Glory Of The Football Manager System

Boom.

That is where it starts. One drum, somewhere up in the green, before we are even out of the tunnel.

Boom. Boom. Boom-boom-boom.

And I stood in the mouth of that tunnel with 10 fringe men and a keeper who had waited his turn, and I could feel it coming down the concrete throat of the Luzhniki at us. Not a sound yet, a pressure, a thing pushing back against the air.

I thought, not for the first time in this tournament, that I was going to be sick, and there was nowhere to do it.

Then Amine Harit stepped up level with me.

21 years old. First start of his life, and the life in question was a World Cup semi-final against Harry Kane. He had gone the colour of the tunnel wall an hour ago and it had not come back. He did not say anything to me.

He just stood there at my shoulder, close, the way a kid stands close to somebody in the dark, and I understood that the frightened boy had come to stand next to the frightened man because we were the two in that tunnel with the most to lose and nobody to say it to.

So I said the only true thing I had.

”You feel that?” I nodded down the tunnel at the noise. ”That is not for them. Half of that is for you. Go and make the other half wish they’d stayed home.”

He breathed out, once, long.

And we walked out.

The noise did not hit me the way it hit me against Croatia. It was worse, because this time half of it was mine, and the two halves were at war over my head.

40,000 in green and red down one side of that bowl. Drums. Flares, hsss, the smoke rolling flat across the lower tier. And the women already going, lu-lu-lu-lu-lu, that sound that gets in under your ribs and stays there and that no other crowd on earth makes.

And 38,000 down the other side in white, and they were not quiet either, and they were singing a song I have known my whole life.

Three lions on a shirt.

I have sung that song. I want that on the record, because you cannot understand one minute of the rest of this if you do not know that.

I have sung that exact song in a pub in Manchester with my dad, who has been dead 20 years, a pint in my hand and his going flat on the table, both of us believing for 90 minutes that this was finally the year. It is not an arrogant song.

People who did not grow up with it think it is a boast, and it is the opposite of a boast. It is 52 years of hurt that has learned to laugh at itself so it does not have to cry. It is the most English thing there is.

And 38,000 of my own were singing it at me. At the man in the other dugout. At the Manc who had gone and taken it off them.

I put my head down and walked to my technical area and did not look at them, because if I looked at them I did not know what my face would do.

Somewhere over my head there was a camera on a wire, running the whole length of the pitch, and Marcus had told me, because Marcus tells me everything, that on the far end of that wire was the biggest audience of the entire tournament. Bigger than the last 16.

Bigger than any group game. Every soul who watched us put Croatia out, and then some, and then a continent on top of that.

France were already in the final. They had done their bit the night before in Saint Petersburg and gone to bed, and they were sat somewhere warm right now, watching this, watching to see who they got.

Win tonight, and Morocco are in a World Cup final.

Lose tonight, and Morocco are the best story nobody remembers, the nearly, the semi-finalists, and 40 years from now a man in a café in Rabat says ah, but 2018, you should have seen us in 2018, and the person across the table has to take his word for it.

That is what a semi-final is. There is no next round to put it right in. There is the final, or there is the rest of your life explaining it.

The anthems went, and that was the worst four minutes of the night, and the night had not started.

Theirs first. 38,000 English voices, and I stood on that line with my hands behind my back and my jaw set and I did not sing it, and not singing it was one of the hardest things I have ever made my own body do.

Then ours. And 40,000 Moroccans put a wall of sound up into that black roof, and down in front of me Munir Mohamedi stood with his eyes shut and his fist on the badge.

The keeper I took a shirt off in a locked room in June, back between the posts tonight because Yassine had emptied himself into that shootout and a fresh man who had waited his turn with dignity was worth more to me than a hero running on fumes.

Behind him Da Costa, and Dirar, and Fajr, and a boy called Harit who caught my eye across the grass, white as the wall behind him.

I gave him a nod. Nothing else. There is nothing else worth anything you can give a 21-year-old in that moment.

One more thing sat in me all through those anthems, and I am not proud of how much of it was there.

Southgate had named 11 and put 12 on the bench, and not one of them was mine.

My Crystal Palace had finished 2nd in England that year. Won the League Cup, the FA Cup and the Europa League, a treble, in the one season I had them.

And the man picking England had looked at Wan-Bissaka, and Tarkowski, and every English boy I had made better, and picked none of them, and gone with Ashley Young at 33 and called it his best.

I am a professional. I am not saying that is why. But I would be lying if I said it was not somewhere in me when the whistle went, and I do not lie in this book.

Peep.

And England came at us like a train.

I knew they would. It was the one thing I had told the fringe men over and over for four days. They will start fast, they will start perfect, they have 38,000 people and a song and a manager who has told them it is written.

The first 15 minutes they will believe it harder than they have believed anything in their lives.

Do not drown in the first 15. Get to 60. At 60 they get tired. At 60 we start.

They did not need 15.

They needed 5.

Alli went down 25 yards out under a challenge from Fajr that was half a challenge, and the referee’s arm went straight up.

His name was Faghani. Iranian.

Neutral, a whole continent from both benches, a man who had reffed at this level for years and did not scare, and I had watched 2 of his games on that muddy laptop and told my players he lets you play, but he does not let you moan, so do not give him a reason to look at you.

And I had given him a reason. Or Fajr had. A foul in the one patch of grass on the whole pitch you cannot foul England.

Because their number 2 stood over it.

Trippier. The lad who had put more balls into this tournament from a dead spot than anyone since 1966, and I had drawn his name on a whiteboard in red pen and said do not, do not, do not give him this.

And we gave him this.

The green end tried to whistle it out of him. 40,000 of them, one long jeer, leaning on the moment. And the English end sang straight over the top, and for a second the two walls of noise just hit each other in the middle of the pitch with the ball sat on the grass between them.

He did not cross it.

Thwack.

I did not see it go in. I heard it, and I got it in the wrong order.

The English end is 80 yards from where I stand and sound does not travel for free, so the roar reached me before the net did.

A full half-second where 38,000 people knew a thing my eyes had not caught up to, and by the time I found the ball sitting in the side netting the noise was already on top of me and over me and through me.

It came up through the studs first. Then the plastic of the dugout under my hand. Then it was in my chest, and then it was in my back teeth, and Bray was shouting something six inches from my ear and I watched his mouth move and heard not one word of it.

Up in the top tier of the English end a whole block of them came down off the seats in one motion, and the tier was moving, actually moving, a ripple running along the front lip of it.

A paper cup came down out of it end over end through the floodlight beam, and I lost it somewhere over the boards.

It’s coming home. It’s coming home. It’s coming.

They sang it right at me. The whole English bank, on their feet, arms out, and half the faces I could pick out were turned not at the pitch but at the dugout. At me.

There is a version of that song a crowd sings because it is happy. And there is a version it sings as a weapon. This was the second one.

Bray was at my shoulder. ”Danny.”

”I know.”

”That’s the exact thing you said not to give them.”

”I know, Michael. I was stood here.”

I did not sit down. I did not put my head in my hands. I stood on that white line with 38,000 of my own countrymen celebrating in the 5th minute of a World Cup semi-final like the cup was already engraved, and I made myself do the only thing that was any use to anybody.

I watched.

And here is what I saw, under all of it, while England lost their minds over a goal.

I saw Ashley Young, 33 years old, jog back to his own half with his hands on his hips.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the Massage Chair.