Glory Of The Football Manager System

Day one. Tuesday, February 6th.

I kept my promise.

The alarm went off at seven and I turned it off and got out of bed without waking Emma, which required the kind of tactical awareness that no coaching badge could teach, because Emma slept in the centre of the bed, diagonally, with her legs occupying approximately seventy percent of the available mattress and her hair occupying the remaining thirty, and any attempt to exit without disturbing the arrangement was an exercise in precision movement that would have impressed a bomb disposal unit.

I made it to the kitchen. I put the coffee on. I walked to the Turkish shop on Lordship Lane, which opened at six-thirty because Mr. Kemal believed that London deserved fresh bread and mushrooms before seven and that any shopkeeper who opened later was, in his words, ”lazy and disrespectful to the morning.”

I bought mushrooms, eggs, bacon, sourdough bread, tomatoes, and a bunch of flowers that were sitting in a bucket by the door and that had no connection to breakfast but that existed because the woman asleep in my bed deserved flowers on a Tuesday for no reason other than the fact that it was Tuesday and she was in my bed.

I cooked. Scrambled eggs, the way Emma had taught me: low heat, constant stirring, taken off thirty seconds before they looked ready because they continued cooking on the plate. Bacon, crispy, the way she liked it.

Mushrooms from Mr. Kemal’s, sautéed in butter and garlic. Tomatoes, halved, grilled.

Toast, sourdough, not burnt, because I was paying attention to the toaster and not to Emma’s hip, which was the mistake I had made last time and which I was not going to repeat because a man could only use the ”I was distracted by your body” excuse a limited number of times before it became a character flaw rather than a compliment.

I put everything on a tray. Coffee. Orange juice. The flowers in a glass because we didn’t own a vase because neither of us had ever bought flowers before, which was something I needed to fix. I carried the tray to the bedroom.

Emma was awake. She was lying on her back, her red hair spread across the pillow, one arm above her head, the duvet pulled to her waist, the training shirt she slept in riding up above her stomach.

She was looking at the ceiling with the unfocused, half-awake expression of a woman who had heard kitchen sounds and had been lying in bed waiting, not because she couldn’t get up, but because she was enjoying the anticipation of being brought breakfast by a man who had promised to do so and who was, apparently, keeping his promise.

”Good morning,” I said, standing in the doorway with the tray.

She turned her head. She saw the tray. She saw the flowers. Her face did something that no press conference, no documentary camera, no podcast microphone would ever capture: the unguarded, unperformed, completely private expression of a woman who was loved and who knew it and who was allowing herself, for one morning, to simply receive it.

”You bought flowers.”

”They were by the door at Kemal’s.”

”You bought me flowers from the Turkish shop at seven in the morning.”

”They’re tulips. I think. They might be something else. I don’t know flowers.”

”You don’t need to know flowers. You need to bring them. Which you did.” She sat up, the training shirt shifting, the duvet falling away.

She reached for the tray. I put it on her lap. She picked up a piece of bacon with her fingers and ate it before touching anything else, because Emma’s relationship with bacon was primal and non-negotiable and preceded her relationship with cutlery by approximately ten seconds every time.

I sat on the edge of the bed. She ate. I watched her eat. The morning light from the half-open curtains catching her hair. The freckles on her nose. The way she closed her eyes when she tasted the mushrooms, the small, private pleasure of a woman who appreciated food the way she appreciated good writing: with her whole body.

”These are perfect,” she said.

”Kemal’s finest.”

”Not the mushrooms. Although the mushrooms are excellent.” She looked at me. ”This. The tray. The flowers. The fact that you got up at seven on your day off to cook for me. This is perfect.”

I leaned across the tray and kissed her. She tasted of bacon and coffee and the morning, and her hand found the back of my neck and held me there, the tray between us, the eggs getting cold, the kiss lasting longer than either of us planned because some mornings the kiss was the point and the breakfast was the excuse.

”Your eggs are getting cold,” she said against my lips.

”I don’t care about the eggs.”

”I care about the eggs. I care about the eggs very much. You made them perfectly, and I intend to eat every one of them.” She pushed me away gently, her palm flat against my chest, her smile the smile of a woman who was balancing desire and breakfast and had decided, for the moment, that breakfast was winning. ”Sit. Eat. We have all day.”

We had all day. And the next day. And the day after that. Four days. No matches. No training. No press conferences. No tactical briefings. No whiteboard. No earpiece. No touchline. Just the apartment and the city and the woman across the tray and the promise that I had made to be here, fully here, for four days.

After breakfast, we drove. The DB11, top down despite the February cold, because Emma said she wanted to feel the air, and because I had learned in eighteen months that arguing with Emma about things she wanted to feel was a waste of time and oxygen.

We drove south out of London, through Kent, past the orchards and the oast houses and the villages with names that sounded like they had been invented by someone writing a novel about England. Tenterden. Biddenden. Sissinghurst.

The roads were narrowing as we left the motorway, the hedgerows closing in, the February countryside grey and green and beautiful in the particular, understated way that the English countryside was beautiful: not dramatically, not spectacularly, but consistently, the kind of beauty that didn’t demand attention but rewarded it.

Emma was in the passenger seat, her green coat buttoned to the chin, a Palace scarf around her neck that she had grabbed from the hallway without thinking, her red hair whipping in the cold air, her phone in the glovebox because phones were not allowed.

The rules of the four days. No phones. No football. No work. Just two people in a car on an empty road, being the people they were before the Premier League and the Netflix cameras and the sixty-three points and the cup final changed the scale of everything.

I drove with one hand on the wheel and one hand on her thigh, because the DB11’s gear stick was automatic and my left hand had better things to do than rest on a centre console. She put her hand on top of mine. Her fingers laced through my fingers. The February wind was cold on our faces and warm where our hands met.

We stopped for lunch at a pub in a village whose name I forgot the moment we left. Stone walls. Low ceilings. A fire in the grate. A barman who did not recognise me, which was a gift. Emma ordered a ploughman’s and a glass of wine and I ordered fish and chips and a Coke and we sat by the fire and talked about everything that was not football.

Her podcast. Episode two had uploaded. The numbers were strong. Episode three was recording next week. Danny Walsh, guest. Non-negotiable. She had prepared twenty-two questions. She would not show me the questions.

She said the best interviews were the ones where the subject was unprepared, and that if I tried to prepare, she would add a twenty-third question about the school play that his mum had told Elena about, and that the school play was apparently so embarrassing that Danny’s mum had laughed until she cried while telling the story.

Her writing. The Athletic column was growing. She had been offered a book deal by a publisher who had read the podcast and wanted a non-fiction account of Palace’s season ”from the inside.”

She had not decided whether to accept it. The book would require access that she currently had as Danny’s girlfriend but that she would need to formalise as a journalist, and the intersection of those two identities was a line she was still working out how to walk.

Her parents. Her mum had called on Sunday. Her dad had watched the Liverpool match. He had texted her afterwards: ”Your boyfriend is very good at football. Please tell him we are impressed.” This was, by the standards of Emma’s father, a retired doctor from Altrincham who communicated primarily through understatement, the equivalent of a standing ovation.

We drove home in the dark. The DB11’s headlights cutting through the Kent lanes, the heater on, the wind kept out by the roof that we had eventually raised when Emma’s nose turned the colour of a strawberry and she admitted that ”feeling the air” was romantic in theory and hypothermic in practice.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the Massage Chair.