Glory Of The Football Manager System

[10:52 BST.]

Sarah did not get up.

She had one more thing. I could see her deciding whether to say it, which Sarah almost never did, because Sarah said everything the second she’d decided it was true.

”There’s a thing with Mama,” she said. ”It’s not mine to tell you. But you should go and find him before he goes home, because he won’t bring it to you, and he should.”

”Where is he?”

”Boot room. On his own. He’s been in there twenty minutes.”

I found him in the boot room.

He was sitting on the low bench under the pegs with a phone in his hand, not using it, just holding it, the way you hold a phone after a call has ended and you have not decided what the call meant yet. The boots hung in rows above him. It smelled of leather and dubbin and the spray Rebecca uses. Drip went a tap somewhere that the kit lads never fully turn off.

”Mama.”

”Daniel.”

I sat down on the bench next to him.

We did not say anything for a bit. That is allowed, with Mama. He is the only man at the club you can sit in silence with and have it mean something rather than nothing.

”My father,” he said, eventually.

”Yeah.”

”You remember. On the bus from Wembley. I told you.”

”I remember.”

”The cancer is in his bones now. It moved. The doctor in Massy told my brother on Sunday. Six months was what they said in April. Now they do not say six months. Now they say it differently. They use the words you use when they have stopped telling you months.”

Drip.

”Mama.”

”He cannot fly, Daniel. That is the thing. He wanted to come to Lyon. It is the first European final this club has ever had and his son is the captain and he wanted to be in the stand. And he cannot fly, because his body cannot take the cabin, the pressure, the sitting, all of it. My brother rang to tell me. He is not coming. I have been sitting in here telling myself it is fine, that he will watch it on the television in Massy the way he watched the cup, that this is enough.”

He turned the phone over in his hands.

”It is not enough,” he said. ”But I am the captain and I cannot walk into that meeting you just had and be a man whose father is dying. So I sat in here instead. I will be fine in five minutes. I am always fine in five minutes.”

I did not say anything for a moment.

Here is the thing I was not going to say to him, and did not say to him, because it was mine and not his and Friday was mine.

On Friday morning I was driving my mother to a graveside in Moss Side that I had not stood at in fourteen years, because I had spent fourteen years telling myself that the man under it knew what I thought of him without me having to go and stand there and say it. I had run out of time with my father a long time ago.

I had run out of it without noticing I was running out of it, which is the only way anyone ever runs out of it. And here was Mama, who had not run out of it yet, sitting in a boot room deciding to accept that the last big thing his father would ever want to see, he would see on a television three hundred miles away.

Not while I had a phone in my pocket.

”Your dad’s not flying commercial,” I said.

Mama looked at me.

”He’s not sitting in a cabin for two hours with the pressure and the strangers. You’re right, he can’t do that. So he’s not doing that. There’s an air ambulance company the club’s used twice, when Mateo went to the specialist in Munich and once before that. A medical jet. A doctor on board, a nurse, a bed, not a seat, a bed, oxygen if he needs it, the whole thing.

We fly your father and your brother and your mother to Lyon Thursday morning, we have him at the Groupama in a private box with a medical team beside him, and we fly him home Thursday night the same way. He does not sit up once if he does not want to. He watches his son captain Crystal Palace in a European final, and then he goes home to Massy in a bed in the sky.”

Mama did not say anything.

”I’ll ring Sarah now,” I said. ”It’s done before you’ve laced your boots. Don’t argue with me about the money, because I’m not the one paying it, the club is, and Steve will sign it off before I’ve finished the sentence, and if Steve doesn’t I will, and I won’t miss it. Your father is coming to Lyon, Mama. He is going to be in that stadium. That is happening.”

He put his face in his hands.

Mamadou Sakho is six foot two and he is the hardest man at this football club and he has played a hundred and more matches at the back for this team and taken elbows and studs and the worst the Premier League has and got up every time without a sound.

He put his face in his hands in the boot room and his shoulders went, once, and I put my hand on the back of his neck the way he does to Konaté, and I left it there, and I did not say anything else, because there was nothing else that needed saying.

Drip went the tap.

After a while he sat up. Wiped his face with the heel of his hand. Did not apologise for it, which was right, because there was nothing to apologise for.

”Why,” he said. ”Why this. It is a lot, Daniel. The jet. The doctors. For one match.”

I thought about Friday. The drive to Moss Side. My mother in the passenger seat. The graveside I had not been able to make myself visit for fourteen years.

”Because I had a father once,” I said, ”and I ran out of time to show him a thing I wanted to show him, and I have never got that time back, and I am not going to stand here with the means to make sure you don’t run out of yours and do nothing about it. Your dad sees this one, Mama. In person. With his own eyes. While he still can.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

”On Friday,” he said. ”Sarah told me. You go to your father.”

”I go to my father.”

”All right.” He stood up. Picked his boots off the peg. He was steady again, the way he is always steady, the captain again. ”Then we win on Thursday for both of them. My father in the stand and your father in the ground. Both of them watching. We win it for both.”

”Both of them,” I said.

[The Car Park. 17:40 BST.]

I rang Sarah from the boot room and the jet was booked before Mama reached the car park. Steve signed it off in a text of four words. Sarah had the medical company on the phone inside ten minutes and Mama’s brother in Massy inside twenty.

I came out to the car park at twenty to six and the rain had finally packed in. The training pitches were empty and going gold at the edges the way they do in late May when the light hangs on. Somewhere behind the academy building a ball went thunk against a wall, once, and stopped, and I knew without looking it was Olise, getting his last ten minutes in before someone made him go home.

Two days to Lyon.

Two days to Wenger’s last ninety minutes and Aubameyang’s channel and Aaron who doesn’t give yards and Mama half a yard deep and a sixteen-year-old knife in the drawer and Eze the lighthouse and Bojan’s send-off. Two days to a medical jet lifting off from a private strip with a dying man in a bed in it who bought his boy his first pair of boots in Massy forty years ago and is going to watch that boy lift a European trophy or break trying.

And then Friday. My mother in the car. Moss Side. The thing I had carried since I was fourteen, finally going where it had always needed to go.

Thunk, went the ball, one more time, behind the building.

I got in the car and drove home to Dulwich.

[Two days to Lyon.]

***

Thank you for 100 Power Stones,