Glory Of The Football Manager System

At the corner of Holmesdale Road I saw a boy of six or seven on his father’s shoulders with a Palace flag in one hand and the other hand stretched out trying to touch the side of the bus as it went past. He could not reach.

His father lifted him higher. The boy still could not reach. The father stopped trying and just held him up there with both arms, in the smoke, in the noise, on a Thursday night in April outside a football ground neither of them had thought they would ever see a European semi-final at.

The boy was crying. The father was crying. The men either side of the father were crying.

I turned my face away from the window because I did not want the lads on the bus to see what I had just seen.

Sarah saw anyway.

She did not say anything. She put one hand flat on the seat between us. Did not look at me. Watched the road. Gave me the minute.

I gave myself the minute too.

Crystal Palace had brought me down from Manchester in the summer of 2016. I had been at Moss Side Athletic in the county league for two years before that, managing a squad of plumbers and roofers and one builder who could not run.

Palace had been the only club in England that had picked up the phone, and they had picked it up to offer me the under-eighteens. Ten months in I had won the FA Youth Cup. Two months after that the under-eighteen Premier League National.

I had to put the kids into the UEFA Youth League the following autumn because the senior side had not qualified for the Champions League and I was not going to wait on them. The senior side was not going to qualify for the Champions League under Alan Pardew. So I had decided to qualify the kids myself.

Then Pardew was sacked five matches from the end of last season with the club five points off the relegation zone, and Steve Parish had pointed at the twenty-seven-year-old in the academy office on the twenty-third of April and given me the senior side for the five. We had won the five. Permanent contract in the summer.

Eleven months. One Carabao Cup on the cabinet in the executive corridor. Second in the Premier League with seventy-seven points and seven matches left. A Europa League quarter-final won at the end of the night I was driving towards. An FA Cup semi-final at Wembley on the twenty-first.

Forty-two wins from fifty-two matches in all competitions. Twenty unbeaten in the league. Pope, Konaté, Mateo, Rúben, James, Mama, Gnabry, Aaron, Eze, Olise, Aviero, Blake, Mitchell - almost every one of them either signed by me, brought through by me, or kept at the club because I had been at the club. And the academy lads in the UEFA Youth League quarter-final because I had been right about them too.

The bus moved on.

The men on the pavement were singing my name. The women were crying. The children on their fathers’ shoulders were cheering for the team, and the older men with their grandchildren’s hands in theirs were watching the bus the way they had watched the 1990 team’s bus go past them on this same road twenty-eight years ago when they had been the ones being held up.

A hundred and twelve years of Crystal Palace Football Club. Eleven months of mine.

More in the eleven than any man before me had done in any of the hundred and twelve.

I was who I thought I was.

I had become Crystal Palace.

The bus turned into the players’ entrance at quarter to seven.

[Selhurst Park. 19:50 BST.]

The Holmesdale tifo dropped during the anthems.

It was the full width of the stand. White cloth. Two photographs side by side. On the left, Steve Coppell on the touchline at Wembley in 1990 in a sheepskin coat with one arm raised, twenty-eight years old in the picture, the youngest manager to take a side to an FA Cup Final at the time, looking at something off to the right that the photograph would not show.

On the right, me. On the touchline at Anfield in December. Twenty-eight years old in the picture. Looking off to the same right. Arms folded. The same shape of jaw. The same set of the shoulders.

Across the top of the tifo, in foot-high letters:

ONE OF YOURS.

ONE OF OURS.

The Holmesdale sang Glad All Over with the rest of the ground for the first time I had heard the whole ground sing it together without the half-empty corners not joining in. Twenty-five thousand voices. The Dave Clark Five song from nineteen-sixty-three that had been the Palace song since 1968.

The chorus took the length of the chorus and ended with the crowd doing the four claps and the bench at our end coming to their feet to do the four claps with them, and Konaté standing on the centre circle with his head tilted back, looking up at the underside of the East Stand roof, mouthing along with the words even though he did not know what most of them meant.

The whistle went at five past eight.

The match was eighty-two minutes of football and eight minutes of celebration.

Salzburg made one substitution at half time and four more in the second half. They were playing for pride and there was not much of it. Marco Rose stood at the touchline with his hands in his pockets for the whole ninety minutes and looked across at me once, in the seventy-first, and raised his hand in something between a salute and an apology. I raised mine back.

Bowen scored in the twenty-eighth. James Rodríguez set him up from the edge of the box with a pass that Pirlo would have signed off on. Bowen went off in the seventy-third for Olise. Pato hit the post in the eighty-fourth.

Lainer scored a consolation in the eighty-ninth from a corner. Pope did not really go for it because he had not been beaten in five matches and he would rather concede a free header than dive at the feet of a centre-back in the eighty-ninth minute of a tie won three matches ago.

One-one at Selhurst. Four-one on aggregate.

We were through to the semi-finals.

The whistle went and the away end did not boo because there was nobody left in the away end to boo. The home end did the only thing the home end was ever going to do.