Glory Of The Football Manager System

Tyrick Mitchell took it in 4 seconds and asked whether Portsmouth’s left winger tracked back. I said I would find out. He said he would find out himself, and went to see Marcus.

Ryan Fletcher I did not tell. Steele took him out onto pitch 3 at 11 with a bag of balls and told him somewhere in the middle of a shooting drill.

I watched it from the fence. Fletcher stopped a ball with his chest and held it there and looked across at Steele for about 5 seconds. Then he threw it back and set himself for the next 1.

Thk.

Ellis Cartwright found Blake in the gym at lunch. I know because Rebecca told me, and Rebecca only tells me things that are on her card.

The 2 of them did a 20 minute bike side by side without a word. Then Cartwright asked her if he could do the same 20 again tomorrow with Blake, and she wrote it down.

Nya Kirby went to Sarah before lunch and asked to see Marcus’s sheet. She showed him where he was. He was above the line, a long way above it. He looked at it for a while and gave it back.

He had not come to see where he was. He had come to see where Connor was.

The press conference was at 1 on Friday, for the cup tie, and the first 4 questions were about the window.

Was I signing anybody? No. Was I selling Olise? Nathan had answered that. Why was a club top of the league with a Champions League tie in February not buying a striker?

”Because I have 4,” I said. ”And 1 of them is going on loan to Middlesbrough on the 24th of January, so that in May I have 4 who have all played football.”

A man from the Times put his pen down and asked why a side top of the league was sending players out.

”I am top of the league with 31 players,” I said. ”Some of them are 18. If I keep them on a bench until May to make myself feel safe, they lose a year. They do not get it back.”

Nothing else I said got printed. By 6 that line was on 3 back pages under 3 different photographs of me, and none of them said I was wrong.

Bzzt.

SEMENYO. 18:40.

First training. They shout more than us. The gaffer made me do the crossing drill 3 times because I smiled in the first 1. Pitch is terrible. Love it.

At 4 o’clock I had gone down to the barrier with Cooke’s sheet.

Ron had the light on in the gatehouse and the radio off. Clnk. He slid the window back. I passed the sheet through it and he read it with his glasses on the end of his nose. 7 names, 7 clubs.

These were not released, I said. They were ours. They were going to play for somebody else until May.

He knew what I was going to ask before I asked it. He took the pencil off the shelf.

There was an 8th, he said, who was not on the sheet. The Brazilian. Who was ringing him?

Pato, I said. On Sundays, in Portuguese, since the summer. Ron wrote R. Pato Sun at the bottom of his page and drew a box round it.

I said every other Wednesday.

”Every Wednesday.” He was already copying the names onto a fresh page, in the same hand as the 40. ”Every other Wednesday is how you lose 1. Ask any of the 40.”

What would he ask them?

”Whether anybody has asked them a question this week.” He did not look up. ”If they say no, I ask them 1.”

Hampton is on the way home if you go the wrong way round the M25, and on Friday night I went the wrong way round.

Dion’s registration had gone in at 1 minute past midnight on Tuesday. For a cup tie the FA want a name by 12 noon on the day before, so he had been eligible for Saturday since Tuesday morning.

Dougie had told him so at 9 on Wednesday in the car park, and Dion had walked into the side of a van.

I did not go in. The kitchen light was on and the curtain moved, and a minute later Mrs Asare came out onto the step in her tabard with her arms folded against the cold.

He was asleep, she said. Since 9. He had never been asleep at 9 in his life.

I had come to tell her he was on the bench, so she would not find out from a screen at Wembley. She knew already. He had told her at 6 and gone to bed. She looked down the road at nothing. The man with the leg had said she could keep row 31 until the middle of January.

”I am not going to shout tomorrow. Not 1 word. I want to watch him.”

She went in and shut the door, and the kitchen light went off.

The Grimsby lot had been at Wembley since late morning. They had come down the motorways in coaches and cars, and they had a black and white end behind the far goal that was louder an hour before kick-off than the Holmesdale was at kick-off.

Dum. Dum.

”MARINERS. MARINERS.”

Michael Jolley had his side out to warm up 10 minutes before ours. He stood in the middle of them in a club coat and talked, and they listened with their hands on their hips, and not 1 of them looked up at the stadium.

GRIMSBY TOWN: McKeown. Hendrie, Hall-Johnson, Rose, Fox. Hessenthaler, Clifton, Embleton. Woolford, Cardwell, Thomas.

CRYSTAL PALACE: Krul. Ward, Dann, Tuanzebe, Mitchell. McArthur, Kirby, Olise. Bowen, Blake, Cartwright.

Bench: Fletcher, Konaté, Højbjerg, Grealish, Townsend, Pato, Asare.

Holders of the FA Cup, at Wembley, against a League Two side, and 5 of my starting 11 were 19 or under.

Prrrp.

Grimsby did what a side does when it comes to Wembley for a cup tie and not for a day out. 2 banks of 4 on the edge of their own box, and everything that came past them got kicked.

Their goalkeeper, James McKeown, is their captain, and he came for every cross as if it owed him money.

Jake Hessenthaler went through the back of Michael Olise in the 6th minute and the Grimsby end cheered it.

Thud.

Olise was up before the whistle, and handed the ball to the referee himself. On 19 Hessenthaler went through him again. He got up again.

On 31 Olise went past Hessenthaler and Clifton in the same 5 yards and put it on Blake’s head 8 yards out. McKeown came across his line and tipped it round the post with 1 hand, and the Grimsby end sang his name for 2 minutes.

Prrrp.

0-0 at half time. Sarah drew 1 line on the board, from our left touchline to the edge of their box.

”Hendrie stands off. Every time. He is scared of the ball in behind him.” She put the pen down. ”So stop putting it in behind him.”

I looked along the bench.

60 minutes. Asare for Bowen.

The board said 33, and Wembley made the noise a crowd makes for a substitution nobody has explained to it. About 20 people in that stadium knew who 33 was. 1 of them was in Block 103, Row 31.

Dion did not go at Hendrie straight away. For 4 minutes he took the ball and gave it back, simply, the way Cooke tells the under 23s to do in their first 10 minutes on any pitch, until the match had stopped watching him.

On 67 he went.

He came at Luke Hendrie at a jog on the left touchline. 2 yards out he broke his stride, tk tk, and Hendrie planted. Dion dropped his left shoulder and was past him.

The Holmesdale end had him by then.

”33. 33. 33.”

70 minutes. Grealish for McArthur.

78 minutes. Pato for Cartwright.

Grimsby held on. Their end did not stop. McKeown took a Pato volley on his chest on 81 and the whole end sang his name again, and Michael Jolley stood on the line of his technical area with both fists clenched against his chest.

On 86 Dion went again. Hendrie did not plant this time, he had learned, so Dion did not stop. He went straight past him on the outside, the 1 thing Hakimi had shown him in November he could not do, and he got to the byline and looked up.

Blake was on the penalty spot with a centre half on him. Dion did not cross it. He rolled it back, flat and slow, to the edge of the 6 yard box, where Connor Blake had stopped running so that the centre half would keep going.

Blake hit it with his left foot, first time, into the bottom corner.

Swsh.

1-0.

He did not run to the Holmesdale end. He ran to Dion, who was still on the byline, and picked him up by the waist and held him off the grass.

Then he put him down and turned to our bench and found Michael Cooke at the end of it, cap in his hand. He did not point. He nodded, once.

”GLAD ALL OVER. GLAD ALL OVER.”

In Block 103, Row 31, a woman in a heavy coat sat with both hands over her mouth and made no sound at all. Clive, next to her, did the shouting for both of them.

Prrrp. Prrrp. Prrrp.

Crystal Palace 1 Grimsby Town 0.

Bzzt. Dougie, from the directors’ box, forwarding a text from a Middlesbrough number.

Tell the lad well done. Tell him the 24th. TP.

Michael Jolley shook my hand on the halfway line and did not say much. He took his players to the far end, and they stood in front of the black and white and clapped, and the black and white sang back at them until the stewards gave up asking.

Wayne Hennessey was in the corridor afterwards in his suit, waiting for Steele. Steele had not told him yet. Monday, I had said. He looked at me as I went past and he knew something. Goalkeepers always do.

Sarah was in the doorway of the staff room with the UEFA folder under her arm.

She did not hand it to me. She opened it at List A and held it so I could read it. 25 names in her writing. Every 1 of them had either stood on a stage in Lyon in May, or come in over the summer and played for this club in the biggest competition there is.

”Hennessey needs 1 of those lines,” Sarah said. ”Dion will need another, if you want him for Madrid. You have 3 new names to give, and 0 empty lines.”

The 1st of February, I said.

”The 1st of February.” She shut the folder. ”Who comes off, Danny?”