Glory Of The Football Manager System

Boxing Day at Selhurst Park.

I arrived at the ground two hours before kick-off, the way I always did, through the staff entrance on Holmesdale Road. The security guard, a man named Dennis who had worked the Selhurst gates for thirty-one years and had seen managers come and go like weather systems, nodded as I walked past. ”Morning, gaffer. Happy Christmas.”

”Happy Christmas, Dennis. Good one?”

”Quiet. The missus cooked. The dog ate the Yorkshire puddings off the counter while we were watching the Queen’s speech. Standard.” He paused. ”Second in the league, gaffer. My old man would have wept. He followed Palace from 1952 until the day he died. Never saw us higher than seventh.”

”What was his name?”

”Arthur. Arthur Briggs.”

”Then this one’s for Arthur, Dennis.”

He looked at me for a moment, his weathered face softening, and then he nodded and waved me through. That was the thing about this run, about this season, about this impossible, improbable, history-defying surge from obscurity to the summit.

It wasn’t mine. It belonged to Dennis and Arthur Briggs and the thirty-one years of gate duty and the Yorkshire puddings the dog stole and the father who never saw his club in second place. It belonged to everyone who had been waiting.

In the hospitality lounge, Steve Parish was introducing me to someone. I turned, and the someone was Liam Neeson.

Six foot four. Silver hair. The face that had launched a thousand action franchises, now wearing a Crystal Palace scarf and an expression of genuine, uncomplicated joy. Parish had mentioned that Neeson was a fan.

He had been calling the chairman’s office for years, asking for tickets with the polite persistence of a man who was used to getting what he wanted but understood that matchday allocations at a twenty-five-thousand-seat ground were not the same as front-row seats at a film premiere.

”Danny Walsh,” Neeson said, extending his hand. His voice was exactly as deep and exactly as Northern Irish as you would expect, and the handshake was firm without being performative. ”I’ve been wanting to meet you.”

”Likewise,” I said, which was both true and a massive understatement. ”How long have you supported Palace?”

”Since the early nineties. I was doing a play in the West End, living in South London, and a friend took me to Selhurst. The noise, the passion, the complete and total commitment of the supporters to a club that was, at the time, not very good.” He smiled. ”I was hooked. I’ve been coming whenever I can since. Although I’ll admit this season has been considerably more enjoyable than most.”

”We try.”

”You do more than try, Danny. You’ve given this club something I haven’t seen in twenty-five years of watching them. Hope. Not the blind, delusional hope that fans carry around like a survival mechanism. Real hope. The kind that’s backed by evidence.”

He looked at me with those pale blue eyes that had stared down wolves and kidnappers and the entire Albanian mafia in various fictional contexts, and in person conveyed a sincerity that no camera could replicate.

”My daughter called me on Christmas morning. She’s not a football fan. She called me to say that Crystal Palace were second in the Premier League and that she was proud of me for supporting them all these years. Proud of me. Because of what you’ve done.”

I didn’t know what to say. A compliment from Liam Neeson was not something the UEFA coaching manuals prepared you for.

”Stay for the match,” I said. ”I’ll make sure you’ve got good seats.”

”I’ve got terrible seats. Section W, Row Z. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

He shook my hand again and walked out to find his section, his Palace scarf trailing behind him, and I stood in the hospitality lounge and thought: this is really happening.

The families of the players filled the directors’ box and the stands around it. Sakho’s wife and daughters in the front row, the two little girls in Palace shirts with ”PAPA” on the back, the younger one waving a flag that was bigger than she was.

Neves’s mother, who had flown in from Portugal for Christmas, was sitting beside his wife and Lurdes, who was wearing a Palace bib and appeared to be attempting to eat the seat in front of her.

Konaté’s parents, visiting from France, his father standing because he said sitting was disrespectful. Chilwell’s younger brother in a full Palace kit, vibrating with the nervous energy of a boy who wanted to be on the pitch more than anything in the world.

Dann’s parents, his father wearing the captain’s armband replica he had bought from the club shop in October and had worn to every home match since, his mother beside him with a thermos of tea because she believed that football grounds served ”nonsense coffee and nothing else.”

These were not supporting characters. These were the people the players played for. The wives who managed households alone during away weeks. The mothers who watched through their fingers.

The fathers who stood because sitting felt like giving up. The daughters in shirts too big for them, waving flags they couldn’t control. Every goal, every win, every point in the league table was felt in these seats before it was felt anywhere else.

The Holmesdale was different on Boxing Day. The usual atmosphere of controlled hostility, the tribal aggression that made Selhurst Park the hardest ground in London, was softened by the season.

Families who only came at Christmas were here, their unfamiliarity with the songs compensated for by the sheer volume of their enthusiasm. But threaded through the festive warmth was something else, something that had been growing since November and was now, on Boxing Day, impossible to ignore.

The Champions League.

Nobody said it officially. Nobody at the club, nobody on the coaching staff, nobody in the media had used the words ”Crystal Palace” and ”Champions League” in the same sentence without immediately qualifying it with ”of course, it’s still early” or ”let’s not get carried away.”

But in the Holmesdale, in the Arthur Wait, in the family stand and the Whitehorse Lane end, the dream was alive. You could hear it in the conversations before kick-off, the murmured exchanges between strangers that started with ”imagine if” and ended with ”why not us?”

I heard a man in the Holmesdale, maybe sixty, grey-haired, a Palace shirt under his winter coat that was so old the badge had faded to pink, say to his son:

”Top four. That’s all we need. Top four and we’re in the Champions League. Do you understand what that means? Barcelona at Selhurst Park. Real Madrid at Selhurst Park. We would hear the Champions League anthem at our ground, in our stadium, where your granddad used to stand in the Sixties and watch us lose to Coventry. Do you understand what that would mean?”

His son, maybe thirty, was nodding. His eyes were wet. ”I understand, Dad.”

”No, you don’t. Not yet. You will when it happens. If it happens.”

If. The condition that every Palace fan carried like a talisman and a wound. If. Because they had been hurt before, these people. They had been promised and disappointed, promoted and relegated, saved from extinction and plunged back into crisis.

The hope that Danny Walsh’s season had given them was real, but it was also fragile, held at arm’s length, examined carefully before being allowed close. They believed. But they believed the way people who have been hurt before believe, with one eye on the exit.

I wanted to give them a reason to stop looking at the exit.

***

Thank you for 200 Power Stones.