Glory Of The Football Manager System

[The Dressing Room. 00:20 CEST.]

Chaos. Beautiful chaos.

Emma was up on a bench beside Iza, the pair of them filming the carnage on their phones, my medal swinging round her neck every time she laughed.

POP. POP-POP.

The alcohol-free came out by the crate, the club’s habit since Wembley, ours now, and this time it was Konaté who sprayed first. Konaté, who three months ago did not know what the spray felt like, up on the physio table emptying a magnum over the whole room with his face like thunder and his heart like Christmas.

FSSSSHHHH.

The rest of it I could not give you in order if you paid me, a room gone to noise and singing in four languages, Mandanda conducting it off a kit hamper because a keeper going home to Marseille gets to conduct whatever he likes.

Olise sat in the corner with his medal still on and his phone against his ear, and through everything, through all the noise, you could see his mouth making the same shape over and over.

Dad. Dad. Dad.

His old man was somewhere up in that stand in his Cameroon federation polo, the man who played international football and never once pushed his boy, and his boy had just won a European final at sixteen, and there were not enough words in either of their languages so Olise was just saying the one.

My phone buzzed against my chest. Bzzt.

Mum.

I watched every minute. Margaret came round with her own chair. Ride your bus in London tomorrow and let them all see you. Then I will see you Sunday, and you will bring the cup, and you will not argue with me. Eat something today, Daniel. You look thin on the television.

I read it twice and put the phone away carefully, like it might break.

Steve Parish stuck his head round the door at half twelve, took one look at the room, and got a magnum of the alcohol-free over his suit from four directions at once. FSSSH. He stood there dripping in a thousand pounds of tailoring with the biggest grin I have ever seen on a chairman.

”DANIEL WALSH! THIRTEEN MONTHS AGO I GAVE YOU FIVE MATCHES!”

”YOU DID, STEVE!”

”WORST PIECE OF FORECASTING IN THE HISTORY OF THIS FOOTBALL CLUB!”

The parade had been booked for a week. Roads, police, the open-top bus, the lot, all of it quietly put in the diary the day after we knocked Sporting out, because Steve is superstitious about everything bar his own football club.

Tomorrow afternoon, Croydon to Selhurst, Whitehorse Lane and Park Road and Holmesdale Road, every yard of it. South London had known for days. There were flags in SE25 windows that had been up since Tuesday. They had been ready for this longer than we had.

Tomorrow belonged to them. A hundred and thirteen years of them, and they could have every minute of it, because in the end everything this club does, it does for them. Sunday belonged to me. Sunday I had somewhere else to be, eight hundred miles north, that no bus was going to.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I noticed the red light was gone.

Tomás’s camera had been six inches from my face since the eighth of January. Every session, every presser, every coach, every bad night and every good one, that little red light. It was not here. None of them were. Elena, Tomás, Ruth, the whole Netflix crew who film everything, gone, on the one night above all others you would point a camera at.

Bzzt. Elena.

We put the cameras away at full time. Some nights belong to you and not to the lens. See you on the bus tomorrow. And Sunday, wherever you and your mum are going, the cameras stay home.

She knew about Sunday. Of course she did, she had filmed me for five months. She had filmed everything, and chosen what not to.

Some things are ours. Not theirs.

[The Pitch. 01:40 CEST.]

The stadium was nearly empty when I went back out. I do it after every final now, apparently, though nobody told me it was a habit until it was one. Confetti over the grass like the morning after a wedding. The away end a bare concrete cliff with one steward sweeping it, swish... swish...

Mama was already out there. I’d have bet on it. Sat in the centre circle in his flip-flops, medal on, arms over his knees.

I sat down next to him. Wet grass through my suit trousers in about four seconds. I left it.

”He’s asleep at the hotel,” Mama said. ”My mother says he held the radio the whole way to the car.” He turned his head. ”In the boot room on Tuesday you said we win it for both of them. One of them saw it.”

”Yeah.” It came out rough. ”He did.”

”Sunday you go to the other one. You tell him all of it, the whole thirteen months, and you do not give him the short version.” He looked back out at the empty bowl. ”Fourteen years is a lot to say, Daniel. Do not try to say it standing up. My father had six months, then he had less, then tonight he had a trophy on his knees and twenty thousand people singing at his window. Time does what it wants. So Sunday, you take yours.”

I had nothing to say to that, so I said nothing, which is allowed, with Mama.

When I got up, Emma was at the mouth of the tunnel where she’d been the whole time, my jacket still on her, my medal still round her neck, and she just held out her hand.

The trophy went on the bus in a seat of its own, belt clicked round the marble, clack, because the kit man takes no chances. Dann asleep against a window with his medal in his fist and the armband still on his sleeve. Emma under my arm, my jacket on her, the medal on her chest, her head going heavy on my shoulder, all of it staying exactly where it was.

Tomorrow, an open-top bus the length of South London, every street from Whitehorse Lane to Selhurst, for the people who had waited a hundred and thirteen years for it. I would stand on the top deck and give them all of it, and somewhere in the middle of it I would promise them more without saying one word out loud. So much more.

And Sunday, eight hundred miles north, two graves in Moss Side I had not stood in front of in fourteen years, my mum beside me, and the cup she had told me to bring.

In a safe in my office at Palace, a small box sat waiting for a shut door and Emma’s face when I finally got it right.

Five trophies in thirteen months, and I was twenty-eight years old.

I had no idea what we were going to do next, and I could not wait to find out.

[Tomorrow: the parade.]

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Thank you to Sir nameyeles for the support