Glory Of The Football Manager System

July 16th, 2017

I was up at six.

Not because I had to be. Not because anyone had knocked on my door or sent a message. I was up because my brain refused to stop working.

The match was still playing on a loop behind my eyes: the 18% pressing efficiency, the two goals we had gifted Atlético in the first half, the three penalties blazed over the bar and into the arms of Jan Oblak.

The 4-2 scoreline sat in my chest like a stone that was simultaneously a trophy and a warning. I lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling of my hotel room, watching the Singapore skyline lighten from black to deep blue to the pale, washed-out gold of a tropical dawn, and then I got up, made a coffee from the little machine on the desk, and sat by the window.

The city was extraordinary in the early morning. The Marina Bay Sands lit up against the sky, the waterfront already busy with joggers and cyclists, the heat already building even at this hour.

I had grown up in Moss Side, where the view from your window was a row of terraced houses and, if you were lucky, a patch of sky between the rooftops.

I had spent my entire life in Manchester, and the furthest I had ever been from home was the coach journey down to London when I took the Palace U18 job. And now I was sitting in a hotel room on the other side of the world, managing a Premier League football club, watching Singapore wake up.

I thought about that for a while. Then I picked up my phone and called Emma.

She answered on the third ring, her voice thick with sleep. ”Danny? It’s six in the morning.”

”I know. Sorry. I just needed to hear your voice.”

There was a pause, and then I heard the soft sound of her shifting in bed, sitting up. ”Are you alright?”

”Yeah,” I said. ”More than alright, actually. I just... I’m sitting here looking at this city and I keep thinking you’d love it. The way it looks in the morning. The heat. The food last night was unbelievable, by the way. I had something called laksa and I think it might be the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”

She laughed, a warm, sleepy sound. ”Better than my mum’s Sunday roast?”

”Different category entirely,” I said. ”Non-comparable.”

”Diplomatic answer.”

”I’ve been learning.”

She was quiet for a moment. I could picture her exactly sitting up in bed in our penthouse in Dulwich, her hair a mess, squinting at the phone. She had been the one constant through all of it.

Through the U18 job, through the chaos of the first team appointment, through the transfer window and the press conferences and the nights when I had come home so wound up I couldn’t speak.

She had never once made me feel guilty for the hours, for the obsession, for the fact that football took up most of the space in my head. She just made room for herself in whatever was left, and that was enough for both of us.

”How did the game go?” she asked.

”We won 4-2. Lost the penalties.”

”That sounds like a Danny Walsh result,” she said. ”Brilliant and annoying at the same time.”

I laughed. ”That’s about right.”

”And James? How was the presentation?”

”Perfect,” I said. ”The stadium went absolutely mental. Flame jets, smoke flares, fifty thousand people screaming his name. He walked out in the ten shirt and the place lost its mind. Most of them weren’t even Palace fans. They just came to see a Galáctico.”

”And how did you feel?” she asked. She always asked that. Not how did it go, not what happened, but how did you feel. It was one of the things I loved most about her.

I thought about it honestly. ”Proud,” I said. ”Genuinely proud. Like, this is real. We’ve actually done this. Crystal Palace, with James Rodríguez in a number ten shirt, presented him to the world in Singapore. Two years ago, I was managing Railway Arms on a Sunday morning in Moss Side, a pub team that doesn’t even exist anymore. Then Moss Side Athletic in the county league. Then the Palace U18s. Then five games as an interim with everything on the line. Now this.”

”You deserve it,” she said, simply.

”I want to bring you here,” I said. The thought had been sitting in the back of my mind since the moment the bus had pulled up to the stadium the night before.

”Not for work. Just for us. I want to show you this city. The food, the waterfront, all of it. I want to sit with you at one of those outdoor restaurants by the water and eat laksa and watch the lights come on over the bay.”

There was a pause. ”Danny Walsh,” she said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. ”Are you going soft on me?”

”Absolutely not,” I said. ”It’s purely logistical. You’d enjoy it. I’m being practical.”

”You’re being romantic, and you don’t know how to handle it.”

”I’m hanging up now.”

”Promise me,” she said, her voice going quieter. ”Promise me we’ll come back.”

”I promise,” I said. And I meant it. ”One day. When the season’s done and we’ve got a minute to breathe. We’ll come back and do it properly.”

”I’ll hold you to that,” she said. ”Now go and manage your football club. And Danny?”

”Yeah?”

”I’m proud of you too.”

I sat with the phone in my hand for a while after she hung up, watching the city. Then I finished my coffee, got dressed, and went to work.

---

The training facility at Geylang was a forty-minute drive from the hotel, and by the time the bus arrived, the heat was already thick and heavy.

The players who had played forty-five minutes or more the previous night were split off immediately into the recovery group. They filed into the gym and pool area with the resigned, slightly pained expressions of men who knew exactly what was coming.

Active recovery was not glamorous. It was stationary bikes and resistance bands and foam rollers and the specific, targeted misery of a sports massage on legs that had already given everything they had.

The big screen in the recovery room was showing the match highlights on a loop. This had been Sarah’s idea, and it was a quietly brilliant one.

The players who had conceded in the first half had to sit on their bikes and watch themselves make the mistake on repeat.

Milivojević, pedalling with the grim, stoic expression of a man serving a sentence, watched himself get swarmed by Koke and Gabi for the third time and let out a long, slow breath through his nose. ”I know,” he said, to no one in particular. ”I know.”

Tarkowski, beside him, watched himself get caught flat-footed for Torres’s tap-in. He said nothing. He just pedalled harder.

Wan-Bissaka, who had been caught out of position twice in the first half, was watching his clips with the focused intensity of a student revising for an exam.

He was twenty years old, and he was already making mental notes, already filing the corrections away. That was the thing about him... he never needed to be told twice.

In the pool, Zaha was doing laps with the languid, effortless grace of a man who had been born in the water. He was singing quietly to himself, something that sounded like it might have been Drake, and he looked entirely unbothered by the fact that he had been substituted at half-time.

Zaha had always had that quality: an absolute, unshakeable belief in his own ability that insulated him from doubt. He knew what he was. He knew what he could do. The first half had been a bad half, and he had moved on from it before the final whistle had blown.