Glory Of The Football Manager System

[Kickoff. 20:45 CEST.]

BLEEP.

[8’.]

Wilf won it, that’s how it started. He ran Bellerín into the corner flag, shoulder to shoulder, thud, and Bellerín shoved it out for a corner because Bellerín was already sick of him after eight minutes.

Our end stood up. They knew. The whole club knew what the first corner was.

Bojan jogged over to take it. Wiped the ball on his shirt. Set it down with two hands, the way the La Masia ones do, like the ball was borrowed and he’d promised to bring it back unmarked.

In the box, the furniture moved. Christopher walked backwards into Ospina, leaning, big and friendly and completely illegal in spirit and completely legal in fact, hands up like a man surrendering, bodyweight like a man not.

Three of ours stacked at the near post in a queue. And Konaté wandered off towards the edge of the box, away from everything, hands on hips, like a lad whose mind was on his dinner.

Ospina’s eyes went everywhere. The stack. Christopher’s back. The stack again.

Bojan raised one hand.

Whump.

Flat. Hard. Not floated, driven, to the penalty spot, to nowhere, to a patch of empty grass.

And the lad whose mind was on his dinner arrived at the patch of empty grass like a freight train.

Konaté, full sprint off the blind side, eight yards of runway, leaping over the wreckage of Christopher and Ospina and meeting it with his forehead at the top of his jump.

THUD.

Top corner. Ospina never moved. Ospina never had a chance to fancy it or not fancy it. It was past him while he was still finding Konaté in the crowd.

RAAAAAAAAAAAH.

[Crystal Palace 1-0 Arsenal. Konaté, 8’.]

Konaté did not smile. Konaté ran to the corner, to the cliff of red and blue, and stood in front of twenty thousand of them with his arms out wide and his face like thunder, and twenty thousand people lost their minds, and the drum went DUMDUMDUMDUMDUM, and Christopher picked him up off the ground from behind and roared something in his ear.

On their bench, Wenger sat down slowly and wrote something in a small notebook.

KB-22. Two days after Bray said the words. The first corner of the match.

I turned to the bench. Bray was already looking at me. He raised one eyebrow about three millimetres, which for Bray is a cartwheel.

[24’.]

Then football did the thing football does, which is remind you it heard you celebrating.

It came from nothing. A throw-in, their half, going nowhere. Xhaka took it off Özil and let it sit on his left boot for half a second, and I heard Bray come off the bench behind me shouting ”RÚBEN, THE DIAGONAL,” and Rúben was already stepping, but you cannot press a man’s imagination.

Xhaka hit it sixty yards without backlift.

WHUMP.

A flat, dipping, horrible ball, dropping out of the lights over the top of everything, and it bounced once in that no-man’s-acre in front of our box, and Konaté went to attack the bounce, front foot, exactly the way I’d told him to attack everything.

He missed it by half a boot.

Half a boot. The ball kissed off the top of his toe instead of his laces and skidded on instead of dying, and the whole shape of us turned inside out in one heartbeat, because Mama was where Mama was supposed to be, covering Aaron’s channel, and the hole was suddenly in the middle where Konaté used to be, and there was a yellow-booted blur in the hole that had started running before Xhaka ever touched the ball.

The run is the first thing. The ball is the second thing.

Aubameyang took one touch.

He did not look up. He had decided before it arrived.

Thud.

Low, past Pope’s left hand, in off the post, clang, the cruellest sound in football.

[Crystal Palace 1-1 Arsenal. Aubameyang, 24’.]

Their end detonated. The noise rolled over the pitch like weather.

Konaté stood on the spot where the bounce had beaten him and did not move. Stared at the grass. Both fists clenched at his sides.

Mama got to him in four strides. Grabbed him by the back of the neck, pulled his head in, forehead to forehead, and shouted something in French over the noise, two inches from his face. Konaté shouted something back. Mama shook him once, hard, the way you shake a gate to check it’s still hung right, and pushed him back towards the halfway line.

Aaron jogged past me on the touchline chasing the restart.

”Not his fault, gaffer!” he shouted, pointing back at Konaté. ”That’s not his fault! That ball was filth!”

It was filth. Sixty yards onto a sixpence, the one weapon we’d named and couldn’t unload. On their bench Wenger had not celebrated. He’d just nodded, once, and written in the notebook again.

[41’.]

And then they twisted the knife, four minutes before the break, with the exact blade Bray had held up in the video room.

Özil drifted. That’s all he did. He drifted right, into the pocket between Chilwell and Neves, the place he goes when he’s decided to be on, and nobody could follow him without leaving a door open, and the door that opened was Bellerín, overlapping, because Wilf had pressed up high hunting the next goal and just this once didn’t get back.

Özil slid it into Bellerín’s stride without looking at him.

The cut-back came low and hard across the six-yard line, behind Mama, behind Konaté, behind everybody who deals in first balls, arriving at the penalty spot where second balls live.

And arriving with it, late, from deep, on the burst, exactly on time, was Aaron Ramsey.

Mili was two strides behind him. Two strides. He’d tracked him sixty yards and lost him for the last five.

BANG.

Side netting, inside of the post, gone.

[Crystal Palace 1-2 Arsenal. Ramsey, 41’.]

”FUCK!” Mili’s voice carried over everything, over fifty-six thousand people, both hands on his head, screaming at the sky. ”FUCK! FUCK!”

Neves got to him first. Took his wrists. Pulled his hands down off his head and held them and talked, low and fast, until Mili stopped looking at the sky and looked at him.

On the touchline four feet from me, Bray said, very quietly, to nobody: ”You do not lose Ramsey on the late run.”

”Bray.”

”I said it Tuesday.”

”Bray. Not now.”

”Tracked him sixty yards.” He pulled his cap down. ”Lost him for five.”

Their end was singing Wenger’s name now. Twenty-two years of a song, and the old man in the long coat stood in his technical area with his hands behind his back, not celebrating this either, just looking up at the scoreboard like a man checking the time of a train he’d waited his whole life for.

[45’+1.]

BLEEP. BLEEP.

Half-time.

The lads came off with their heads every way. Konaté straight down the tunnel, first, alone, jaw working. Mili with Neves still attached to his arm. Wilf ripping his sock tape off as he walked because Wilf rips his sock tape off when he’s furious with himself.

Bojan last, unhurried, scooping up the match ball that had rolled to the touchline and flipping it to the fourth official with the outside of his boot, calm as a man leaving a café, a man in the middle of a promised ninety with forty-five of it still owed to him.

I stopped at the mouth of the tunnel and looked up. Right, high, the box on the halfway line.

The old man was on his feet. Blanket on the floor. Nurse hovering. He had the radio pressed to one ear and his other fist was up, shaking, at the pitch, at the night, at all of it, and even from down here I could see his mouth moving, and I would have bet the whole club he was not telling anyone it was over.

His son had not lost a header. His son’s team was forty-five minutes from losing a final.

Behind me, fifty-six thousand voices. In front of me, a dressing room with a hole in it.

Forty-five minutes between Arsène Wenger and the only thing football had never given him.

I pulled the door open.

[HALF-TIME: Crystal Palace 1-2 Arsenal.]