Glory Of The Football Manager System

The last camera light blinked off, and they finally let me go, the noise of that corner still ringing in my skull.

They had asked the same thing six different ways.

How does it feel, coach? I had not flown three thousand miles to weep on Russian television, so I gave them the work, the lads, and Portugal on Wednesday, and let them film me not saying the thing they wanted.

Clatter. A stud bag hit the tiles ahead of me, and I followed the noise into a dressing room that had come off its hinges.

Bass thumping out of a phone propped in a boot, a song I did not know. Shin pads and tape and empty bottles over every inch of the floor. Saiss up on a bench with his shirt knotted round his head, conducting the lot of them.

Doomf. Doomf. Doomf.

I let it run a minute. They had earned the minute. Then I reached over and switched the phone off.

”Right. Heads up.”

It took a second. Sweaty faces came round, the singing died in twos and threes, and then it was quiet enough.

”Look at this floor. Go on. Look at it.”

They looked.

”We are guests in this country. You hear me? Guests. In an hour, some cleaner walks in here, somebody on next to nothing, and they find out exactly what this team thinks of their house. So we leave it the way we found it. Every wrapper. Every bottle. Every last bit of tape off those tiles. Now.”

Nobody groaned. That was the bit I was proud of.

Benatia, the captain, the best part of a hundred million pounds of a footballer, went round the room on his knees with a bin bag held open.

Rustle. Bottles went in two at a time.

Hakimi got down and stripped the tape off the tiles in long pulls. Skritch. The young lads folded the soaked kit into the skips the way their mothers taught them. Somebody dug a mop out of a cupboard, and somebody else found the cupboard it lived in and put it back after.

Sloshhh.

By the time we filed out you could have eaten off that floor. Kit folded, bins tied, benches wiped, everything back exactly where we found it. The old fella who looked after the room stood in the doorway not knowing what to do with his face.

I left the bodies to the people who own them after a match.

Rebecca had the recovery up on the whiteboard before the last man was off the grass, all of it in her own square hand. Ice baths for the ones who had done the ninety. The soft bikes to flush the legs. Whirr. The shakes, the mats, the lot.

Hssss. Somebody lowered into the ice and swore in three languages at once.

The fitness lads moved between the bodies like a pit crew, Rebecca at the head of it calling the order, and that was them for the next hour. My night with the players was done. Theirs was just starting.

At nine o’clock the other half of our group kicked off down in Sochi, and me and the staff crowded round a laptop in the little analysts’ room to get a proper look at what was coming for us.

It took him four minutes.

A run in behind, a leg hung across the full-back, down he went. Penalty. He set the ball on the spot and put it away without his heartbeat changing. Thwip.

Bzzt, went the tinny speaker, full of a crowd a thousand miles off.

Spain were the better side. You did not need my job to see it. The passing, the angles, Diego Costa bullying in for one and then dragging them level. It did not matter. They had eleven men playing lovely football, and Portugal had one man who had simply decided he would not lose.

He got his second before the break, a shot the keeper should have swallowed and spilled instead, and he ran off with his chin up like he had known all along it would fall for him.

Spain went ahead with half an hour left, a Nacho strike off the inside of the post that made Bray hiss. 3-2. I sat there thinking the night was done, and a small ugly part of me was glad. Let somebody else have the problem.

Then, two minutes from time, Portugal won a free kick twenty-five yards out, and every man in our room went quiet, because every man in our room already knew.

He stood over it. Legs apart. The big breath. The chest going up.

And he lifted it over the wall and dipped it under the bar with the keeper turned to stone.

Thunk. Top corner. 3-3. The hat-trick. One man dragging a side that had not earned the point all the way to it, on his own, in front of the whole planet.

And then he did the thing the whole world does with him. He tore off to the corner, pulled up dead, and leapt, that high turning jump, and came down square with his feet apart and his arms thrown wide and his face roaring up at the lights.

SIIIUUU.

The cry came off the Sochi crowd and out of our little laptop speaker at the same moment, a hundred thousand of them landing on the word with him.

Thirty-three years old, and he celebrated it like it was the first goal he had ever scored in his life. That was the part that frightened me, more than the free kick had. The hunger still on him.

Nobody in our room spoke for a moment.

”That’s coming here Wednesday,” Bray said.

”Wednesday we plan him,” I said. ”Tonight we just sit here and watch him, like everyone else on earth.”

I shut the laptop. My hands were not quite steady, and I told myself it was the coffee.

It was near one in the morning when I got back to my room. She picked up before the first ring had even finished, and the noise came down the line ahead of her voice.

”Hiya. Hang on, I can’t hear him. Shush. SHUSH.” A door shut somewhere and the racket halved. ”Sorry. Soph and that lot are still here, they’ve had a few.”

”You had the girls round.”

”Course I did, whole flat of them. We got the green and white out and Becca made a flag, it’s honestly the worst flag you’ve ever seen, I’ll send you a photo.” She was going a mile a minute, the way she does when she’s wound right up.

”Danny. Danny. You won. Do you actually get that you won?”

”I was there, love.”

”No, but the first goal, when the little lad scored, I screamed, I properly screamed, the woman downstairs banged on the ceiling and everything.”

Somebody shrieked laughing behind her and she went half off the phone. ”Stop it. Stop. Sorry. What were you... no, talk to me. Are you alright? You looked dead tired on the telly.”

”I’m alright.” I sat down on the end of the bed. ”I’m not going to lie to you, though. I was bricking it the whole way through.”

The noise behind her dropped. She’d moved, or shut another door on them.

”I know you were.”

”You can’t have. I had my hands behind my back the whole time, nobody could’ve...”

”Danny. I know your hands.” Soft now, the rest of it gone somewhere, just her. ”I’ve stood and washed up next to you for two years. Everyone watching tonight saw a fella in a suit stood there dead calm. I saw your hands. I saw you.”

I didn’t have a thing to say for a second. The saucer, the sixty thousand, the green corner, the whole roaring night of it, and it had all come down to this. A voice in a flat back in Dulwich that knew my hands.

”You still there?”

”Yeah. I’m here.”

”Don’t you dare go quiet on me, you’ll set me off and this lot’ll never let me hear the end of it.”

I laughed, and it came out thick. ”Ronaldo’s next, you know.”

”I saw him. Show-off.”

”He’s the best there’s ever been, Em.”

”And you’ll have him figured out by Wednesday, because you figure everything out, it’s the most annoying thing about you.” Behind her somebody started chanting my name, badly, and the rest of them piled in on it.

”Oh my God. Right, I’ve got to go before this lot wake the whole road up. Go to sleep. You’ve got a country to run in the morning.”

”Night, Em.”

”Night. I love you. I’m so proud of you I could burst.” A little pause. ”And I’m still not doing the washing up when you’re home. I don’t care what you’ve gone and won.”

Click. She went, and the racket went with her, and the room was very quiet.

I sat in it a while, the phone going cold in my hand. Then I pulled up the group, because I needed to see it written down before I would believe it.

GROUP

1 Morocco |+2 | 3 |

2 Spain | 0 | 1 |

3 Portugal | 0 | 1 |

4 Iran | -2 | 0 |

Every projection in the world had printed us fourth before a ball was kicked. The makeweights. The free three points the big two would share on their way to the knockouts.

And there it was, in plain white numbers. Morocco, top of Group B. Above Spain. Above Portugal. Above the whole lot of them.

For one night, anyway. And the best footballer alive was coming for us on Wednesday.

Tk. I turned off the light, and I lay there a long time looking at a ceiling I could not see.

***

Thank you for reading.