My Ultimate Gacha System

Old Trafford filled slowly on a Tuesday evening in late September, the floodlights already burning white against a sky that hadn’t fully given up on daylight, and the stadium announcer’s voice rolled out over the pitch as the teams finished their final stretches.

Red shirts moved through the warm-up in loose, overlapping patterns near the halfway line, while across the turf the away end had turned a deep Crystal Palace blue, flags snapping whenever the wind caught them.

Camera operators tracked along the touchline, pausing on faces the broadcast wanted the country to recognize, and somewhere behind the dugout a groundsman finished his last pass with the line-marker before jogging clear of the box.

"Manchester United, ladies and gentlemen," the announcer began, and the crowd noise rose in a practiced wave that dipped and swelled with each name.

When Onana’s name came through the speakers first, a section near the Stretford End answered with a cheer that had grown more confident with every clean sheet.

Dalot. Malacia. Evans. Maguire. Amrabat, still finding his rhythm in a shirt that wasn’t quite his own yet.

Casemiro drew the loudest response of the back-and-midfield names, the kind of noise reserved for a player supporters trusted with the ugly minutes as much as the good ones.

Mount. Martial. Garnacho, greeted with the particular warmth Old Trafford saved for players still writing their first Chapters at the club.

Then came the substitutes, read in a flatter, faster cadence the way benches always were, and Demien Walter’s name landed in the middle of the list.

The reaction arrived in two layers.

A low murmur ran through blocks of the crowd first, the sound of thousands of fans doing the same quiet arithmetic — hat trick at Burnley four days ago, no start tonight — and turning it over without quite deciding what to make of it.

Underneath that murmur, though, a pocket of applause broke out near the corner of the Sir Bobby Charlton Stand, loud enough to carry, and a few voices called his name outright, the syllables stretched the way they did when supporters wanted a player to hear them specifically.

The broadcast camera found him on the bench a beat later, jacket zipped over his kit, and held on his face for exactly as long as it needed before cutting back to the eleven jogging into their starting positions.

Demien kept his expression level, the same expression he’d have worn if his name had been read fourth instead of fourteenth, but his fingers closed once around the edge of the bib folded across his knee, a short, hard grip that lasted no longer than a breath before he let it go and flattened his palm against the fabric instead.

He clapped for the starters as they lined up, the applause even and unhurried, and when Casemiro glanced toward the bench and nodded, Demien nodded back without any performance in it.

Only then did he let his eyes drift to the pitch itself, holding there a second longer than the moment required, before he lowered himself into his seat between Reguilón and the kit man’s crate of spare boots.

He understood the decision.

Four matches in five days did that to a squad, and a manager who wanted a Premier League campaign intact by December couldn’t afford to run an eighteen-year-old into the ground chasing every headline his last performance had bought him.

Understanding it and wanting the ball anyway were two separate things, and his body kept arguing the second point even while his face agreed with the first — he leaned down and retied a bootlace that hadn’t come loose, checked the studs against the turf as though he might be sent on inside the next five minutes, then caught himself mid-motion and sat back against the row of substitutes with his arms folded, forcing the stillness rather than feeling it.

His phone buzzed once in the pocket of his tracksuit while the starters finished their final passing drill, and he checked it without any urgency he’d have shown for a text from anyone else.

Bench again? They’re rationing you like a good wine. Try not to sulk on camera, the whole country’s watching.

He almost smiled before he stopped himself, aware of exactly how many lenses pointed in his general direction, and typed a reply that ran three lines longer than what he actually sent.

He deleted most of it, the version where he admitted how much the bench had bothered him tonight, and left only the part that sounded like nothing at all.

Not sulking. Just watching.

Sophia would know better. She usually did.

The referee’s whistle cut through the last of the pre-match noise, and Crystal Palace kicked off like a team that hadn’t read the script written for a heavily rotated United side.

Their front two curved their opening runs toward United’s center-backs rather than sitting off, cutting the passing lane back inside before Evans or Maguire could settle, while a Palace midfielder shadowed the space in front of the back four closely enough to discourage anyone from threading through it.

On the flank, their winger held his position half a yard higher than natural, ready to spring the moment United gave the ball away in a dangerous area.

From the bench, Demien watched it develop the way he watched every match, whether he was on the pitch or not.

When Palace’s press closed around Amrabat receiving on the half-turn, Demien leaned forward without meaning to, his eyes finding the gap opening down United’s right before Amrabat himself saw it, and he tapped two fingers against his knee in the rhythm of a pass that never came.

Amrabat played it backward instead, safety over ambition, and Demien exhaled through his nose and sat back again.

United’s first sequences carried the caution of a side still finding its shape.

Mount checked into pockets between Palace’s lines and asked for the ball with his body angled to receive, only to have Palace’s midfield step up tight enough that he had to bounce it back to Casemiro rather than turn.

Garnacho stayed wide on the left, content to isolate his fullback one-on-one rather than drift infield and crowd the space United needed to open.

Martial dropped deep once to link the play, felt a Palace center-back arrive on his shoulder before he could turn, and laid it off first time.

"United have made wholesale changes tonight, as expected," the commentator said, his voice settling into the easy rhythm of a cup tie broadcast, "and you can see it in the first few minutes — a lot of players feeling each other out in unfamiliar combinations. Demien Walter starts on the bench after that hat trick at Burnley, which will raise a few eyebrows, but Erik ten Hag clearly wants fresh legs and a settled shape here rather than another twenty-goal night."

"Palace will want to make that decision look wrong before United find their rhythm," his co-commentator added. "Get at this back four early, because it hasn’t played together much."

Palace nearly did exactly that in the eighth minute.

Their winger beat Malacia down the left with a change of pace that opened half a yard of space, drove to the byline, and cut the ball back toward the edge of the box rather than crossing it early.

A Palace midfielder met it on the run and struck through a crowd of bodies, the shot skidding low enough that Onana had to get down fast, parrying it away with both hands before Maguire hacked the loose ball clear for a corner that came to nothing.

On the bench, Demien’s jaw tightened at the sight of the ball squirming loose in United’s box, and he glanced once toward Ten Hag’s stiff posture in the technical area before his eyes went straight back to the pitch, tracking the corner through to its conclusion.

United settled through Casemiro rather than through any individual moment of quality.

He began pointing runners into positions before the ball arrived, slowing possession down when Palace’s midfield jumped too eagerly and daring them to keep pressing into space they couldn’t cover, and gradually Palace’s press lost its earlier sharpness.

Mount started receiving higher up the pitch with more time to turn.

Garnacho got his first genuine one-on-one against the Palace right-back and shifted the ball onto his favored foot, though the final ball drifted behind Martial’s run and out for a goal kick.

The match paused in the twelfth minute when Palace’s goalkeeper went down reaching awkwardly for a routine save, signaling toward the bench with a grimace before he’d even finished the movement.

Palace’s medical staff jogged on, and the rhythm of the game broke apart for several minutes while replacement gloves were found and a stretcher was waved away in favor of a slow, supported walk to the touchline.

During the stoppage, the broadcast camera found Demien again.

He’d risen with a handful of substitutes to stay loose along the touchline rather than warming up in earnest, rolling his shoulders and shifting his weight between his feet, and a cluster of fans behind the dugout began chanting his name into the lull.

He heard it clearly enough — there was no pretending otherwise with the sound carrying the way it did in a half-empty stretch of seats — and he answered with a small nod in their direction before turning his attention back to the pitch, unwilling to let the moment become anything more than what it was.