Glory Of The Football Manager System

There is a column on that whiteboard for every man in the squad, and a mark against each one, and I have learned to read Rebecca’s marks the way I read the gift.

Green is fit. Amber is a risk. Red does not play.

She started at the top.

”Bounou. Green. He is a goalkeeper, he ran about a mile on Saturday, he could play tomorrow. Steele has him in for a light session and that is precaution, not need.”

”Good.”

”Back line.” She tapped down the column. ”Wan-Bissaka style, we do not have, this is Morocco, stay with me. Full backs. Hakimi, amber, and I want to talk to you about him on his own after. Mendyl, green, the boy is 20 and made of rubber. Centre halves.” She stopped.

”Benatia.”

”Benatia is red and you know he is red. And he is going to stand in front of me and tell me he is green, and he is my captain, so you are going to have to be the one who tells him no.” She put the cap on the marker.

”He cleared a ball 4 inches off the floor yesterday and landed like a dropped wardrobe. He has played 120 minutes and a shootout against Mario Mandžukić. He is 31. His body has taken a hammering a 25-year-old would feel.”

”He cannot not play a World Cup semi-final.”

”I did not say he cannot play. I said he is red today, on Sunday. Ask me again Tuesday.” She moved the marker down.

”Saïss, amber, cramp all through extra time, but he is younger and he will come back. Da Costa, green, did not play. That is your centre-half pairing if Benatia does not make it.

”And against a team that scores 8 of its 11 from set-pieces, I would rather have Benatia in the air on one leg than not have him at all. But that is your call and not mine.”

I wrote nothing down. I have never written anything down in that room. I just let her fill the board in my head.

”Midfield.”

”El Ahmadi, amber, that calf went into cramp and I do not love it, but he will run. Boussoufa.” She shook her head. ”33 years old and his calf went to concrete overnight, I told you. On the bike this morning and I had to lift him off it.

”He is red for running. He might have 20 minutes of standing still and passing in him by Wednesday and no more. Fellati, green. Ounajem, green.”

”Sofyan.”

And here Rebecca did something she does not do. She put the marker down on the tray, and she looked at me.

”Sofyan Amrabat is the fittest man in this building,” she said. ”He came in this morning and trained like he was trying to get sent home. He ran until I stood in front of him with both arms out.

”He did not kick a ball on Saturday night. He has got 120 minutes of a World Cup quarter-final that he never got to spend, and it is all still in him, and he does not know where to put it.”

She picked the marker back up.

”He is green. He is more than green. But keep an eye on that boy, Danny, because there is a difference between fit and all right, and he is one and I am not sure he is the other.”

I knew. I have known since he grinned at me in the mud and said next time.

”Front line.”

”Boutaïb, amber, tired legs, he will go. Fajr, green.” She stopped at the last name on the board, and she did not say it, because she did not have to.

There was a red line straight through it.

EN-NESYRI.

Nobody in that building but me and Rebecca knew what that red line was. Everybody thought it said 3 to 4 weeks. Everybody thought the boy had pulled something and would sit on the bench in a tracksuit and be a good lad about it.

I stood and looked at his name with the line through it, and the gift did the thing it does, unasked, uninvited, the number floating up beside a name on a whiteboard in an empty treatment room.

[YOUSSEF EN-NESYRI. CA 141 / PA 176.]

I know what that second number used to be. And there is nothing I can do about it, and there is nobody I can tell, and that is what the gift is for. It shows you the damage. Then it folds its arms and it waits with you.

”So that is where we are,” Rebecca said, capping the marker. ”6 of your first-choice 11 are amber or red. Your captain cannot get off the floor.

”Your centre-forward is not in the tournament, and I am the only person in Russia you have let say that out loud. And on Wednesday you play the best set-piece team in the world.”

”Do not concede a corner,” I said.

She looked at me.

”That’s the plan?”

”That’s the plan. They cannot make a chance in open play. 3 goals in 5 games from open play. Everything else is dead balls.

”So we do not give them one. We do not foul wide, we do not go to ground, we do not put it out for a throw in our own third. And we press the one central midfielder they have, and we make them build through people who cannot build.”

”You have done it once,” Rebecca said.

And she was right, and it was the one thing in that whole grim treatment room that was on my side.

We beat England 4 weeks ago. Saint Petersburg, the 9th of June, a warm-up nobody remembers but us. Sofyan sprang a tired Henderson pass and had the ball in the England net inside 9 seconds. 1-0.

And they spent the rest of the night unable to break down 11 men behind the ball, because that is the thing England could not do then and cannot do now.

”A friendly,” I said.

”Was it?” She almost smiled. ”You kept a clean sheet against that forward line with a back four that has all gone home injured. Do it again with this lot and you are in a World Cup final.”

Rebecca looked at the board. At the 6 ambers and the reds and the one red line that was worse than a red.

”With this?”

”With that.”

She did not say anything else. She did not have to.

You do not say much to a man who has just told you his plan to reach a World Cup final is to ask 6 injured men and a captain who cannot jump to defend for 90 minutes without one mistake, and never once give the best dead-ball team on earth a corner.

It is the sort of plan you take into a match when you have run out of better ones. And I had run out of better ones on Saturday night, somewhere around the 118th minute.

And 4,000 miles away, at a training ground in Beckenham, it was the middle of a Sunday afternoon, and my other team was starting to come back.

Sarah sent me a photograph while I stood in that treatment room. No message with it, she does not do messages, she wrote team sheets in a school exercise book when she was 11 and she communicates in team sheets still. Just the picture.

The Beckenham pitches in the July sun. Cones out. Ladders down. The first day of pre-season, the fitness lads back in before the internationals, the youth boys running, and Sarah stood on the edge of it in a Palace training top with a clipboard, running my football club while I ran a country.

Olise was in the middle of the shot, mid-stride, that easy way he has. Tyrick Mitchell behind him. Semenyo. The kids I had watched come up.

And underneath, the only words she sent, because Sarah does not waste them either.

Your club is ready when you are. Go and win your other one first.

I stood in that treatment room and looked at the photograph for a long time. The July sun on the Beckenham grass. My kids. My caretaker. My club, ticking over without me, waiting.

And I thought about the 2 of them, the club and the country, and how a year ago I had neither, and how a year ago the biggest decision of my Sunday was whether the U18s did the running before the game or after it.

I put the phone in my pocket.

2 desks. 2 teams. 2 buildings on 2 sides of a continent, and both of them mine, and both of them looking at me.

A year ago I was coaching an under-18 team out, and my phone did not ring on a Sunday, because there was nobody who needed me on a Sunday.

Now I had a 10 million pound signing landing on Monday, a World Cup semi-final on Wednesday, and a caretaker running my football club so well she was sending me photographs of it thriving without me.

I did not know whether to laugh or lie down.

And 4 days.

I went to find Bray, because it was time to build the thing that keeps England out.

And I already knew it was going to be the hardest 4 days of my life. I already knew we were going to have to defend for 90 minutes with men who could barely run.

And I already knew that somewhere in the middle of it, I was going to have to look my own country in the eye and try to break its heart.

I could not wait.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus and Kostas_Gounakis for the support.