Glory Of The Football Manager System

Nadia was waiting in the lobby with a folder and the face she does.

Ping. The lift behind her. Somewhere off to the left a barman was putting bottles into a fridge one at a time, clink, clink, clink, and 20 feet beyond the glass doors that drum was still going.

”Press at 6. FIFA at 7 for the trophy thing, which you will hate, and I have told them 10 minutes.” She fell into step with me. ”The morning we landed in Russia, you could have had us at 750-1 for this tournament. This morning we are 4-1 for the final. France are 1-3.”

”That is about right.”

”The Sky panel picked France. All of them except Keane.”

”Keane picked us?”

”Keane said France have not been in a proper fight yet and we have been in 5, and he would rather have the team that knows what the last 20 minutes feel like.”

Roy Keane. Well.

”Neville said France 2-0 and that it was nothing against you. Henry picked France and then spent 4 minutes explaining why he might be wrong, and they had to cut him off for an advert.”

Then she stopped walking, which Nadia does not do, and put a printed sheet in my hand.

”You should see this before a journalist reads it to you at 6.”

4 lines.

No foreign manager has ever won the World Cup. 20 tournaments, back to 1930. Every winning coach has managed his own country.

The youngest man to win it is Alberto Suppici. 31 years, 252 days. Uruguay, 1930. No manager under 35 has done it since.

No African nation has ever reached the final.

No Arab nation has ever reached the final.

I read it 3 times, stood in a hotel lobby with a barman clinking bottles behind me.

Everybody thinks a list like that lifts a man. They think you read it and the wind gets under you.

It does the opposite, and here is why.

Nobody has ever done it because it is nearly impossible to do. That is what a list like that is actually telling you. 20 tournaments. 88 years. Not one foreign coach has managed it, and I am 29, and the last man to win this younger than 35 did it in 1930 when they came over on a boat.

It is not encouragement. It is a long record of how this usually ends.

And there was a second thing under it I did not say to Nadia.

I have already done every part of that list except the last part. First African semi-final. First African final. A squad nobody wanted, through the group of death, past the hosts, past Croatia, past England.

All of that is done and cannot be undone. And not one line of it will matter on Monday if we lose on Sunday.

They will remember it fondly, which is worse. A lovely story. A wonderful adventure. Weren’t they marvellous.

I stood there and let myself think it all the way through, because I have never once got anywhere by refusing to look at a thing.

We might lose this.

We might lose it badly, in front of more people than have ever watched a human being do anything, and go home as everybody’s favourite story, and I will have to stand on that grass and watch 11 men who gave me everything find out that everything was not enough.

”Coach.”

Elena was 6 feet away with Tomás behind her and the boom already up, and there was a look on her I had not seen in 6 weeks of her filming my life.

”Have you seen it?”

”Seen what?”

She turned her phone round and pressed play and did not warn me, and that is the only reason it got me.

Music first. Strings, low, one note held.

Then a Portakabin door that sticks. I know that door. I have shouldered that door 400 times. Ours, at Beckenham, and 16 kids in a room built for 8, and Olise at 16 and about 4 stone laughing at something out of shot.

And my own voice off camera, younger than I sound now, saying right, in, sit down, quick as you like.

Bang. The strings cut and the drum came in and it went.

Selhurst, from behind me, walking out, the noise coming up off the Holmesdale like water. The airport fence with 2,000 people on it and Bray’s voice: ”...Right. Aye. That’s us, then.”

The mopped dressing room floor. The old boy at Kaliningrad on his mates’ shoulders with his cap in his hand.

Mud, and Bounou on his knees, and Sofyan Amrabat’s face in the exact second he understood the 5th penalty was never coming.

Then the sound dropped out. Everything went silent.

And they put up 3 seconds of Wednesday night with no audio on it at all, just me on a white line not moving while a stadium came apart around me, and then they let the KRAK of 40,000 people back in at full volume, and it came out of that little phone speaker like something breaking.

Black.

THE WALSH WAY.

And then, small, underneath: ONE MATCH LEFT. JULY. NETFLIX.

I did not say anything for a while.

”It went up at 2,” Elena said. ”It has done 11 million. Not this week. Since 2 o’clock. Netflix have moved the release. It was going out in October. The first 3 episodes drop in 4 weeks.”

”They can’t. You’ve not finished filming it.”

”No,” she said. ”We have not.”

And I stood in a hotel lobby in Moscow and understood that Tomás had the camera on my face while I watched a trailer of my own life, and that this, me, right now, would be in the show.

There is no door out of that. I signed a piece of paper 14 months ago and there is no door.

There was a shot in the middle of it I have been putting off, the same way I put off Harit.

A street in Moss Side. Red brick, wheelie bins, the chip shop on the corner with the shutter half down.

4 seconds. No words. And then a pair of hands making tea in a kitchen I have eaten 10,000 meals in, and the camera never once goes up to her face, because she would not let it.

My mother. Who has never watched a football match in her life.

”You went to my mum’s.”

”She rang us,” Elena said. ”In April. Rang the production office herself and said, and I am quoting, if you are going to do it you may as well do it properly. Then she made the crew a bacon sandwich each and refused to be filmed.”

I had to look at the ceiling for a bit.

Clink. Clink. The barman, still going, all the way through it.

”There is no ending,” I said, when I could.

”No.”

”You have cut 90 seconds of my entire life and you have not got an ending, because it has not happened yet.”

”That is exactly right.” Elena had gone quiet, and Tomás had the camera close enough that I could hear it running, that little whrrr they make. ”Sunday is the last episode. Nobody has filmed it. Nobody has written it. Not Netflix. Not me. Not you.”

”That’s a terrible way to make a television programme.”

”It is the only way to make this one.”

I rang Emma at 11 that night with the window open, because the road below had not gone quiet and I had stopped wanting it to.

Boom. Boom. Boom-boom-boom. Him. Still there. 19 hours.

”30 million by 9 o’clock,” she said. ”It is the biggest thing on the internet today. There are 14-year-olds in Jakarta who now know what a Portakabin is.”

”Did you watch it?”

”4 times. I cried at the chip shop, which I am not proud of.” A pause. ”Your mum rang me before it went up, to warn me. She did not want to warn you because she said you would only get funny about it.”

”She’s not wrong.”

”She never is.” The kettle going on, 2,000 miles away. ”How are the lads?”

”Frightened. Which is right. Anybody who is not frightened of this is not paying attention.”

”And you?”

I sat on the end of a hotel bed with a printed list in my pocket that said nobody like me had ever done this in 88 years. A squad who had to learn to be a different team by Sunday.

A striker who had gone down on the grass for a second and a half and got up, and a captain who had seen it.

And I gave her the true answer, because she is the only person alive I give the true answer to.

”I don’t know if it’s enough, love. I’ve built it as well as I know how and I don’t know if it’s enough.”

She did not tell me it was.

”No,” she said. ”You wouldn’t, would you. That’s Sunday’s job.”

Saturday, then. One more session. A team sheet with a hole in it where a striker should be.

And somewhere in a building in London, a man cutting a documentary about my life around a gap at the end the exact size and shape of a football match.

On Sunday, in front of more people than have ever watched a human being do anything, I was going to walk out and film the last episode.

Below the window, the drum kept going.

I had no idea what was in it.

*A/N: A keeper who told him he was wrong. A midfielder who says he is being put in a cage. A striker who went down for a second and a half and a captain who saw it. 30 million people have watched a trailer of his life with no ending on it.

2 days. France. And nobody knows how it finishes, including him. You know what to do.*