Glory Of The Football Manager System

There were 3 minutes left of the 4 and I was not going to go quiet. I came off my line with both arms up, pushing them on, screaming at Ziyech to keep it wide and Boussoufa to get it forward, throwing my whole body up the touchline with every ball.

Bray told me after that he had both fists in the back of my jacket the entire time, holding me inside the technical area, and I never felt them once.

And I sent them up again. Both centre-halves. The left-back. I was pointing Saïss forward and waving the full-backs on and emptying my own half on purpose, 4 white shirts camped on the lip of the French box, France flinging bodies in front of all of it, because there was nothing left to protect and everything left to win.

Harit hit one from 8 yards. Smack. Umtiti got a chest in front of it, oof, and went down and stayed down, and 78,000 people were up before the block, a wall of noise rising, then falling as the ball spun off to safety. Ahhhh.

Ziyech curled the loose one and Lloris flew and got a glove to it, tp, and a whole stadium sucked its breath in, hhhhh, and held it. The old man was leaning so far over the rail that a steward had a fist in his belt.

El Ahmadi lashed the next one back through a forest of legs, crack, off a blue shin, up onto the roof of the net, and the roar came up and died in the same half-second, the sound of a whole stand punched in the stomach. Ooooohhhh.

Pitana had the watch up in front of his face. Tick. Tick.

So I threw my last dice. I was right at the front of the technical area screaming my goalkeeper’s name and stabbing my finger up the pitch, up, UP, go, and whether Yassine Bounou heard me over 78,000 people or just knew, he left his goal and ran. Slap-slap-slap-slap.

A goalkeeper running 100 yards through a monsoon into the other team’s box, and the sound 78,000 people made was not a cheer and was not a groan. It was one long rising note, a whole stadium taking one breath and holding it, and the drums went quiet, because the drummers had come down to the front to watch.

Last ball of the World Cup.

Ziyech stood over it with his socks round his ankles and his face, for the first time in 6 weeks, showing every bit of it.

He hung it on the square yard, thwump. The one from Saturday, from every Saturday.

And it went slow again.

Every man in that box went up, and above all of them, above Varane, above Giroud, in the last act of the last minute, rose the goalkeeper of Morocco.

I saw the ball meet his forehead. I saw Lloris beaten and turning, already knowing. I saw 40,000 people coming up out of their seats with the roar already in their mouths.

thock.

Clean. Downward. Past the keeper.

DONK.

A metallic, sickening ring off the inside of the post.

And for one whole heartbeat, the world believed it. The net kicked on the wind behind the goal, and 40,000 people saw a ball sitting in a net, and a sound came up out of them with nothing held back in it, YYYEEEEEAAAAHHH.

And Bounou, who had risen for it, was already wheeling away with both arms in the air, certain.

Then the ball came back off the paint, across the line, and out, and the eye caught up with the truth a half-second after every heart in green had already left the ground.

And the roar died in 40,000 throats at once, cut off with a knife, one enormous hk of stolen air, the worst sound I have ever heard a crowd make.

Varane hammered the rebound up into the black.

And while it was still climbing, Néstor Pitana put the whistle to his mouth.

FWEEET. FWEEET. FWEEEEEEEEEEET.

The last ball of the World Cup came down into the centre circle with nobody under it. It bounced once in the wet, splat, rolled a heavy yard, and stopped.

Nobody went for it. There was nowhere left to take it.

And the whole place came apart down the middle.

France went up in a wall of blue, the cannons on the tunnel roof going FWUMP, FWUMP, FWUMP, FWUMP, their colours falling out of the black in the rain.

The whole French bench came over the boards at once and sprinted the length of the field into the arms of the team, and they went down in a heap on the centre spot, chest into chest, and even over the cannons you could hear the thump of grown men throwing their bodies at each other.

Pogba flat on his back making an angel in the wet. Griezmann on his knees screaming into his own hands. OUAIIIIIS!

And up in the stand, the man in blue who had grieved too early was on his seat now with both arms straight up and the rain running down his open face, and he was not the only one up there crying.

And in the same paper, on the same grass, my players went down where they stood. All of them. One after another, as if the whistle itself had cut them off at the knees.

And it was not only their hearts that gave out. It was their bodies.

They had spent 45 minutes doing a thing a body is not built to do, dragging a World Cup final back from 3 goals down in a monsoon, and the whistle was the second the machine was finally allowed to break.

Legs cramped and locked under men who could not have stood again if the stand had caught fire. Ziyech on all fours, gasping. Saïss with both hands clamped round a seized calf. Every chest on that grass heaving up at the black, pulling at air that would not come. Hhhh. Hhhh.

Sofyan face down on the halfway line, arms folded over the back of his head. Harit on his knees with his shirt over his face. Bounou still marooned in the French box where the last ball had died. Hakimi where the counter had left him, and not a yard from it since.

The old man’s cap was on the concrete at his feet. The woman from Huizen had her back to the pitch. The boy in the big gloves had not got up.

And then, out of the middle of all that blue, one of them stopped.

Hugo Lloris turned his back on his own celebration and walked to his goal line, to where Yassine Bounou was still standing alone, the man who had run the length of the pitch to head the last ball of the World Cup against his post.

Lloris took the back of Bounou’s head in both hands and put their foreheads together, keeper to keeper, and held it there in the rain.

You do not do that while there is still a game to be won. The war was over.

The ticker tape did not choose. It came down out of the same black sky onto both of them, the same paper, the same rain.

On the blue shirts it turned to gold. It caught in their hair and stuck to their soaked skin and made them into something out of a story, champions of the whole earth, lit up and roaring.

On the green shirts it turned to ash. It settled on the backs of men lying face down and did not move, wet and grey and heavy, and looked for all the world like it was burying them where they had fallen.

And under the roar, if you were close enough, and I was, you could hear the other thing. The sound no camera ever takes home. Grown men sobbing into wet grass, and the flat, hollow patter of rain, pit-pat, pit-pat, coming down on the backs of 11 empty jackets.

3-4.

Full time.

***

Thank you for all of the support.