Glory Of The Football Manager System

”And I’m stood here on the first day, before we’ve kicked a ball, to tell you the people who wrote that have not watched what I’ve watched.”

Flat. No shouting. The way you say a thing you actually mean and want a man to hear once and not forget.

Then I gave them the only real answers I was ever going to give, because there were honest questions buried under all the noise and a few of them deserved a straight reply, and answering the fair ones in my own time, unasked, is a different thing entirely from standing at a desk being shouted at.

”Two things people have a right to ask, so I’ll answer them before they do. One. Is this fair on Crystal Palace.” I nodded, like the question was a good one, because it was.

”It’s the best thing I’ll ever do for them. There’s a deal in this that takes that football club somewhere it’s been trying to get to for years, and when I’m home you’ll all see it, and you’ll understand why a chairman as sharp as mine said yes. They’re not losing a manager for six weeks. They’re gaining something that lasts a lot longer than six weeks. Two.”

I held up a second finger. ”Do I know I’ve been handed Spain and Portugal in the group. The two best players on the planet in one group of four.” A beat. ”Yes. I can read a draw. I’ve known since the draw. And I took the job anyway, on purpose, with my eyes open, which might tell you something about what I think this team is.”

I folded the sheet into my pocket.

”We assemble Monday. Crans-Montana, up in the Swiss mountains, where the air’s thin and the legs learn to carry more than they think they can, and where there’s no cameras and no cafés and nothing to do but turn into a team. We’ve a fortnight. A closed-door game at the back end of it to see where we are. Then Russia, and Iran first, in St Petersburg, and we’ll talk again then.”

I gave the camera the last of it. ”I’ll not promise you we’ll win it. I’d be a fool and you’d be right not to believe me. I’ll tell you the one thing I know for certain instead. Whatever this team’s supposed to be, it’s going to be more than that. I’ve seen it. They’ve just not seen it yet. Dix-huit jours. Eighteen days.”

A beat, the last of it, straight down the lens. ”À bientôt dans les montagnes. See you in the mountains.”

One nod. Somebody cut it.

For a second nobody in the room said anything at all. The federation officer by the door was looking at me like I had grown a second head and it had spoken Arabic too.

Steele just shook his own head slowly, side to side, the way you do at a magic trick you cannot work out. Bray had his arms folded and a small private grin on, the grin of a man who has worked with me long enough to enjoy being surprised and to have half expected it anyway.

Then Marcus, who had a second screen up in the corner, Sky’s output, sound low, made a noise and waved me over. ”Walsh. Walsh, come here, you have to see this. He’s on. He’s actually on right now.”

He turned the sound up.

And there he was. The same man.

The former England one, the one who four hours earlier had sat in that studio and told eleven million people I could not say a word to my own players, could not name their back four, asked had I even been to Morocco and answered it himself, no, no, and no, and sat back pleased.

They had him back on the desk for live reaction the second I started, because of course they did, he was their man, he was the one who had called it.

I caught him mid-sentence.

He was halfway through saying it again, that the federation must be mad, that they had hired a manager who would need a translator to take his first team talk, and the producer must have been screaming into his ear because his face did a thing I will remember for a long time.

The certainty went first. Just slid off. He stopped talking with his mouth still open. His eyes went off-camera to a monitor, came back, went off again. And the host next to him, who had clearly just been told what was actually happening on the feed, leaned in and said the words that finished him.

”For viewers just joining us, ah, Daniel Walsh is, he’s delivering this entire squad announcement in, that’s fluent French he’s speaking there, he’s, ”

”That’s not, ” the pundit started.

”That’s fluent French.”

A silence on the desk. Two seconds of dead studio air, which on live television is a year.

The pundit looked at the monitor, the monitor that was showing me calmly reading out a World Cup squad in the exact language he had bet his afternoon I did not have, and he had nothing. The man who had not stopped talking since one o’clock had nothing to say. He reached for his water.

Marcus made a sound like a kettle. ”He’s drinking his water. Look at him. He’s hiding in his glass of water on live telly.”

On the screen, the bottom third had panicked into action, white subtitles thrown up live and getting it wrong, Ziyech coming out as a town in Belgium, the producers doing the only thing left to them, which was admit in scrolling text that they could not keep up with the man they had spent the day calling a fraud.

And the thing they could not do, the one thing, was cut away. You do not cut away from this. You sit your expert on the desk and you let the country watch him watch the proof that he was wrong, in real time, with his own water in his hand.

I did not say one word about it. Not on camera, not after. That was the whole point. You do not stand at a desk and tell people you can do a thing. You do the thing, in front of all of them, and you let the man who said you couldn’t sit there on live television and find out at the same moment as everyone else.

”Headline’s gone,” Marcus said, scrolling now, gleeful. ”It’s already gone. Walsh announces Morocco squad in fluent French. That’s the back page. That’s everyone’s back page. They’ve had to bin whatever they wrote at one o’clock.”

”That’s the idea,” I said.

”Does Jessica know you can do that?” Marcus said.

”Jessica finds out same as everyone. On the telly.”

Bray clapped me once on the shoulder, eyebrows up, the old fox. ”Crans-Montana. Thin air. You devious article. You’re going to march them up a mountain for a fortnight, aren’t you.”

”I’m going to find out who they are up a mountain for a fortnight,” I said. ”Comes to the same thing in the end.”

And that was the whole press operation. No desk. No forty hands. No row, in a language they had bet the house I did not have. By the time anyone out beyond the fence worked out what they had been handed, I was already gone, out the back service road with my collar up, the tyres going crackle over the loose stone, the chaos at the front gate shrinking in the wing mirror to a row of dishes pointed at nobody and nothing.

Emma rang before we’d reached the main road.

”You absolute,” she said when I picked up, and stopped, and she was not laughing. Her voice had gone low and rough in a way it does not go in the middle of a working afternoon.

”I watched it. Of course I watched it. And about thirty seconds in I worked out what you were doing, and I had to put the laptop down, Daniel, because I could not see the screen straight. Four hours after that man told the country you couldn’t order a coffee in it, and you stood there and did the whole thing in it, to the whole country, and didn’t so much as blink.”

”I had to do something with it.”

”Do not be modest about it. Not to me. I got it first, in my own kitchen, four words against my mouth, and I have been good for nothing since. I sat through an entire edit and heard not one second of it. I keep...” she stopped, and when she came back her voice had dropped further, no performance left in it, just want.

”I keep hearing you say it. I’m not all right, Daniel. You’ve left me not all right and you’re in a car going the wrong way.”

”I’m twenty minutes out.”

”Make it fifteen.” A breath, the warm one all the way through the phone now, gone serious with it.

”The chef’s gone home. There’s nobody here. I’m not wearing the work armour and I’m not going to be wearing much else by the time you’re through that door, and the first thing you are going to do when you walk in, before you put your bag down, before you say a word to me in English, is say something to me in French. I don’t care what. Read me the shipping forecast in it. I have never wanted anything the way I want that right now and I am a little bit ashamed of myself and not ashamed enough to stop.”

”J’arrive,” I said. I’m coming.

The noise she made down the phone is not a thing I am writing down.

”Fifteen minutes,” she said, wrecked, and hung up.

I told Jessica’s driver to put his foot down.

I went home.

Behind me the country was still arguing with itself about a man who had stopped being the story at four o’clock and would not be it again until a ball was kicked. A banner was going to a printer in South London.

A boy of nine in Rabat had his arms folded and his chin up. And eight hundred miles east of all of it, up in the thin air of the Swiss mountains, a hotel was making up twenty-three beds for a squad that did not yet know it was about to become the most interesting team at the World Cup.

Monday. Crans-Montana.

The work started Monday.

***

Thank you for 200 Power Stones.