moment in silence.
"You're really not going to bite on this are you," he said.
"There's nothing to bite on. He's a good player. I'm a good player. We're both seventeen. In ten years people will look back at this season and talk about it." Richard looked out the window. "Right now I have ten days before Real Madrid come to my stadium and I need three goals."
Chidi was quiet.
Then: "Your stadium."
Richard glanced at him.
"You said my stadium," Chidi said. There was something in his voice that was not teasing. Something quieter and more genuine than that. "Three months ago you arrived here with two bags and a phone full of your mum's prayers. Now you're calling it your stadium."
Richard said nothing for a moment.
The city moved past the windows. Yellow and black everywhere, the colors of a place that had decided it owned him as much as he was beginning to feel it owned him back.
"It is my stadium," he said simply.
Chidi nodded once.
Didn't say anything else.
Drove him home.
Later that night, after food, after the tactical notes, after the quiet of the house had settled into something comfortable and familiar, Richard's phone lit up with a message from a number he didn't immediately recognize.
Then he read the name attached to it and sat up slightly.
It was a Nigerian number. The message was in English, short, professional.
Richard. This is Coach Okafor, Super Eagles technical staff. We've been watching your season closely. Your agent has been in contact about the June window. We want you to know the door is open and we're proud of what you're doing. Keep going.
He read it twice.
Then he set the phone down and looked at the ceiling for a long time.
The Super Eagles.
June felt far away.
But it existed. The green and white shirt existed. The possibility of walking out in it existed.
He thought about Tunde in the Düsseldorf studio. You're the reason my brother started taking football seriously again.
He thought about his mother's voice. His father's texts.
He thought about Lagos.
He thought about all of it, properly, for the first time in a few weeks — the full distance traveled, the full weight of what was being carried, the full scope of what was being built.
Then he put the phone on the nightstand.
Turned the light off.
Ten days.
His stadium.
Three goals.
Sleep.