Glory Of The Football Manager System

[Crans-Montana. The first session.]

We came out of the tunnel into the thin bright air and the mountain hit them in the lungs before I’d said a word.

You could see it land.

Twenty-three men jogging out onto a pitch at fifteen hundred metres, and somewhere around the second lap the easy chatter thinned and a couple of them went quiet and one of the younger lads put his hands on his hips on a warm-up jog, which you do not do on a warm-up jog at sea level.

The altitude was the first coach on the staff. It tells the truth about a man’s summer before you’ve blown a whistle. Who came back from the season in shape and who came back from a beach.

Bray clocked it beside me. ”Three of them are in trouble already and we’ve not started.”

”Good,” I said. ”I want to know which three.”

Marcus had a tablet out on the touchline, not filming for once, coding live, every drill, every turnover, building the thing he’d build all fortnight.

He was my analyst and my assistant both up here. Until we had a working system locked down before Russia, I needed him on the grass and not behind a desk, calling what he saw in real time.

”First turnover to first shot,” he said, eyes down, thumb tapping. ”I want it under four seconds by the friendly. We’re at seven. That’s the whole job, right there. Three seconds.”

”Then let’s go and find three seconds,” I said.

I’d told the federation one thing when I took it. No positions are safe.

Nobody walks into this camp with a shirt in his pocket because of a name or a number of caps. I had a squad of twenty-three, a back four that did not concede, and a tournament three weeks out.

I was going to spend the first session finding out who actually played. Not who was supposed to.

So I did not put out a team. I put out everyone.

Tweet of the whistle, flat in the cold.

”On we go. Everybody. No guaranteed places.” I said it twice, once each way, so the back of the room heard it too. ”Today you show me. I pick nothing off a reputation.”

You learn who a man is the minute you tell him his shirt is not his.

Some of them tightened. The ones with caps and a name to protect, the ones who had a place to lose, you saw a flicker go across them, the senior pro’s flinch at being made to audition. And some of them lit up. The ones who had spent careers behind a name. The young ones. The No.2s.

Two of those went off like I’d handed them the morning.

The first was the keeper.

I’d come up the mountain with a question I could not answer off a screen, and his name was Munir.

MUNIR MOHAMEDI · Goalkeeper · Age 29 Current Ability 124 Handling 13 · Reflexes 14 · Command of Area 12 · Composure 11

The No.1. The man in possession of the shirt. Twenty-nine.

And the card told me what the room could not. A keeper whose hands were fine and whose nerve was a question. Composure 11, three weeks from walking out in front of Cristiano Ronaldo and eighty thousand.

Numbers and nerve are not always the same size, and you cannot see nerve on an iPad. You see it when a striker’s through.

Behind him, the No.2.

YASSINE BOUNOU · Goalkeeper · Age 27 Current Ability 130 / Potential 142 Handling 15 · Reflexes 15 · Command of Area 15 · Composure 15 · Decisions 14

Bounou. Girona. Younger, bigger numbers, the better long-term eyes, and three weeks out he was the understudy because that is how a pecking order calcifies, on appearances and inertia and nothing being put to a proper test.

So I put it to a proper test.

Steele set up the same drill for both of them, the cruelest one he has. Strikers coming in waves, no rest, the thud of a struck ball and the smack of it into gloves every six seconds until the lungs go.

Because up here the lungs go fast, and a keeper who panics tired is a keeper who lets a nation down in the eighty-ninth minute.

Steele is my goalkeeping coach and he says about nine words a day. Halfway through Bounou’s set he came and stood next to me without being asked, which for Steele is a speech.

”That one,” he said. Nodded at Bounou. ”Look at his feet between shots. He’s not even thinking about it. Resets every time. The other one’s brave but he’s guessing.”

Bounou was a wall. Tired, soaked, up at altitude with a forward bearing down every six seconds, and he kept the same calm set to him shot after shot, talking the whole time, command of area you could hear from forty yards, organising defenders who were not even in the drill out of pure habit.

Munir saved plenty. But he saved them loud, and late, and you could see the panic arrive a half-second before the save did, and a half-second is the whole game against the people we were about to meet.

The card had Bounou a notch up. The grass had him two divisions up.

I made the second note of the camp. Bounou is the one. The No.2 was my No.1, and the only question left was when I told them, and how, because you do not strip a man of a World Cup shirt without thinking about what it does to him and what it does to the room.

That one would keep a day or two. But it was decided on the grass in twenty minutes, the thing the screen had left open for a week.

The second revelation was not even in my squad.

The federation had three standby players up at the camp, lads not in the twenty-three, training in case somebody’s hamstring went before the deadline. Insurance. You barely look at them.

I looked at one of them inside ten minutes and could not stop.

NOUSSAIR MAZRAOUI · Full-back · Age 20 Current Ability 132 / Potential 168 Pace 15 · Technique 16 · Decisions 15 · Composure 15 · Off the Ball 15

Twenty years old. Just broken into the Ajax first team that season. Not in my squad, not eligible for a minute of this World Cup, up here as a what-if and a thank-you for a good season.

And he was, quietly, one of the best footballers on the pitch.

It was the calm of him that got me. Hakimi is a thunderbolt, all acceleration and nerve and the occasional teenage mistake.

Mazraoui was the opposite kind of full-back. Two-footed, never beaten by his first opponent because he never overcommitted, a head on him at twenty that El Ahmadi had at thirty-three. He could play either flank. He defended like he’d read the script and attacked like he’d written it.

I stood and watched a kid who could not play a single minute for me at this tournament and felt the specific ache you only get a few times in a career, which is I want that one about a player you cannot have.

”He’s not in the squad,” Bray said, following my eyes.

”I know.”

”You’ve got that face on.”

”I know I have.” I made the note anyway. Mazraoui. Remember this. Whatever it costs, remember this.

Because a manager who only looks at the men he’s allowed to pick is a manager with one eye shut. You do not forget a twenty-year-old who makes the game look that quiet.

He was not for Russia. He was for some other day, some other phone call. I filed him where I keep the players I mean to come back for.

Then I put him out of my head, because I had a tournament to build out of the men I did have, and two of them were about to remind me why nobody outside Morocco was giving us a prayer, and why everyone outside Morocco was wrong.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.