Glory Of The Football Manager System

At the Trafford Centre on that Saturday evening, she took me to Moss Bros. Not John Lewis I got the city wrong in my memory, because the Trafford Centre had a Moss Bros rather than a John Lewis in 2016, and the woman in front of me is about to correct me in three seconds if I get this wrong in my head.

She walked in ahead of me, found a shop assistant, explained that I needed a suit for a job interview, and when the assistant asked my size, she answered for me because she knew my size better than I did, because she had been paying attention for a year.

She picked out a navy suit. A white shirt. A silk tie in Crystal Palace blue she chose the colour deliberately, because she wanted me to walk into that interview looking like I already belonged. A pair of proper leather shoes. Brown leather belt. A navy pocket square that she spent four minutes folding until it sat right.

The total was three hundred and ninety-two pounds.

I tried to stop her at the till. I told her that I couldn’t ask her to do this, that it was too much, that my £400 bonus from Terry could cover a cheaper suit from somewhere else. She had looked at me with the patient exasperation of a woman in love with an idiot the exact expression she was wearing now, in the penthouse, in the green dress and she had said, with perfect calm:

”Danny. Shut up. You can pay me back when you get the job.”

She had put it on her credit card. I had worn that suit to the interview in Croydon three weeks later, my UEFA B Licence certificate still pending in the post. I had been offered the role contingent on the licence.

I had passed the licence in April. I had started at Palace in July. And I had paid Emma back in instalments over the following six months fifty pounds here, a hundred there, the last instalment going into her account two days after we won the FA Youth Cup final.

That suit had started everything.

”I remember,” I said.

”You couldn’t afford a suit then,” Emma said, her voice steady now, her hands in her lap. ”You couldn’t even afford the bus from Moss Side to Manchester Piccadilly. I used to find the train ticket in your pocket and work out that it was a third of your day’s wages. And now you can afford anything. Anything. You’ve just flown us to a private lunch at a three-Michelin-star restaurant on Christmas Day, and you’ve bought me three pieces of clothing that together cost more than my annual salary when we met.”

She looked at me. ”And the thing that gets me, Danny, the thing that makes me cry like an idiot in the living room on Christmas afternoon is that you’re still the same. You still notice what I say. You still remember the dress at Selfridges and the coat in Covent Garden. You’re not a man who got rich and forgot. You’re a man who got rich and is using it to remember.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have words. I pulled her against me, the dress and the coat and the leather jacket with her initials in the collar, and she cried into my shoulder for a while, and I sat there and looked out of the window at the grey London afternoon and thought about a small shop on the edge of the Beckenham high street where mom used to take me for chips when I was fifteen.

The world had changed. We hadn’t. That was the gift.

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That evening, we watched television. Not football. A Christmas film It’s a Wonderful Life, which Emma had never seen, which I had seen every year with my mum since I was seven, which made me cry on cue at the same scene every time. Emma cried too, which surprised her more than it surprised me.

”I didn’t expect that,” she said, wiping her face during the credits.

”It’s the point of the film.”

”It’s annoying. I don’t like being manipulated by cinema.”

”You’re a journalist. You’re literally paid to manipulate.”

”That’s different.”

”Why?”

”Because I do it on purpose.”

We laughed. We sat there on the sofa with the Christmas tree lights reflecting off the window and the city quiet below us and the phone for once face down and silent. My phone had been silent for three hours.

Nobody expected me on Christmas Day. Nobody needed me. I was, for a few rare hours, nothing more or less than a man in a flat in South London with the woman he loved, and it was enough. It was more than enough. It was, in fact, everything.

At eleven o’clock, Emma stood up, took my hand, and led me to bed. She was still wearing the green dress. She took it off slowly, carefully, and hung it over the back of the chair. Then she kissed me the conscious, open-eyed, deliberate kiss of a woman who had been seen and remembered and who had decided, on Christmas night, to make it count.

Boxing Day was tomorrow. Southampton at home. Full stadium, Boxing Day atmosphere, the Holmesdale in Christmas scarves.

But that was tomorrow.

Tonight, in the quiet of the penthouse, with the tree lights still on and the city silent and the woman I had loved since Moss Side in my arms, tonight was the gift.

Tonight was the day.

[Premier League Table December 25th, 2017.]

[1. Manchester City 59 pts]

[2. Crystal Palace 45 pts]

[3. Manchester United 42 pts]

[4. Chelsea 39 pts]

[5. Liverpool 38 pts]

[Crystal Palace sit second in the Premier League on Christmas Day. This is the highest league position the club has held since April 1991 (finished 3rd under Coppell). In the Premier League era (1992-present), the club’s previous best was 7th during a single season never sustained. Second place on Christmas Day has never been achieved before in the club’s 112-year history.]

[Social media impressions: #CPFC trending #1 in UK for 14 consecutive hours. Official club Twitter followers: +67,000 overnight. Instagram followers: +141,000. International supporters’ clubs have reported doubled attendance at Christmas Day viewings across 12 countries.]

[Fan reaction consolidated: awe, gratitude, emotional exhaustion. The Thornton Heath mural has been expanded. Generations of Palace supporters are contacting the club to describe what they are watching as ”a gift they never thought they would live to see.”]

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Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the Super Gift.