Glory Of The Football Manager System

The smell in the centre circle was Deep Heat and sweat and torn-up grass.

That is what I remember. Not the noise. The smell, and 22 men lying about in the mud like something had been dropped on them from a height.

Rebecca was on her knees with Saïss’s leg hooked over her shoulder, driving both thumbs into a calf gone hard as wood. The sound he made going into that stretch is not a sound a grown man should make in front of 80,000 people.

Boussoufa lay flat on his back, eyes shut, chest going like a bellows.

Somebody was being sick on the halfway line. Nobody turned round.

And I needed 5 names.

Not for the referee. He does not want them. He just needs to know who is walking when they walk. The list is for me. It is the only thing left in this entire stadium that is still mine.

Crk. Mustapha slapped the board into my chest and the pen was dead in my hand, and I stood there in the middle of a World Cup quarter-final scribbling circles on my own palm to drag the ink down.

[HAKIM ZIYECH. COMPOSURE 15.]

[MEHDI BENATIA. COMPOSURE 16.]

Composure. As if that meant a thing now.

The gift does not know Youssef has not slept since Moscow. It does not know whose calf went at 110. It does not know which one of these boys will be lying awake at 40 years of age hearing this exact crowd.

My hands were wet. I have never wanted a cigarette so badly in my life and I have never smoked.

So I got down in the mud and looked at faces instead.

”Ziyech.”

Haunches, hands flat on the grass. He nodded without lifting his head.

”Benatia.”

The captain said nothing. Put his hand out. I took it and he squeezed once.

”Boussoufa.”

The old boy did not open his eyes. ”Yes,” he said, at the sky.

That was 3. And I already knew the 5th, because I had written it on the back of my own hand 10 minutes ago and I had not been able to look at it since.

Amrabat. 5.

En-Nesyri was sat with his shirt over his face. He had been like that since Mandžukić’s header.

”Youssef.”

He dragged it down. He was grey.

He could not speak, so he put one finger up, asking me to wait, and pulled 2 breaths through his teeth.

”Early,” he said. ”Not last.”

”Why?”

”If I am last.” He stopped. Got another. ”If I am last, gaffer. And I miss.”

He could not finish it. He shook his head at the grass instead.

”4th,” I said. ”You go 4th.”

6 feet away, Sofyan stood with his arms folded, looking at me like a man waiting outside a door.

Then Bounou came round.

Every one of them. Down on his knees in the mud, both hands on a head, forehead to forehead, 10 seconds a man. Benatia. Sofyan. Saïss. Ziyech. All of them.

He got to me last and he did not say a word.

He put his head against mine and held it there.

And he was shaking. Right through the both of us, the whole time, and then he let go and got up and walked off down the pitch on his own.

I never told him I felt that. I never will.

60 yards. That is the walk.

60 yards to a goal with 40,000 Croatians packed to the roof behind it, the front row of them 8 yards off the net. The drums. The flares. Checkerboards over every barrier, and a whole half of that stadium who had been on their feet for 2 hours and had nothing left to lose.

Bmm. Bmm. Bmm-bmm-bmm.

And our 40,000, the whole green wall, 100 yards the other way. Behind the halfway line. Singing at their backs, because it was the only thing left they were allowed to do.

Every man who walked out for Morocco walked away from his own people. And into theirs.

The referee took a long look at the spot and did not like it. 120 minutes had chewed it to soup. He scraped at it with his boot, gave up, put the ball down anyway.

It rolled off. He put it back.

Then he came to the edge of the box and had a word with Bounou. Pointed at the line. Pointed at his own eye. Pointed at the gantry.

Stay on it. We are watching you.

The lads went into the centre circle and locked arms, green in one row and white in the other, and that is where the Laws leave them. 10 men in a ring in the middle of the pitch. 60 yards from anything. Nothing to do but hold each other up.

And then the touchlines went the same way.

Bray took my left arm. Steeley had my right and would not give it back. Rebecca locked on to Bray, and Mustapha on to her, and every sub and every physio and Nadia on the end of it, our whole bench strung out along the paint with their arms threaded through each other like a chain across a river.

40 yards away, in white tracksuits, Dalić’s staff did the same thing at the same time, and neither bench looked at the other, because both of us were looking at the same 12 yards of mud.

And when I lifted my head, the stands had done it too.

40,000 people behind the halfway line with their arms over each other’s shoulders. Whole rows of strangers locked together, swaying, one thing.

And behind that far goal, 40,000 Croatians arm in arm across the checkerboards, packed so tight you could not have got a hand between them.

Everybody in that stadium was holding on to somebody. 80,000 of them, 22 wrecked men, 2 benches, and not one soul in the place was going to watch this on their own.

Bounou walked out to his goal.

And Subašić walked out of it.

They passed each other in the 6-yard box, because that is where the Law puts the kicking side’s keeper, out on the corner of the area, on the line, alone, closer to it than any man alive except the one taking it.

They did not look at each other.

They would do that 7 more times before the night was done.

And that is the job. That is the entire job at that moment. You write 5 names with a pen that does not work, and then you stand on a line of white paint and watch other men decide your life.

Modrić came out of the circle and 40,000 people opened up on him.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEE.

40,000 whistles. It is not a sound, it is a pressure, and it gets in behind your eyes. 60 yards of it, and he walked through it with his head down and his hands loose.

The Croatian half started up underneath it. Slow. Building.

”HR-VAT-SKA!” Clap. Clap-clap. ”HR-VAT-SKA!” Clap. Clap-clap.

He put the ball on the spot. It rolled off. He put it back, pressed it into the muck with the flat of his hand, and knelt there patting the dirt in around it, like a man planting something.

4 paces back.

And then his own end shut up.

That is the thing nobody tells you. Your own people go quiet. 40,000 Croatians who had been screaming for 2 hours dropped to nothing at once, because they know, they all know, that noise does not help the man on the spot. It only hurts him.

Which left our 40,000. And they were not quiet.

WHEEEEEEEEEEE.

Peep.

And then even that went.

You could hear his studs.

Thump.

Low left. Bounou went the right way and it went in off his fingertips.

”IIIIIIDEMOOOOO...”

That whole end came off its hinges. Flares, smoke, 40,000 men climbing on each other, and the drums going like men being beaten.

1-0.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the Massage Chair.