Glory Of The Football Manager System

France went straight down the other end and hit the post.

We had scored the goal of the tournament, we had lost our striker to it, we had put a 21-year-old on in his place, and inside 2 minutes the whole night tipped under my feet.

Mbappé took one pass from Griezmann and went past Dirar like a rumour, cut across Saïss, and bent one round Bounou with the inside of his boot off the sodden grass.

pok.

DOINK.

The inside of the far post. My heart came up out of my chest and stopped somewhere behind my teeth.

40,000 people made the sound of a door slamming on a whole house, HAH, and the ball ran back out along the wet paint, hissing across the 6-yard line, and Saïss got a boot under it and battered it into the stands with his own heart coming through his mouth.

The cold hand. Every time.

And on the far touchline, for the first time in 6 weeks of watching him, Didier Deschamps took his hands out of his pockets.

He was moving before the ball was dead. Pointing, reorganising, 2 minutes of it, and then the board went up on their side. N’Zonzi on, Matuidi off. A unit of a man, sent on to stand in the corridor Achraf had been living in.

And then Deschamps did the thing I will respect for the rest of my life, and fear in my sleep.

He moved Mbappé to the left.

Off his wing. Away from Dirar. Into the grass behind Hakimi.

He was not chasing a 4th any more. He had stopped trying to win the game in front of him. He was waiting for the one I had promised my dressing room, and he had just moved his gun to the window it would come through.

I saw it, and he saw me see it, and neither of us could do anything about the other one, and the match went on.

My mouth had gone dry. I remember that. In all that rain, with the water running off my chin, the inside of my mouth was like paper.

And I let myself feel it, for one second, the thing I had refused to feel for 6 weeks.

This was the final. Not a final. The final. The last match football would play all year, the one a whole planet had climbed a month to reach, and there was no second leg and no next week and no other night. Whatever happened now happened forever.

Up behind the glass in the main stand the King of Morocco was on his feet in the dark, soaked to the skin like everybody else. 2 seats along, the president of France. A row of men who run countries, none of them dry, none of them sitting.

A billion people were watching a team nobody wanted try to do a thing that had never been done.

Then I put it away, because you cannot feel that and coach at the same time.

What came next was the best 15 minutes of football my teams have ever played, and I include everything at Palace.

We put France in their own box and kept them there.

The rain was coming down in rods now, straight and hard through the floodlights, and it hammered the roof of the stand in one long roll that never broke, trrrrrrrr.

Under it the ground had started to make the low sound, the one you feel in your feet before you hear it, the sound a stadium makes when it can smell a goal.

Triangles in the rain. Boussoufa dropping between the lines, El Ahmadi holding the door, Ziyech drifting into the seams N’Zonzi could not cover and Harit running at whoever was nearest with the fearlessness of a boy who has been on the pitch 10 minutes.

76 minutes. Harit went past Pavard on the inside, past Varane on the outside, and hit it from 8 yards, and Hugo Lloris saved it with his face. His actual face, thwock, the ball off his cheekbone and back up into the rain.

He was on his feet before it came down, shaking his head like a wet dog, screaming at his back 4, pointing, organising.

Ziyech corner, short this time, worked to the edge, floated back in, and Saïss climbed above everybody and met it flush on the forehead.

TONK.

The bar. The whole frame shook and shed its water in a sheet, and 40,000 throats opened on the way up and shut in the same half-second, one enormous AH bitten clean in half.

Fekir came on for Giroud, and France broke, and Fekir hit one from 20 that was through everybody, thwack, and Bounou flew and got 2 fingers to it, tp, and turned it over the bar, and the corner came to nothing, and we went again. Harit again, jinking, and his shot took a deflection, tk, and crawled along the wet line, and Umtiti got back and hacked it off the paint with his standing foot, thunk, while falling backwards into his own net. Boussoufa clipped one round the corner for Hakimi, who was somehow both making the run and arriving late at the far post, and Lloris came through 3 bodies and got both fists to it, pomf, and took a Moroccan head on the way through.

THUMP.

The collision. Bodies down in the spray. Pitana waved play on and the green end howled its outrage into the rain.

France broke, 4 on 4, and Fekir slipped Mbappé down the left, and a low groan went up out of 40,000 people, nnnnh, the sound of a crowd watching the one thing it is afraid of. And Benatia, who cannot run, ran, and threw himself full length through the water and got everything on the ball.

Skkkkh-THUD.

He came up with the ball and 30 metres of spray behind him and played it off the floor to Sofyan before 2 blue shirts landed on where he had been.

My captain. 31 years old. Told for 2 years his legs had gone.

The Luzhniki was not a stadium any more. It was one animal.

The noise had turned into a physical thing, a pressure flat against the side of my face and a hand pushing on my chest, and I was shouting into it and could not hear one word of myself and did not stop.

There was no bigger room than this one, anywhere, tonight. No bigger night. We had climbed a whole month of football to stand in the last hour of it, and every person who had ever laughed at these boys was watching them now.

”DIMA MAGHRIB! DIMA MAGHRIB!” from 3 sides now, the neutrals gone over, all of them, the Senegal flags and the Nigeria flags and the Egypt flags all up and swinging.

”ZI-YECH!” Boom-boom-boom. ”SO-FYAN!” Boom-boom-boom.

40 South Londoners had their shirts off in a Moscow monsoon, arms round each other, bouncing, singing the Palace song with my name in it to a stadium that could not hear them and did not need to.

The old man on the rail was not waiting any more. Both hands gripped the barrier and his whole body willed, leaning into the pitch like a man leaning into wind.

At the top of the green end the man who came back down the steps had both fists in the air and his face turned up into the rain, shouting at the sky. He had nearly missed this. He knew exactly what he had nearly done.

Row 9 was on its feet, all of it, the whole row.

She was not. Emma sat dead still in the middle of the standing, with her fists against her mouth.

And twice, in the middle of all that, I looked at the halfway line.

He was there both times. Alone in the rain in the centre circle, hands on hips, walking in small circles, a boy waiting for a bus in a storm.

He had touched the ball 4 times in 20 minutes. While 21 men emptied themselves into the night, the fastest footballer alive was walking, and watching, and keeping himself dry inside somehow.

No sound came off him at all. In the middle of the loudest place on earth there was a quiet spot the size of one man, the way the centre of a storm is quiet, and it frightened me more than anything France had done all night.

And the number came up, unasked, the way it does.

[KYLIAN MBAPPÉ. STAMINA 96%.]

I turned and looked at Rebecca’s board on the bench. 11 names. 10 of them red.

The fire again. Always the fire, and never once the water.

Boussoufa bent double with his hands on his knees for 3 seconds, spat, straightened up, and asked for the ball again.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus and Kostas_Gounakis for the support.