Glory Of The Football Manager System

They came again before the half hour. Another corner, another ball hung on that near post. And again Da Costa found his man, and this time he did not just clear it, he went and hunted it, came off his mark and met it full and put it into the away end. [CRACK. ”YEEEAAAHHH!”]

The one after that, Munir claimed clean, up above the lot of them, both gloves wrapped round it. And he did not simply catch it.

He held it over his head a half-second longer than the game needed, then was down and screaming, pointing, shoving the back four back into shape. His box, and he wanted them to know it.

[”MU-NIR! MU-NIR!”]

The same men who had been counting his run-up an hour ago, saying his name now.

They had turned England’s best weapon 3 times, and slowly, the way you never feel it happening while it happens, the match began to bend into the shape I wanted.

England had the ball and did not know what to do with it. Stones rolled it to Maguire. Maguire rolled it back.

And the 38,000 who had spent 20 minutes singing it home went quiet in that specific way a crowd goes quiet when it can feel its team making nothing and cannot work out why. [Toooot! A lone plastic horn cries from the Moroccan end.]

Down on the grass it read plainer than any number could put it. Sterling ran into channels that were not there and put it out off his own shin. Alli, a rumour. Lingard drifting.

Kane dropping so deep to get a touch that he ended up in his own half, and Da Costa going with him halfway and then stopping dead, because Benatia was howling at him to leave it, hold the line, and for once the kid held the line.

On the far touchline Southgate stood with his arms folded and his waistcoat buttoned and did not move a muscle, and I watched him not move, and I knew that stillness in my own bones.

It is the stillness of a manager whose team is winning and building nothing, who has just felt the first cold draught of the thought that this will not be enough.

They had a song for me by then, and they were not about to put it down.

They built it the way we always build them, took a tune everybody’s nan knows and bent the words round it. The first was almost gentle. Sing-song. Half of them grinning as they swayed. [”HE’S ONE OF OUR OWN... YOU SOLD OUT ONE OF YOUR OWN...”] You could have set a nursery rhyme to it.

Then it grew a spine. That flat 4-beat thump, boots on concrete [STOMP. STOMP. STOMP.], [”HE’S A JUDAS AND HE KNOWS HE IS!”], and I am not writing the rest of what they had me down as, because my mother reads everything I put my name to and she watched this game.

And then they wanted a wave. That tune, the one that is meant to be love, the one they sing when they want the gaffer to turn and lift his arms and share it with them. They turned it inside out and handed it back to me as a summons.

[”WALSH! WALSH! LOOK AT US!”] 38,000 people ordering me to turn round and face the country I was born in.

And I could not do it.

That is the plain truth of it. I stood on the white line and stared at my own back four like my life was buried somewhere in it, and the one thing I could not make my body do was turn around and look at them, because I did not know what my face would do if I did.

Here is what they do not tell you about being hated by your own. It is not the abuse. I have been abused; every manager alive has been abused. It is that they use the tune. My tune. The one my dad taught me in a pub with his pint going flat.

They sharpen it into a knife and hand it round and put it in me, 38,000 at a time, and every note of it is home.

So I turned my back on 38,000 of my own, and I coached.

”HAROON!” Carcela’s head snapped round. I chopped my hand up the line. ”Stay high. Do not come back and help. Stay HIGH. I want you on that full-back’s chin the second we win it.”

He nodded. He had it. And I watched him push 5 yards further up the pitch and hold there, high and lonely on that tired full-back’s shoulder.

Twice before the break, we let them see the edge of it.

First time, Fajr, the same boy playing terrified sideways balls in the 10th minute, stepped across a tired pass from Henderson and took it clean, not a scrap of fear left in it, and I saw the whole change in him in that one touch. Fang all the way out.

And the 11 men who had been a low block half a breath earlier came pouring up the pitch in straight fast lines, [RRROOOAAAAARRRR!] and beside me Marcus clicked his stopwatch [click] like a man at the races, counting the seconds it took us to travel from our box to theirs.

Harit carried it, and every ounce of the fear had gone the instant the ball was at his feet, because that is the one mercy the ball grants a footballer: it takes the crowd out of his head. The same crowd that had spent 20 minutes climbing inside it.

He slid it down the motorway behind Young, into the strip of grass I had been watching since the 5th minute, and the ball skidded off the greasy surface and ran, and Nordin was onto it at a flat sprint on those lungs that do not end.

[Skhhh.] Studs raking wet turf. The cross came in low and hard across the England 6.

Bouhaddouz got there. A yard of space and Pickford’s near post gaping, the chance I had drawn on a board for 4 days, and he snatched at it, leaned back, and put his laces through it.

[SMACK!] Off the top of Pickford’s bar and away, and 40,000 people had their hands on their heads before the ball had finished travelling.

He should have scored. He knew it. He stood with both hands laced behind his skull looking at the sky, and I could not even be angry, because a striker who was terrified 20 minutes ago had just been through on goal in a World Cup semi-final.

And 40,000 Moroccans came up off their seats for the first time since the anthem anyway [”YYYEEEAAAHHH!”]. No goal, nothing on the board, and they roared it like one had gone in, because they had seen the thing I had promised them for 4 days. This England could not live with the counter, and now England knew it too.

And on the England bench, a man stood up.

Not Southgate. Southgate had not moved.

But somebody beside him came up off the seats fast, pointing down our left, at the space behind Young, at the bare grass I had been staring at since the 5th minute.

I did not need to hear him to know he had seen it. An hour too late, and only half of it, because he was reading grass and I had been reading Young’s legs since the 5th minute.

Southgate turned his head and looked where the man was pointing. And did not move.

He had seen it. And he was going to sit on his lead and hope. I could have kissed him.

And the English end roared the clearance that followed, a Stones header hoofed into row 12, [”YYYEEEAAAHHH!”], the way you cheer a thing you are frightened of.

That is how far it had turned in half an hour. 38,000 people who had spent the first 5 minutes singing it home were on their feet cheering a defensive header like it was a goal of their own, because they had felt it too. A goal up, and nowhere near safe.