Glory Of The Football Manager System

I ran it back 9 more times.

On the 9th the kitchen door opened behind me. Emma came in with her hair in a towel and looked over my shoulder at the screen for about as long as the wide shot lasts. Then she reached past me and shut the lid of the iPad with 1 finger.

”You have a quarter-final tomorrow night,” she said. ”Go to bed.”

I went to bed. I lay on my back in the dark and for once it was not Moscow on the ceiling. It was 2 lines of yellow shirts, 4 and 4, sliding across a pitch together like a gate on a runner, and I was working out how many passes it takes to get a gate to slide too far.

Ron had the barrier up for me at 10 to 7.

Rebecca had beaten me in.

Her board was on the easel outside my office with the whole squad on it in her square capitals, and a line through every man she wanted fresh for the Etihad. She had not waited to talk me through it.

She was in the gym with Hakimi and a stopwatch, and the board did not need her stood beside it. 2 of the names without a line had a number written after them. Wan-Bissaka 60. Grealish 70.

I picked the 11 and the 7 from the names she had left me, at my desk, before the kettle had boiled.

CRYSTAL PALACE: Krul. Wan-Bissaka, Tuanzebe, Konaté, Mitchell. Kirby, Grealish, Olise. Bowen, Blake, Semenyo.

Bench: Fletcher, Ward, McArthur, Højbjerg, Townsend, Cartwright, Pato.

10 outfield players with an average age of 19 and a half, in front of a goalkeeper who has been to a World Cup. Jack Grealish is 23 and he was the oldest outfield player I had. The holders of the Carabao Cup were going to play a quarter-final at Wembley with 2 boys of 17 in the middle of the pitch.

I looked at that sheet for a while. Then I signed it and took it down the corridor to Sarah, who files it. She had a second sheet waiting with 5 blank lines on it for the penalty takers. I wrote Bowen, Olise, Blake, Grealish and Kirby, in that order, and she read it back to me once. There is no extra time in this competition before the final. Sarah read that rule in June and she has not let anybody in the building forget it since.

Marcus had the analysts’ room dark at 9 and 3 clips on the wall. He had cut it down to 3 for Ibrahima Konaté, who will not sit through 10.

The first was Burton going a goal behind at Shrewsbury in August, and a goal behind against Burnley in September, and winning both. Marcus let those run without a word.

The second was Jake Hesketh, 22, on loan from Southampton, chasing a team mate’s shot into the 6 yard box. Then doing it again against a different side. Marcus had 7 of those and showed 2. He stopped the second with Hesketh a yard from the goalkeeper and nobody near him, and he looked across the room at Nya Kirby until Kirby nodded. Then he told the room the other thing he had found. Hesketh scored his first goal in senior football against Crystal Palace, in this cup, in September 2016, 7 months before I had this job.

The third was the gate. Burton defend in 2 lines that move across the pitch together, and they do it well, because Nigel Clough has drilled it into them and half of that back 4 have played for him at 2 clubs. But a line that slides has to keep sliding. Switch the ball once and it follows. Switch it back inside 6 seconds and the far full back arrives on his own, a yard late, with a winger already running at him.

That was Monday’s session. That was why I had stopped it 4 times.

Bray had the cup side on pitch 2 at 11 for 20 minutes of corners. I watched from the fence and he did not come over, and I did not expect him to. He walked Connor Blake to the near post and stood him where Christian Benteke stands for routine 4.

Then he took Tyrick Mitchell and Axel Tuanzebe to the halfway line, 1 at a time, by the elbow, and left them there, and went back and ran the routine 6 times with those 2 stood 50 yards from it doing nothing at all.

On pitch 3 Michael Steele had Tim Krul and the boy Fletcher taking crosses. There was a water bottle on the grass behind the goal with a strip of white tape round it and 5 names on the tape in Steele’s writing.

At lunch Deano brought 3 armbands up from the kit room and laid them in a row on the hatch. Deano brings 3 of everything.

Scott Dann was not in the 18. He is 31 and club captain. He got up from his own table, picked the middle armband off the hatch, and carried it across the canteen to where Konaté was sat with a plate of pasta and his headphones round his neck.

”Left arm, Ibou,” Dann said. ”And you call the toss.”

Konaté stood up to take it. He is 19 and 6 foot 4, and he held that strip of elastic in both hands and looked at it. Then he put it in his tracksuit pocket and sat down and finished his lunch.

I had made 1 decision of my own in the night. I was going to watch this match from the bench, sat down, with my hands where I could see them.

Wembley on a Tuesday night in December, with the cold coming up through the concrete of the tunnel. You could hear the Burton end from the dressing room corridor. They had come a long way down the M1 for this and they had brought a drum.

Dum. Dum-dum. Dum.

BURTON ALBION: Collins. Brayford, Turner, Buxton, Hutchinson. Allen, Quinn, Fraser. Harness, Hesketh, Akins.

All in yellow, shirts and shorts and socks. A League One side that had put Aston Villa, Burnley and Nottingham Forest out of this cup to get here.

They were men. You saw that before you saw anything else in that tunnel. Jake Buxton is 33, with tape on both wrists. John Brayford is 30. Lucas Akins is 29 and their player of the year. Stephen Quinn has 18 caps for Ireland and he has stood in this tunnel before an FA Cup final, in 2014, when Michael Olise was 12 years old.

Olise was stood 4 feet from him with the collar of his shirt in his teeth. He had been 17 for 6 days.

[JAKE BUXTON. CA 104. PA 104.]

Both numbers the same. Everything that man was ever going to be as a footballer, he already was, and he had got there on wet Tuesdays in the lower divisions with nobody watching. I did not need the cards for my own line. I know those second numbers by heart, and the lowest of them was a long way north of 104.

Nigel Clough walked down his line from the back. He is 52. He won this cup twice as a player and his father won it 4 times as a manager, and he first took the Burton job in 1998, when they were in the 7th tier. He did not look at my players once.

”What are we playing for tonight?” he said.

”Pride,” Buxton said. And then the rest of them, down the line, 1 after another.

Prrrp.

I sat down. Sarah was on my left with the sheet on her knee. Bray was on my right. In the row behind us, in a seat Sarah had put his name on, Michael Cooke had his cap in both hands.

For 11 minutes Burton did exactly what Marcus’s wall said they would. 2 lines of 4, with Hesketh dropping in to make it 5, and they went across that pitch together shouting at each other, and it was good, honest, organised defending by men who have done it 400 times.

It did not matter. You could see it did not matter by the 4th minute.

Quinn went to close Olise down the way he has closed people down for 13 years, shoulder first, to let the boy know he was there.

Olise took the ball on the outside of his left boot with Quinn already leaning into him. He rolled away from the contact as if the contact had been a door somebody was holding open. Quinn went through the space where a 17-year-old had been stood, and had to put a hand on the grass to stay up.

He looked at the grass. Then he looked at his own bench.

It was the same all over the pitch, in small things. Jamie Allen is a good midfielder at that level and he needed 2 touches to do what Kirby did in 1. In the time the second touch took, the ball was 40 yards away on Jarrod Bowen’s chest. Buxton won his first header against Blake, clean, and Blake was already running onto where it would land. Their left back showed Jarrod Bowen down the outside, the right thing to do with a winger, and Bowen went down the outside and the left back did not see him again until the byline.

Thwack. Kirby, left to right.

Thwack. Bowen, back inside to Grealish, and Grealish straight out to the left before the yellow lines had finished arriving on the right.

The gate was sliding. On 12 minutes it slid too far.

Kirby switched it. Grealish switched it back. Quinn and Allen were both 2 yards late coming across, and Michael Olise was stood in the gap between them, 20 yards out, on the half turn, asking for it.

Kirby gave it to him. Quinn got there. Allen got there. Olise put his left foot on top of the ball and dragged it backwards through the pair of them as they arrived, so that they closed on each other and not on him, and he was facing the goal with the ball on his left side and nobody in yellow within a yard.

He passed it into the goal. Left foot, along the grass, round the outside of Buxton’s legs and inside Bradley Collins’s far post, and Collins is 21 and on loan from Chelsea and he got nowhere near it.

Fwip.

1-0.