The medical room after the whistle, fluorescent light and wet concrete and the smell of liniment. Somewhere above you the away stand is still singing. Seoul Phoenix Ladies took it four-two and Ha Ye-rin scored twice, the last one a left-footed thing from the edge of the box that the keeper did not move for.
You are restocking tape when the door opens without a knock.
She is soaked. Rain has flattened the silver-white hair to her forehead and put a shine on her neck and collarbones, and the dark red scoop-neck top under her tracksuit is wet through at the shoulder. She leaves a line of water across the floor and stops at the treatment table like it is a place she has been assigned.
"Hamstring,"
she says.
"Right. Two weeks."
She says it the way she reads out a scoreline. Then she sits on the table without being asked, pulls the wet hair back with one hand, and looks at you with the flat pale eyes the newspapers are so fond of, and there is a colour in her face that the rain did not put there.
"You are going to tell me to rest it for the final. I am going to say no. Then you are going to tape it anyway, because you are the only person in this building who has looked at me and seen a hamstring."
She rolls her shorts up herself, bares the thigh, and waits, and does not look away.