Glory Of The Football Manager System

The longest night of the summer turned out not to be the one I expected.

I had gone back across town to Emma and her family braced to lie awake till morning, waiting on Jessica and a board and a federation eight hundred miles apart deciding my summer for me.

And I slept like a stone, because Emma made me, the way she does, talked nonsense at me in the dark until the World Cup went quiet in my head and I went under with my hand on her hip.

The answer was there when I woke.

Jessica had not rung. She had sent four words, which off Jessica is a fanfare. Done. It’s yours. Conditions held.

Both things I had asked for, the staff and the cameras, won overnight while I slept. The board squared. The federation signed.

Kovacic and James going through Dougie’s hands by the weekend so I would leave nothing half done at Palace. I read it twice, sat on the edge of the hotel bed with Emma still asleep behind me, and let it land. By breakfast I was a World Cup manager.

The federation sent the squad through that afternoon. Twenty-three names. I read them once, in the car, and made myself stop, because once I start I do not stop, and I wanted one more evening of being a man who had just got engaged before I became a man with a tournament to win.

The evening did not last. Emma went under about eleven, the long drive and the longer week finally taking her.

She sleeps the same way she does everything, all in, no half measures. Face turned into the pillow, the red of her hair across it, one bare shoulder out of the duvet where it had slipped, one foot pushed out the bottom the way she runs hot.

The ring caught the streetlight every time she breathed. She had reached for me on her way down, got a fist in my T-shirt and said come to bed, Walsh, the world can wait an hour, and I had said two minutes, and she had known I was lying and gone to sleep anyway, trusting me to lie to her about it, which is its own kind of love.

I lay next to the warm of her a while and could not. There was a squad in my head I had never met and eighteen days to learn them.

So I got up quiet. Took the iPad and the notebook to the little desk by the window, put the lamp on its lowest, turned my back to the bed so the light would not reach her. Manchester out the window, orange and low and going to sleep.

The list was open on the iPad where I had left it. Twenty-three names. I had wanted to wait till the camp to do this properly, with grass and a ball and my staff round me. I could not wait. I never can.

No more putting it off.

I opened the list and let it come.

It is hard to explain what happens when I look at a player. It is not a voice and it is not a screen, not really. It is more that when I look at a man, properly look, with everything I have read and watched and felt about him sat behind my eyes, a shape settles over him. Numbers, and not only numbers.

A truth I can hold. I have had it since I woke into this second life with a dead man’s debts behind me and a living man’s eyes, and I have stopped asking what it is and only use it. I had not switched it on in earnest since Lyon. For three weeks there had been nothing to point it at but a parade and a ring.

I pointed it at Morocco.

The first one I pulled up, I already owned. I did not need a list for him.

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ACHRAF HAKIMI · Right-back · Age 19 Current Ability 138 / Potential 178 Pace 17 · Acceleration 18 · Stamina 17 · Work Rate 16 Crossing 14 · Off the Ball 15 · Decisions 13 · Composure 13

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I sat back. There it was, in front of me, the thing I had seen on bad streams at two in the morning building a Palace shopping list, the thing the rest of them had not clocked yet. Nineteen years old.

The legs of a sprinter and a ceiling you could not see the top of, and a head that had not caught the legs up. The decisions a beat slow. The composure a thing that would come in two years, or come this summer if somebody put a hand on his shoulder and told him to trust it.

I wrote his name at the top of a clean page. Under it, one word. Unleash.

You do not coach a boy like that to be careful. You point him at a touchline and you tell the other ten to cover the grass he leaves, because the grass he leaves is worth less than the mess he makes at the other end.

Then the spine.

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MEHDI BENATIA · Centre-back, captain · Age 31 Current 152 / Potential 152 Positioning 16 · Marking 16 · Heading 16 · Strength 15 · Bravery 17 · Leadership 17 · Composure 15

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A finished man. A Juventus centre-half with no ceiling left to chase because he was stood on it. And the leadership reading told me the thing I needed most on a night like this.

There was already a man in that dressing room the others looked to. I would not have to build a captain. I would have to win one. Those are different jobs and the second is harder.

Romain Saiss beside him. Twenty-eight, Wolves, left-sided, Current 138. Honest. Good enough on the ball to start a move, hard enough off it to end one.

The two of them had gone a whole qualifying campaign without conceding. Not one goal, the list reminded me, across the entire group. You do not do that by luck. The back of this team was not a problem to solve. It was a floor to stand on.

The goalkeeper made me stop. Munir Mohamedi, twenty-nine, and the thing behind my eyes hung over him the way it does when a man’s numbers and a man’s nerve might not be the same size. Current 124.

Never played top-flight club football and three weeks from walking out in front of Ronaldo. Bounou behind him, younger, Girona, better eyes, potential a clear notch up. I wrote them both and put a question mark between them and left it. Some questions you do not answer in a hotel room. You answer them on a pitch, when you see which one talks.

Then the midfield, and this was where the night got interesting.

Karim El Ahmadi first. Thirty-three, Feyenoord, the deep one. Current 140.

The metronome. The man who sat in front of the back four and asked nothing of himself but to be where he was meant to be, so everyone ahead of him could go and play. You do not notice a player like El Ahmadi until you take him out and the whole thing falls in.

Ahead of him, the two I kept coming back to.

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MBARK BOUSSOUFA · Attacking midfield · Age 33 · Current 142 Technique 18 · First Touch 17 · Vision 17 · Passing 16 · Flair 16 Pace 9 · Stamina 11

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Tiny. Thirty-three and playing out in the Emirates now, off the radar of every European scout who had stopped looking.

The thing behind my eyes lit him up the second I focused. A man who had forgotten more about keeping a ball than half this tournament would ever learn. He would not run.

At thirty-three in a Russian July he could not run. But you do not ask a watchmaker to sprint. You give him the ball in the pocket between their lines and let him slow the game down to the speed he wants it played at.

And then the one that made me put the pen down.

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HAKIM ZIYECH · Attacking midfield · Age 25 · Current 154 / Potential 162 Technique 18 · Passing 17 · Vision 17 · Flair 17 · Long Shots 17 · Set Pieces 18 Decisions 14 · Teamwork 11

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I read it twice. Then I read the last two once more, because that was the whole man, sat there in two numbers next to each other. Technique 18. Teamwork 11.

The best player in the squad by a stretch. The Ajax man the rest of the league could not live with. Fifteen assists in a season, a left foot that could pick a lock, every set piece a chance. The one who would decide whether this Morocco was a brave loser or something more.

And a teamwork number down in the cellar, which told me he would drift, and sulk, and want the ball when the team needed him to run without it, and vanish for ten minutes in a strop and then win you the game in the eleventh.