Glory Of The Football Manager System

I’d left the phone face down on the side table all night, buzzing itself to the edge of the wood, and I didn’t turn it over till the grey light was in the room and I’d run clean out of reasons not to.

Bzz. Still going. The screen had given up counting. A little plus sign sat where the number should’ve been.

The goal was everywhere, En-Nesyri’s finish a thousand times over, off every phone in the ground. But it wasn’t the goal that had the world by the throat this morning.

It was the floor.

Somebody had got a photo of our dressing room after we’d cleared out of it. The folded kit. The bagged bins. The mopped floor, the benches all wiped down, the room handed back cleaner than we’d found it. Three words under it I couldn’t read, and below them, over and over, in a language I could.

A nation of gentlemen.

I lay there watching the number climb. More people had shared a photo of us putting the bins out than had watched the goal go in. Honest to God.

A team nobody gave a prayer to had walked into a World Cup, won the thing, then tidied up after itself, and the whole planet had lost its head over the tidying.

I couldn’t take it in on my own. I stuck the phone in my pocket and went down to find the lads.

The noise of it was in the room before I was.

Phones face up next to the eggs, clatter of cutlery under it, screens going hand to hand. Somebody’s mum up on a video call, held high so the whole table could shout at her at once. Bing. A dozen phones caught the same thing in the same second, and a cheer went up round table four.

The floor photo was up at the near table, one of the lads turning it round to the others, and they were in bits laughing.

”We win a game at a World Cup,” he said, wiping his eyes, ”and they’ve gone mad ’cause we cleaned the room.”

Of everything they’d done out on that grass, the thing the planet wanted was a picture of them stacking the chairs. They couldn’t get their heads round it. Tell the truth, neither could I.

Hakimi had three phones going and wasn’t answering one of them.

Ziyech grabbed my arm as I went past, which he’d not done once in three weeks, and shoved his phone up at me. A street I didn’t know, packed, a thousand deep, green from wall to wall.

”Where’s that,” I said. ”Casablanca?”

”Accra, gaffer.” Half a laugh, half summat else. ”Ghana. They didn’t even qualify for this World Cup. And look at ’em. Out in the road. For us.”

I looked at a whole Ghanaian street screaming for a country that wasn’t theirs, for a team that had won one match and swept up after it, and I didn’t have a word in me big enough, so I just took him by the back of the neck a second and moved off before he saw my face.

The young sub, the one who’d held his little girl up to the corner, sat on his own at the far end with his phone face down and his eyes wet, and didn’t want talking to. I left him to it.

And over in the corner, two of them were already in the quarter-finals.

”We beat Portugal, we top the group,” the loud one was saying. ”Top the group, brother, and who knows. Who knows how far this thing goes.”

I clocked it. Said nothing. But I clocked who said it.

On my way to the coffee, the Russian lad who’d cleared our plates all week stepped out in front of me. Nineteen, maybe. About four words of English, and he’d not once looked me in the eye all tournament.

He held his phone up, shy with it, and pointed at it, then at me, then back at the phone.

”Photo?” I said.

He nodded that hard I thought he’d do himself an injury, then put his fist flat on his chest. ”Maroc.” Just the one word. ”Maroc.”

Click. Marcus got it for us. The lad looked at the screen after like it was the best thing he’d ever owned, and went off down the corridor holding the phone in both hands. I got a coffee and didn’t taste a drop of it.

The federation man found me at the urn, hsss, steam off the spout of it.

Same fella who’d had my hand in both of his on the touchline and promised me the Kingdom. He wasn’t promising owt this morning. One envelope in his hand, held the way you’d hold a thing you thought might go off.

”From the Palace,” he said. ”It came in the night. They’ve asked for it to be read to the players.”

I’ve given team talks with my heart going through my shirt. I’d never once read out another man’s words, though, and my hand wasn’t steady when I stood up and tapped the side of a glass.

Ting. The room came right down.

It was short. Thanked them, every man, by the badge. Said a country that had waited twenty years hadn’t just been handed a win on Friday. It had been handed itself back. Said the whole of Morocco, home and away, was stood behind these eleven.

I read out who’d signed it, and the room went still in a way I’d not managed in three weeks of trying.

Benatia took the letter off me after and folded it back along its own creases, slow, like it’d come apart in his hands.

Marcus caught me on the way out, laptop under his arm.

”Two things, gaffer. Sit down for the first one.”

Clack. He had it open before I’d answered and turned the screen round to me. An official statement, seal of the Kingdom across the top, gone out at three in the morning while we slept.

”They’re flying the fans,” he said, before I could read a word of it. ”Government’s footing it. Any Moroccan who wants to come over and get behind this team, the state pays the flight. Every seat. They just sort their own bed when they land.”

I read it twice to make sure I had it right. It was real.

”Four thousand made it over for the Iran game,” Marcus said. ”Half of ’em will have saved a year for that trip.” He scrolled. ”It’s a different number now, gaffer. Best part of thirty thousand and climbing, and that’s before the rest of Africa books in from everywhere else.”

Four thousand. Out of forty million who loved them. The rest had watched it off a settee, same as I used to, ’cause Russia’s the far side of the world and the far side of a month’s wages.

Not now. They were coming. A green wall, ’cause their King had asked and their government had paid and eleven lads had given them the reason.

”And the other thing.” Marcus turned the screen back, gone quiet. ”This went up back home last night.”

South London. A pub I knew, rammed to the doors the night of the win, a banner up over the bar, still wet.

WHEREVER WALSH GOES, WE GO. EAGLES IN RUSSIA.

”Hundreds of ’em,” Marcus said. ”Booking flights to Russia. Your lot, gaffer.”

My lot. Crystal Palace. The club I’d walk back into in July, sat at home right now with their season won and done, and their fans had got online at nine at night and decided that if I was in Russia, then so were they.

Not for England. Not for Palace. For me. To a country that wasn’t even mine.

Bloody hell. I had to go and stand at the window a minute.

I got them all in after breakfast. Whole squad, every coach, the lot.

Let it sit a second. Then I put the screen on behind me, and it wasn’t the goal, and it wasn’t the floor.

It was him. The free kick. Over the wall, under the bar, keeper turned to stone. Tk. Let it run, Raaah, the roar coming off the speaker, and the room went quiet the exact same way it had in the analysts’ room, when every last one of us already knew.

I found the loud one from the corner and looked dead at him.

”You said it this morning. Who knows how far. I heard you.”

He sat up.

”And you’re right. Nobody knows. But I’ll tell you the one thing that does decide it.” I nodded at the screen. ”Not that letter. Not the planes filling up. Him. Wednesday. Ninety minutes.”

”Everything that’s landed on us today, every bit of it, it’s not a gift, lads. It’s a bill. And that’s the man it gets paid to.”

”He stuck three past Spain on his own on Friday and bounced about like it was his first ever. He doesn’t care what your phone said this morning. He doesn’t know one of your names.”

Tk. I knocked the screen off.

”So feel it today. All of it. Ring your mums, let it in, the lot. But tonight it goes in a drawer. ’Cause come the morning we stop being the story. He’s the story. And men like him, lads, they don’t get beat by a good feeling. They get beat by a plan.”

The room emptied out. I didn’t go with it.

Bray was already in the analysts’ room, Portugal footage up, the free kick frozen on the wall where I’d left it the night before.

”Three days,” he said. ”Where do we start?”

Somewhere out over Africa, the first of the planes were filling up. At least thirty thousand of them, coming to watch us stand in front of the best there’s ever been.

I pulled a chair in next to Bray and looked at the man on the screen.

”Here,” I said. ”We start right here.”

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.