Glory Of The Football Manager System

I went in with nothing.

Nobody looked up. 11 men who had just played 45 minutes of a World Cup final sat around the walls of that room dripping onto a mopped floor, and not one of them looked at the door.

The tap was still running. I walked the length of the room and turned it off.

Then the only sound was the rain on the high windows, coming harder than it had all night, and 23 men breathing.

Hakimi sat with a towel round his neck and his jaw set and his eyes red. Sofyan had his elbows on his knees and his head so far down I could see the top of his spine. Benatia could not sit. He stood at his peg with his arms folded, facing the wall.

Rebecca was on her knees in front of En-Nesyri with both thumbs working into the top of his leg. He was looking at the ceiling.

Steam came off all of them. The room smelled of rain and wintergreen and wet grass.

I let the silence sit for 30 seconds. It felt like a year and I let it sit anyway, because there was nothing in me and I needed every one of those seconds to find something.

What I found was the truth.

”Look up.”

They did. 23 faces.

”In 88 years of this fixture, nobody has ever come back from 3. Not once. Not the Brazilians, not the Germans, nobody.”

Ziyech looked at the floor. I kept going.

”So the cup has gone. I am taking it off the table. It went at 44 minutes and it is not coming back, and nobody in this room owes anybody a World Cup any more. Put it down. Stop carrying it.”

The rain hit the windows in a gust, sssshhh, and somewhere above us 78,000 people were a low hum through the concrete.

”Which leaves 45 minutes. In front of 4 billion people. With nothing left to lose and one question still standing.”

I looked round the whole room, one face at a time, the way I did the day I met them.

”What are you made of?

”Because in 20 years, no one of you will be living in the first half of this match. You will be living in the second. Every day, for the rest of your lives, this next 45 minutes is the room you wake up in. So we are going to furnish it properly.”

Rebecca’s fitness board was propped against the physio bed. 11 names in amber going orange. I turned it round to face the wall.

Then I pulled the tactics board off its hook and laid it flat, face down. Bray blinked at me.

”The waiting is finished. It was right, and it worked, and it is dead, so we bury it. We keep the ball, because that is what you have become. But we take it forward now. All of it goes forward.

”When we lose it, I want it back in 6 seconds. Nearest 3 men, straight in, no shape, no permission. You have done it in training for 2 days. Now you do it here.”

I turned to the corner.

”Achraf.”

He pulled the towel off his neck.

”The man marking you plays central midfield for a living. He has done a job on you for 45 minutes and it worked because I kept you home. You are not staying home any more. I want you at their byline every 2 minutes until I say different. Karim covers you.”

El Ahmadi nodded once. Hakimi looked at me and something came back on in his face.

”And I will say this next part one time, so nobody can ever tell me they did not hear it.”

The room went stiller.

”Every time Achraf goes, there is 40 yards of grass behind him. The fastest footballer alive is stood in that grass, and he does not track back. Some time in the next 45 minutes it turns over, and he goes, and when he goes there is not a thing anybody in this room can do about it.

”I know it. I am telling you I know it. And I do not care. There is nothing left in this match to protect.”

I did not believe we could win it. So I did not ask them to win.

I asked them the other thing.

”Go and show me what you are made of.”

For a second nobody moved. Then Benatia turned round from his peg.

”You heard the coach.” He said something else in Arabic, 4 words, low.

And the first man on his feet was Sofyan Amrabat. Head up. The boy who had not lifted his head since the 34th minute stood up first, and the room stood up after him, and the noise of 22 sets of studs hitting that floor at once went through me like a current.

At the door Rebecca caught my arm.

”How long has he got?”

”You tell me.”

”He had an hour, Danny. The hour has gone. Whatever he does out there now, he is doing it on nothing.”

I looked across the room at Youssef En-Nesyri, 20 years old, lacing his boots with his jaw tight, not looking at either of us.

”Amine.” Harit’s head came up. ”Stay warm. You are coming.”

Then the buzzer went, brrrrp, and the door opened, and the noise of the Luzhniki came down that tunnel like water through a broken dam.

We came up the tunnel and the noise arrived before the light did, rolling down the concrete at us, and the closer we got the more it stopped being a sound and started being a place.

HNNNNNNNN. 78,000 people holding one note.

France were already out, stood in the rain in a line, waiting. Nobody keeps France waiting. My 11 walked out to do it anyway, and the green half saw the shirts come out of the tunnel and went up an octave.

The rain had stopped being rain.

It came across the pitch in moving walls, silver under the floodlights, and the noise it made on the roof of the stand was a long steady roar under everything else, trrrrrrrr, like a held note.

My suit had been wet since the 30th minute of the first half. Now it was part of me. I stopped noticing where I ended.

FWEET.

We kicked off, and inside 90 seconds the whole stadium knew something had changed.

Pogba cut out Ziyech’s first pass, and before the ball had gone 5 yards, 3 green shirts arrived on him at once. Sofyan got there first, then Nordin, then Ziyech coming back, and Sofyan came out of the pile with the ball.

6 seconds. I counted it. 6 seconds, and the thing was ours again.

”OOOOOHH.” 78,000 people made the sound of an audience seeing the trick for the first time.

2 days old, that press. 2 days.

And round the ground you could feel the neutrals sit forward. 30,000 people who had come for a coronation working out, pass by pass, that they might have tickets to something else.

And then we played.

Thwack. Boussoufa to El Ahmadi, first time. Thwack. El Ahmadi round the corner to Sofyan. Sofyan into Ziyech between the lines, tk, and Ziyech turned Kanté, which nobody does, and slid it wide.

And Hakimi was there. Nobody had seen him go. A right-back, at the far corner of their box, in the 47th minute.

Cutback. Half cleared. Ziyech, 20 yards.

THWACK.

Lloris got down well and pushed it round the post, and the green half of the Luzhniki came up off its seats with a noise I had not heard from it all night. Not hope yet. The thing that comes before hope. The animal noticing.

The drums changed tempo. Boom-boom. Boom-boom. Boom-boom. Faster. And the horns came in over the top of them for the first time all night, BWAAAAP, BWAAAP, long and rude and joyful.

On the far touchline Didier Deschamps had come to the edge of his technical area, hands still in his pockets, and stood there watching us the way a man watches weather.

52 minutes.

Boussoufa found Hakimi on the halfway line and Hakimi went at Matuidi, and this time he did not check back inside.

He knocked it past him on the outside and went. 19 years old, into the rain, and Matuidi turned like a lorry, and by the time Hernández came scrambling across the grass Hakimi was inside the corner of the box with the ball on his laces.

Hernández did the only thing left. He went through him. Boot, shin, both men down, thud.

Fweeeeet! Pitana’s whistle before they landed.

Free kick. 22 yards. Right of centre.

And the whole of France did the arithmetic in one second flat, because they have watched the tape too. Ziyech, dead ball, right side. Every cross for 6 weeks into the same square yard at the back post. Saturday, 14 balls, 14 times the same square yard.

They loaded the back post like sandbags before a flood. Giroud back there. Varane back there. Umtiti organising it, pointing, pulling men in. Lloris took a half step off his near post toward the traffic, toward the flight everyone in the stadium knew was coming.

Ziyech stood over the ball with Boussoufa beside him and his face doing nothing at all, the way his face has done nothing for 6 weeks.

He had put 14 balls in a square yard on Saturday so that on Sunday nobody would be standing where he was actually going to put the 15th.

FWEET.

3 steps.

THWACK.

Over the wall. It went up over the jumping heads and came down like something falling off a shelf, dipping, and it was under the bar and into the top of the near corner before Lloris had finished transferring his weight back to the post he had left.

For half a second the Luzhniki checked the net.

Then the near end drew one breath, all 40,000 at once, an in-breath you could hear, hhhp, and the roar came up out of it and climbed and kept climbing, a match struck in the dark, a flame going up a fuse.

WHRRRROOOOAAAAR.

1-3. 52 minutes.

Goooaaalll!!