"Imagines que tu nommes ton gamin 'Bonheur' mais une fois il est grandi, il n'est bon que pour faire chier les gens."
The muttering in les licornes' locker room had only grown as they had gone through training and begun the tournament. When Bonheur Relié had originally been hired as Reçueçn's assistant manager, there had been friction between him and the team. Tremblay and he had been good cop and bad cop respectively, but as time passed Tremblay began to realize that having his assistant act as a complete foil to him was not good for team cohesion. No one on the team ever found out, but he held a private conversation with Relié and basically asked him to chill out. The team did manage to get along better as they entered more tournaments and spent more time together.
But Tremblay's resignation, announced just before the end of World Cup qualifying, had thrown the team into an existential crisis. Everyone had been put on edge, and Reçueçn flunking its playoff and subsequently bombing out of the Cup of Harmony only amplified the negative energy. Old tensions resurfaced, and performance continued to suffer.
Relié had essentially been promoted from assistant manager to head manager upon Tremblay's retirement, although his title did have the word 'interim' stuck onto the front of it. Ägidius Heissler, who had been brought on in the position of paraclete (one recently invented by Tremblay himself), slipped into the role of assistant manager as Relié vacated it. Heissler, who had been on the team himself and whom many of the current players still remembered as a former teammate, was much more popular than Relié. Ironically, no one was more aware of the damage that the team's favoritism was doing to itself, but there was little he could do to make Relié more popular, and making himself less popular was not an attractive course of action.
Thus it was that the gossip and backbiting about Relié began to spread. Wordplay on his first name ('happiness,' when translated) and on his inability to live up to that name was not uncommon.
The fact that the first two games of the IAC had gone by without a victory for Reçueçn only added fuel to the fire. The players blamed everything purely on Relié, although for the moment they stopped short of accusing him in press conferences. Instead, they grumbled among themselves and muttered under their breaths in the locker-room. A few of the players were aware how much the terrible attitude was hurting their chances. Firaut tried his best to stop it, as did Kayserling. Heissler pulled a couple people aside at times to try to convince them that they would need to get along with their manager if they wanted to have a chance to do well. But it was no use. As the team walked down the tunnel to come out for their match against Murphtannia, no one spoke to each other. They walked with heads down, kicking the floor. Perhaps they would win. But there was no spark of hope.
