Glory Of The Football Manager System

[Morocco Team Base, Voronezh, Russia. Thursday 21 June 2018.]

The team room was the wrong sort of loud when I pushed through the double doors. Clunk.

It wasn’t the usual breakfast noise, the clatter of cutlery and the easy banter about who slept through their alarm. This was lower and harder than that.

Men’s voices running over the top of one another. A phone somewhere blasting a clip out loud, a tinny roar, a crowd going thump, thump, thump, three lads stood over the screen with their jaws set.

Yesterday this room had been a funeral. Heads down, slow, nobody saying a word after the 3-2 against Portugal. This morning it had heat in it.

Hakimi saw me first. He came straight across, phone already up, and there was nothing broken in his face today. There was a fire lit behind it.

”Gaffer. You seen?”

He turned the screen round. There it was. The goal.

En-Nesyri, ninety-four minutes gone, the ball squirming under Rui Patricio and over the line. Frozen.

Then a line dragged across the still, white, the very one they’d used to chalk it off on Wednesday night. Only this one wasn’t drawn by a referee in a booth. And right beside it, a second line. And between the two of them, daylight.

The lad was level. The whole world could see he was level.

”Look.” Hakimi’s thumb stabbed at the screen. ”He’s level. They robbed us, boss. They robbed us blind.”

Across the bottom ran words I didn’t need translating. Angles. Frames. The shoulder and the last white shirt blown up till you could have laid a ruler across them, sat dead on the same blade of grass.

A good goal. Robbed.

And I stood there with Hakimi’s phone in my hand, a cold thing turning over in my gut, because I’d seen this exact picture before.

On the touchline. The night it happened.

[System Log: Matchday 2, POR vs MAR]

[Timestamp 94:12]

[VAR Override: En-Nesyri is level. ONSIDE. Goal valid.]

It had been drawn in cold blue light over the grass by the thing in my head that not one soul in this room knew was there. I’d carried that on my own for a day and a night.

And now the whole world was holding it up.

Everywhere I looked, two and three of them round a screen, the same ten seconds on a loop. Saiss had his head in his hands, but it wasn’t grief now. It was fury. Crack. Somebody slammed a phone down on a table and didn’t bother saying sorry.

Bray found me at the coffee. Glug.

”It’s everywhere, boss. Top of the lot, every country. Forty million on the one clip overnight, and there’s hundreds of them.”

Marcus was a step behind him with the tablet. Brrp. A phone went off in his hand and he killed it without looking.

”And the federation’s gone to FIFA. First thing this morning. Formal complaint, lodged.”

He slid the tablet in front of me. A statement in two languages, the crest at the top.

For all the good it’d do us on the table. You don’t get a goal back the morning after, and the maths of Group B didn’t care about a piece of paper on a desk in Zurich.

I pulled the table up with a thought.

[Group B]

Spain, 4 pts (+1)

Portugal, 4 pts (+1)

Morocco, 3 pts (+1)

Iran, 0 pts (-3)

Three in the bag from the opening win over Iran. Spain and Portugal sat pretty on four.

If En-Nesyri’s goal had stood, we’d have been level with them. A draw on Monday puts us through. Instead, a draw was a plane ticket home to Casablanca.

Win or go home. We had to beat Spain.

But the table wasn’t what had the room this hot. It was home.

Benatia slid a clip in front of me without a word. A street in Casablanca. Night. Packed kerb to kerb, a wall of people in green, and not one bit of it joy. Fists in the air, screaming for justice.

”All night, this.” Saiss, beside me, thumbing his phone. ”My whole town’s awake and it’s three in the morning back home.”

A country. A continent. A hundred million people who’d taken Wednesday night personally.

But stood in the middle of my furious room, I felt the other thing under the heat. En-Nesyri was over the far side on his own, his phone face down on the table for once.

But it was the empty chair beside him I clocked hardest.

Sofyan wasn’t in the room.

I found him down the corridor, sat on the floor with his back against the wall outside the dining room. Twenty-one years old. Phone in both hands. Staring dead-eyed at the screen.

I slid down the wall and sat on the floor beside him. ”Show me.”

He turned it round. A front room somewhere. Packed with mums and aunties and old fellas crammed round a telly, all in green, and taped up on the wall behind them, blown up off somebody’s printer, a photo of him. Sofyan Amrabat. Their lad.

”My mum’s house,” he said. Quiet. ”They were all there for the game.”

I didn’t say anything.

”There’s so many of them, gaffer.” His thumb started going on the edge of the phone. Tk tk tk. ”It’s not just that room. It’s the whole country. I keep seeing Monday. I give one ball away. The wrong pass, the one that lets Spain in. And it’s me. In front of all of them.”

The whole weight of a continent, come down to sit on a lad on a corridor floor two thousand miles from his mum’s front room.

I could have told him he’d not give it away. Filled his head with you’re-the-best and they-believe-in-you and the rest of it. He’d have nodded and not swallowed a word, because fear doesn’t listen to that.

So I gave him the truth instead.

”You might,” I said.