Glory Of The Football Manager System

January 1st, 2018. Seven-fifteen in the morning. The DB11 idling outside a café on Beckenham High Street.

The place was called Rosie’s.

A proper café, not a chain. Formica tables, condensation on the windows, a chalkboard menu that hadn’t changed since 2003, and a woman behind the counter named Maggie who had been making full English breakfasts for builders and bus drivers and, more recently, the youngest manager in Premier League history, since before he was born.

I had discovered Rosie’s in my first week at the training ground. The coffee was strong, the sausage rolls were criminal, and Maggie didn’t care who you were or what you did for a living as long as you said please and thank you and didn’t take the last copy of the Daily Mirror.

I pushed through the door. The bell jangled. Three builders were at the corner table, high-vis jackets, tea, the Racing Post spread between them. An elderly couple by the window, sharing toast. And on the counter, arranged in a wire rack beside the till, the morning newspapers.

I stopped.

The front pages were not about politics or celebrity or the weather. They were about Crystal Palace.

The Daily Mail: ”WALSH’S TITLE CHARGE: Can the boy from Moss Side really win the Premier League?”

The Sun: ”CRYSTAL PHWOAR-LACE! Palace sit 2nd and the dream is ON.”

The Daily Telegraph: ”Crystal Palace: from relegation to title contenders in seven months.”

The Times, slightly more measured: ”Walsh’s remarkable Palace deserve their place among the elite. But can they sustain it?”

I picked up the Telegraph. Read the headline again. Title contenders. Crystal Palace. The club that had finished seventeenth last season, that had been four points from the Championship, that I had been hired to save with five matches remaining. Title contenders.

I laughed. Standing in Rosie’s café on Beckenham High Street at seven-fifteen in the morning, holding a copy of the Daily Telegraph, I laughed. Not a nervous laugh or a dismissive laugh.

A genuine, full, amused laugh, the laugh of a man who remembered stacking shelves at the Nisa on Claremont Road and was now being described as a title contender by a national broadsheet.

”Something funny, love?” Maggie said from behind the counter.

”The newspapers think I’m going to win the league, Maggie.”

”Are you?”

”Manchester City are eight points ahead of us.”

”So that’s a no, then.”

”That’s a not-this-year.”

”Fair enough. Sausage roll?”

”Please. And a coffee. The strong one.”

”They’re all strong, love. That’s the point.”

I ate the sausage roll at the counter while Maggie made my coffee.

The pastry was flaky, the sausage meat was peppery and hot, and for two minutes, standing in a café that smelled of bacon fat and instant coffee, I was not a Premier League manager or a title contender or the youngest anything in history. I was just a bloke eating a sausage roll before work. The simplicity of it was a gift.

Then I had an idea.

”Maggie. How many doughnuts have you got?”

She looked at me over her glasses. ”How many do you need?”

”Enough for about sixty people.”

”Sixty.”

”And cookies. Whatever you’ve got. Boxes of them.”

”Having a party, are we?”

”Something like that. First day back. New year. I want to bring something for the staff.”

Maggie disappeared into the back kitchen. I could hear her calling to someone named Phil, who apparently handled the baking, and whose response was a muffled exclamation that suggested sixty doughnuts at seven-twenty in the morning was not a standard request.

Five minutes later, Maggie emerged with four large bakery boxes stacked on top of each other, the cardboard warm against my hands, the smell of sugar and fried dough rising through the lids.

”Forty-eight doughnuts, twenty-four chocolate chip cookies, and twelve almond croissants because Phil had a batch ready and said you might as well take them.”

”How much?”

”For you? Sixty-five pounds.”

”Maggie, that’s way too cheap.”

”For normal people it would be ninety. You’re Palace. Phil’s a season-ticket holder. He nearly had a heart attack when Olise scored at Huddersfield. Consider the discount a thank-you for keeping him alive.”

I paid, tipped her twenty on top, and carried the four boxes to the DB11. They did not fit in the boot. They did not fit on the back seat.

I balanced three on the passenger seat and held the fourth on my lap while I drove one-handed the quarter-mile to the training ground, the coffee wedged between my knees, the Telegraph’s headline visible through the cardboard where Maggie had used a sheet of newspaper to line the bottom of the box.

Title contenders. Underneath forty-eight doughnuts. There was a metaphor in there somewhere but I was too busy trying not to spill coffee on my trousers to find it.

At the Beckenham gates, I had a problem. The security barrier required a pass card. My pass card was in my wallet. My wallet was in my jacket pocket. My jacket was underneath a box of doughnuts.

I sat in the DB11, four boxes balanced across the car, coffee between my knees, one hand on the wheel, and stared at the barrier with the helpless frustration of a man who had out-thought José Mourinho but could not out-think a car park barrier.

Dennis, the head of security, was watching from the booth. Thirty-one years at Beckenham. He had seen managers arrive in everything from a Ford Mondeo to a Ferrari. He had never seen one arrive holding forty-eight doughnuts.

He walked over, opened the barrier manually, and looked into the car. ”Morning, gaffer. That’s a lot of doughnuts.”

”Morning, Dennis. I can’t reach my pass.”

”I can see that.” He paused. ”Need a hand?”

”I need about four hands.”

Dennis called over to Martin and Steve, the two other gatekeepers on the morning shift. The three of them extracted the boxes from the DB11 with the careful, coordinated precision of men defusing a bomb.

Dennis took two boxes. Martin took one. Steve took the fourth and the coffee. I climbed out, straightened my jacket, and the four of us walked into the Beckenham training ground in a convoy, three security guards carrying bakery boxes and a Premier League manager carrying a paper cup of Rosie’s finest.

”Is this what title contenders look like?” Dennis said, shifting his grip on the boxes.

”This is exactly what title contenders look like, Dennis.”

”Thought so. My old man would have loved this. Arthur always said the best managers were the ones who brought biscuits.”

”Arthur was a wise man.”

”Arthur was a Palace fan. Same thing.”

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.