Glory Of The Football Manager System

I went back to my boys, and it was the best hour of my life, and then it ended the way all of them end, with a coach telling you the bus is leaving.

I do not remember the bus. I do not remember the hotel.

I remember Emma’s hand and a corridor and a door, and then it was 6 in the morning, and the Moscow sky through the gap in the curtains had gone the grey that is not quite light.

A radiator was ticking somewhere. Tk. Tk-tk. Down in the street a lorry was reversing, that flat electric beep going over and over, some other man’s ordinary Sunday starting up under my window while mine came apart.

I had slept in yesterday’s shirt. I could smell the grass on the cuffs.

And the phone was going.

Bzz. It walked itself across the bedside table on its own vibration, a little at a time, all the way to the edge. Bzz. Hit the lamp. Stopped. Bzz. Started back the other way.

You do not get to keep the hour. That is the thing nobody tells you. You get the whistle, and the pile, and the families on the grass, and then the world wakes up and starts deciding what it all meant, and it does not ask you first.

I picked it up because you cannot not, in the end.

9,308 unread.

More than double the Croatia morning. I lay there and watched the number go up while I looked at it. 9,311. 9,314. A message landing every second or 2 from somewhere on the earth, and not one of them from anybody who could help me.

I should not have opened the app. I knew it while my thumb was doing it. But there is a thing in you that has to look, the way you have to look at the away end, and I opened it, and the whole world fell out.

My name was the first trend in England. It was the first trend in Morocco. Marcus told me later it was the first trend in 14 countries at once, and it was 2 different men trending under the one name.

In one half of the world I was the greatest thing that had ever happened.

Drogba had posted. Eto’o had posted, again, the second time in a fortnight. Salah. Mahrez. The Moroccan federation, and then the Algerian one underneath it, and those 2 do not post the same thing twice in a century.

There was a clip of my players going down on their knees in front of the green end, foreheads to the grass, and it had 40 million views on it before I had brushed my teeth, and the caption under it was in a language I cannot read and I did not need to.

There was a photograph of a wall in Casablanca. Somebody had already painted my face on it. 8 hours. A man from Moss Side on a wall in Casablanca, in paint, before the sun was properly up.

And the thing everybody was sharing, over and over, was 15 seconds of me.

I made the mistake of tapping it. It played on a loop, 5 million times before breakfast, and I had to hear my own voice come out of the little speaker, tinny, the roar of the stadium still going behind it.

Me, 30 seconds off the grass, shaking so hard you could see it in the water bottle in shot. And a woman’s voice, half eaten by the noise, asking the only question there was.

”How does it feel to have knocked your own country out?”

I did not remember saying the answer. I heard myself say it anyway, off my own phone, in a quiet hotel room, and my own face did not look like mine.

The same 15 seconds, in Rabat, was a man who would not say sorry. The same 15 seconds, in England, was a Manc gloating. Same words. You heard whichever one you already were.

And in the other half of the world, whatever the clip was, I was Judas.

I am not going to write what they were calling me.

Some of it I will not put on a page, and some of it does not deserve one, and the worst of it I scrolled past with my thumb before my eyes had finished it, which is the only way to do it, the way you walk past a fight in the street and do not turn your head.

There was a video of a man in a pub somewhere in England, and he had a shirt with WALSH on the back, and he was holding a lighter to it, and 200,000 people had watched him do it and a good number of them were cheering. I watched about 3 seconds.

I have never owned an England shirt with my own name on it. I would not have known where you buy one because I couldn’t afford one most of my life.

But somebody had, so they could burn it, and I lay in a hotel bed in Moscow and I understood that I had become a thing people needed to set fire to.

The tags were the worst of it. I will not print them. There was one with my name and a word next to it and I put the phone face down on the duvet for a while after I saw it.

Then I picked it back up, because the other thing was happening too, underneath.

People were fighting about me. In the replies, everywhere, the same argument over and over, and it was the argument I had been having with myself since the whistle.

Half of them saying a man cannot do that to his own country. That there is something in it that is not right, England man or not, that you do not do THAT, on that stage, to those people.

And the other half saying leave him alone, he did his job, he was paid by Morocco to win a football match and he won it better than any man alive could have, and if you want to be angry go and be angry at the blazers who left him at home.

He did his job. Let him hold his head up.

Somebody with a blue tick, an England shirt in the profile picture, had posted the wounded one, and it had 90,000 likes, and under it a former pro I will not name had replied with 4 words.

He did his job. And that one had 200,000, and the 2 of them were still going at each other in the replies at 6 in the morning like the rest of the country behind them.

I put the phone down.

I sat on the edge of a hotel bed in Moscow, in a shirt with 3-day-old grass on the cuffs. And I was, at the same moment, the most loved man on one continent and the most hated man on my own island.

There is no brain built to hold both of those at once, and I did not try.

I just sat there.

Somewhere below me, faint, coming up through the floor of that hotel, men were singing. My men. You could not make out the song, just the shape of it, drums somebody had brought and a lot of voices that had not been to bed.

There was a knock, and it was Jessica, in yesterday’s clothes and a hotel dressing gown with her hair up in a pen, a phone in each hand.

”Do not,” she said, ”look at your phone.”

”Bit late.”

”I mean it. I’ve been up since 4, and it’s all for you now.” She dropped into the chair by the window. ”Your deal with Morocco is up the day after the final, Danny. Do you understand what that means?

”In 6 days you are the most wanted man in the game, out of contract, and I have had approaches from clubs this morning that would not have returned my calls in May.”

”I’ve got a job. Palace.”

”You’ve got a contract at Palace, which is not the same thing as a club that can hold onto you after this, and they both know it, and so do I.” She waved it off. ”Not this week.

”I’m not putting one word of it in front of you until that final is played. I just wanted you to hear it from me, in this room, before you heard a version of it off a phone.”

I nodded. She is the only person alive I let manage me, and that is the reason.

”And the Palace lads,” she said, softer. ”Wan-Bissaka, Tarkowski, the ones Southgate left at home. Their phones have not stopped either. Half of Europe watched your football beat England last night, and it dawned on them what they’ve been walking past.” She almost smiled. ”I’ll sit on it. There’s a final.”

”How are the boys? Downstairs?”

”Not mine to fret over, are they, they’ve all got their own people ringing this morning.” She said it and then she softened. ”Sofyan’s agent has had Serie A on since 6. 2 of them.

”That boy who nobody in Holland wanted.” She let it sit, because she knew what it meant to me. ”They’re saying his name this morning, Danny. All of them.”

I did not say anything to that. I did not need to.

”But no, they’re alright. Children on Christmas morning who haven’t slept. Benatia’s crying into a full English. Bouhaddouz has watched his own goal 200 times.” She stood. ”Let them have it. You did that for them. Go and eat something.”

And she went.

And then, because I am my mother’s son and there was nothing else to do, I found the remote and put the telly on.

click. Sky. And they had the big desk out.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus and Kostas_Gounakis for the support.