Glory Of The Football Manager System

They were still down when I started walking.

All over the grass, where the whistle had dropped them and walked off and left them. Benatia on his knees in the six-yard box, the shirt hauled up over his face, his back heaving like something was being pulled out of him by the root.

Saiss beside him, head buried in both hands, rocking. En-Nesyri face down in the centre circle with his fists driven into the turf. Sofyan folded over himself on the bench, and the sound coming out from under his towel was one I’d never heard a grown man make.

Bounou flat on his back in his own goal, gloves still on, staring up into the floodlights with nothing behind his eyes at all.

Twenty-odd of mine scattered across that grass, and not one of them able to move.

And I had the worst of it sitting in me like a swallowed stone, the thing not one of them could see and I could never say out loud.

That goal was good. I’d seen it truer than any camera in Moscow saw it. They hadn’t lost tonight. They’d been robbed of it, and all I could do was stand on a white line with the knowing locked in my chest.

It went through me like a boot. I stood there with my arms hanging off me and for a second I couldn’t have told you my own name.

You don’t go on the pitch. They drum it into you from your first day. You stay in your box, you let the players have their moment, win or lose.

Not this one. I wasn’t standing behind a white line watching these men, my men, lie broken on the grass for a thing that wasn’t even true.

So I went to them.

Benatia first. He’s the captain. The captain doesn’t get to lie there.

I crouched and got a hand under his arm and pulled, and he came up off his knees a dead weight, fighting me the whole way, the shirt dragging off a face soaked through to the collar. He wouldn’t look at me. I took his jaw in my hand and turned it till he had no choice.

His eyes were gone. Red raw and swimming, the eyes of a man who’d poured every last drop of himself into that pitch and watched it count for nothing. It near took my own legs out from under me. I got an arm round him and held him up and put my head against the side of his.

”You hear that?” The whole place was coming up around us now, a sound I’ll come back to. ”That’s for you, Mehdi. Every last bit of it. On your feet.”

Then Saiss. I’d been frightened for him since the third one, since the man took the outside off him and left him for dead, and now I could see why. The lad was down on his haunches, staring at the grass like it had reached up and hurt him.

I got down into his eyeline. ”Romain. Look at me.” It took him a while, and when he managed it his chin was going like a boy’s.

”It was never yours, son. You did everything right. The best there’s ever been did that to you on his own, and there’s not a defender drawing breath who stops it. Now up. Your boy’s up in that stand watching his dad.”

I pulled, and he came, and he hung on to my shoulder a second longer than a grown man needs to before he made himself let go.

Sofyan I had to go to the bench for. Twenty-one years old, the towel still over his head, his shoulders going under it. He’d run the middle of a World Cup into the ground on his own two legs, and now he was hiding from the whole of it under a bit of cloth.

I pulled the towel off him. His face was a state, snot and tears and bits of turf, and he twisted it away from me, ashamed of it.

”No. You don’t hide from this. You ran that midfield on your own for eighty minutes, son, on your own, and there’s not a man alive prouder of anybody than I am of you right now. Up. Let them see your face.”

I got him on his feet and turned him round to that green end, and the roar that came down when they saw his number nearly buckled him all over again.

En-Nesyri had had the goal of his life torn off him for an offside that was never there. He came up when I got to him, but his head was going side to side, over and over, telling me it was in, gaffer, it was in.

And God help me, it was. I knew it down to the bone, and I could never tell him how. So I took his head in both my hands and held it still and made him look at me.

”It was in, son. I know it was. I know.” And I walked him upright with my arm clamped round his neck so he couldn’t go back down.

Bounou was still flat on his back in his goal, staring up at nothing. I stood over him and put a hand down into his eyeline.

”Three times,” I said, and took his weight, and pulled him up. ”He beat you three times tonight and every one was a miracle. Only the impossible got past you, Yassine. Now stand up.”

And one by one I went round the rest. Mendyl. Hakimi. Boussoufa. Belhanda. Every man. I got a hand on every one of them and brought him up off that grass, because not one of mine was lying down in front of the world tonight, not while I had legs to walk over and lift him.

And that was when the sound finally got through to me.

It had been building the whole time I’d been down there, but with my broken players under my hands I’d not been able to hear anything else.

Now I came up off my haunches, and it hit me full in the chest like the sea coming over a wall. I felt it in my back teeth. I felt it come up through the studs of my boots and into my legs.

I lifted my head and saw what the whole of the Luzhniki was doing for us.

They were on their feet. Every last soul in the place, and every last one of them clapping, the sound starting somewhere high in the second tier and rolling round the bowl till it was one solid wall of it coming down on the grass like a downpour on a tin roof.

”Clap. Clap. Clap.”

And it was doing the one thing I couldn’t do on my own. It was reaching down onto that pitch and getting hold of my players and lifting them.

The green end was thirty thousand strong and on its feet, roaring through the tears coming down its own faces, scarves stretched up over heads, and the chant rolled down out of the tiers and broke over the grass like surf.

”DIMA MAGHRIB! DIMA MAGHRIB!”

”SO-FYAN! SO-FYAN!”

”YA-SSINE! YA-SSINE!”

They were singing them by name. Every man I’d just dragged up off that floor, the green end screaming his name down at him, on and on and on, until he had no choice in the world but to lift his head off his chest and hear thirty thousand people telling him they loved him.

And I watched it land. I watched it get inside men who’d had nothing left and put something back in them. Heads came up off chests. Backs came up straight. One or two lifted a hand to that green wall, and the green wall came back at them twice as loud.

The neutrals were up and at it too. The Russians who’d wandered in three hours back for a look at the great Ronaldo and stayed to lose their hearts to somebody else, on their feet in their borrowed green, clapping their hands raw over their heads.

The lad down the front in the scarf, the one who couldn’t shape the words at kickoff, had every syllable of it now, bawling them up into the lights.

”DIMA MAGHRIB!”

And then I saw the thing that finished me off altogether.

Down the far touchline, the Portugal bench was up. All of them, subs and coaches and kit men, stood at the edge of their own box, clapping my players the length of the pitch.

”Clap. Clap. Clap.”

Out on the grass, men who had just won were breaking off their own celebrations to turn and applaud Morocco off, because they’d been out there too, and they knew what they were looking at.

Even their corner. The defiant little knot of red and green that had whistled us for ninety minutes was on its feet now, clapping.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the Massage Chair.