Glory Of The Football Manager System

[Dulwich. Thursday April 12. 07:14 BST.]

I woke up before the alarm and lay on my back looking at the ceiling for ten minutes without moving. Emma was asleep on her side with one hand under her cheek and one strand of red hair across her mouth that was rising and falling each time she breathed.

I had managed Crystal Palace Football Club for eleven months. Crystal Palace Football Club had been a football club for one hundred and twelve years. In one hundred and twelve years they had never won a European tie at the quarter-final stage.

In one hundred and twelve years they had never played for the right to be in a European semi-final at Selhurst Park. The closest they had ever come to playing on a continental stage that mattered was Steve Coppell’s 1990 side finishing third in the First Division and not being allowed into the UEFA Cup because the English ban had been only partially lifted.

Tonight was eight o’clock at home with a three-nil aggregate lead and a club that had never been here before. Tonight was the night the one hundred and twelve became one hundred and thirteen, not by the calendar, but by what the lads were about to put on the pitch.

I got out of bed at quarter past. Made coffee. Stood at the kitchen window looking at the back garden of the flat below ours which had a child’s trampoline and a paddling pool somebody had not put away from last August.

Emma came in at half past seven in the hoodie and joggers. Stood next to me at the window. Did not say anything for a minute. Then she put her arm round my waist.

”You all right.”

”Yeah.”

”Properly.”

”Properly. Yeah.”

She leaned her head into my shoulder.

”Eight o’clock tonight,” she said. ”Then dinner.”

”Then dinner.”

She kissed me on the side of the neck. Went back to bed for another hour. I drove to Beckenham at half eight.

[Beckenham. 10:00 BST.]

Training was twenty minutes of warm-up and forty minutes of set-piece walk-throughs against shadows. Bray took the corners. Sarah read the lineup off her clipboard.

”Pope. Joel, Tomkins, Konaté, Digne. Rúben, McArthur. Bowen, James, Gnabry. Pato.”

Mama was in the stands. Aaron, Ben, Mili, Mateo, Wilf, Eze, Christopher were all on the bench or in the stand. Wayne Hennessey had played Salzburg first leg and gone the whole ninety, so Pope got the second leg.

Konaté had not started since the second leg against Atlético on the fifteenth of March because Mama had been doing what Mama does and there had not been a reason to disturb the partnership. Tonight there was. Three-nil up and Mama in the stand and Konaté on the team sheet at home for the first time in a month.

He was the first man at the team meeting and the first man to ask me a question.

”Tomkins on my left, Gaffer.”

”On your left. Joel outside you. Lucas on the other side. You’re senior tonight. Run the back four. Talk to Pope. Talk to Rúben. We do not concede a goal. We do not concede a yard.”

”Yes, Gaffer.”

”They will have nothing. We know they will have nothing. They cannot do four at Selhurst Park. But the only way somebody scores four at Selhurst Park is if we let them think it is possible. We do not let them think it is possible.”

”Yes, Gaffer.”

I let the room break up. Konaté did not move. Stood at the front by the whiteboard with his hands in the pockets of his tracksuit looking at the team sheet which was still on the board.

”Gaffer.”

”Yeah.”

”My family come tonight. From Paris.”

”How many.”

”Eight. My grandmother is in seat block B. She has not been to a match in twelve years. She does not travel. She came tonight.”

He did not say anything else. I did not either. I put my hand on the back of his shoulder for a second. He nodded once. Went out.

[Beckenham. 16:00 BST.]

The pre-match meal was at four. Pasta, chicken, vegetables, bananas, the same meal we had eaten before every match this season. Elena Vasquez was in the dining room with Tomás and Ruth filming the lads eating which they had stopped noticing in February. James Rodríguez was talking to Pato at the corner table in Spanish, both of them too quiet for anybody else to hear. Mama was at the head of the long table laughing at something McArthur had said.

I ate with Sarah at the small table by the window.

She did not say anything for a long time.

”Daniel.”

”Yeah.”

”Tonight is bigger than tonight.”

”I know.”

”You know that this is not a normal Thursday.”

”I know.”

”All right.”

She went back to her pasta.

The bus loaded at quarter past five. Engine on at half past. We pulled out of Beckenham at twenty to six.

[Approaching Selhurst. 18:42 BST.]

The bus turned off the A212 onto Whitehorse Lane and the first flare went up.

Not at the ground. Half a mile out. Somebody had let one off on a balcony above a kebab shop on Whitehorse Lane and the red smoke was coming down the side of the building and the lad who had let it off was holding a Palace flag out of the window.

The bus driver slowed because the road was narrower than he had expected and a man in his fifties walking with his son on the pavement saw the bus and put his hands on the top of his head and stayed like that as we went past, the way you do at a goal.

Then there were two more flares.

Then there were ten.

The bus turned right onto Selhurst Road, and the road was a corridor of red and blue smoke and people pressed up against the railings on both sides and banners stretched across between the lamp posts from one side of the road to the other.

EUROPEAN NIGHT AT SELHURST.

ONE HUNDRED AND TWELVE YEARS.

GLAD ALL OVER. WALSH.

Konaté was at the window two rows behind me. I heard him say something in French I could not translate. I saw him cross himself.

Pato was at the window across the aisle from him with his phone up filming. Pato had played in the Maracanã. Pato had played in the Allianz. Pato was filming.

Pope was looking at the road outside the bus like a man who was not certain whether the road was on fire or whether the air had simply turned that colour.

I had my hand flat against the cold of the window and the cold of the window was the only thing keeping me on the bus.

There were thousands of them.

There had been a Holmesdale flag fund. We had heard about the fund the week before. Five thousand quid raised in nine days. Flares ordered from a supplier in Bremen on Saturday. Distributed on Tuesday at the Beehive pub on the corner of Holmesdale Road.

Two for each of the lads in the supporters’ group who could be trusted not to set fire to a balcony. One thousand four hundred in total. We had not known how many of them would get lit.

We had not known the fans on Whitehorse Lane and Selhurst Road and Park Road and the streets that fed into the ground would be three deep on every pavement for half a mile before the bus arrived.

We had not known the children would be on shoulders.

We had not known the older men would be holding their grandchildren’s hands.

We had not known the woman at the corner of Selhurst Park Road would be holding a framed photograph of her husband who had died in October at the age of seventy-eight, who had had a season ticket since 1971, and that she would hold the photograph up to the window of the bus as it went past so her husband could see what he had not lived to see.

The bus crawled at six miles an hour for a quarter of a mile.

A flare went off four feet from the side panel and the bus driver said Oh! God! under his breath and kept driving because there was nowhere else to go and the lads pressing the flare against the bus from the outside meant no harm by it.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.