Glory Of The Football Manager System

[Beckenham. Friday April 27. 09:14 BST.]

Light training. Forty-five minutes. The Sporting lads had legs in their legs and Wembley was twenty-six hours away and there was nothing left to teach the squad about Southampton that they had not already learned twice this season.

I let Bray run the session. Sat in the bench dugout with a coffee and watched.

Sarah came over at quarter to ten.

”Elena wants four hours this afternoon.”

”Four?”

”She’s been asking for four since February. You’ve been giving her one every six weeks. She has a cut to show you. The cut is the spine of the film. She wants you to see it before any of the press see anything next week. Tomás and Ruth and the new lad are setting up the screening room now.”

”What time.”

”Four. She has the room until eight. Bring water.”

She went off to find Mama.

[Beckenham. The Screening Room. 15:58 BST.]

I had not been inside the screening room since pre-season in July.

Elena had it lit low. The main screen was on at the front, projecting the Netflix loading page in the corporate red the colour of nothing else in this building.

Tomás had a camera on a tripod at the back of the room aimed at the chair I was about to sit in. Ruth was at the desk with the boom mic on a stand and a laptop open in front of her. The new lad, whose name I had finally been told on Tuesday and which was Ben, was in the corner with the second handheld camera.

Elena was in the chair next to mine with a tablet on her lap and the navy blazer on she wore for the parts of the production she had decided were the important parts. She did not stand up when I came in. She tipped the tablet so I could see it.

”This is twelve minutes. The internal trailer for Netflix and the skeleton of the four-part series. The Walsh Way. Episode one runs about fifty-five minutes when I’m done with it, two through four are sixty-five each. I have most of one and two locked in rough cut. Three and four I’m still cutting. Four I do not have an ending for because four ends in May.”

”Show me the cut.”

”One more thing. There’s footage in this you have not seen because we did not show you while we were getting it. If anything in it is wrong for you, I throw it out tonight. I am not going to film around you for ten months and then keep something you don’t want kept. That is not how I work. Anything lands wrong, you tell me, and it goes.”

”All right.”

She nodded at Ruth. Ruth hit the trackpad.

The screen went black for two seconds.

Then it started.

[Black screen. The sound of a Premier League stadium tuning up. The hum of twenty-five thousand voices not yet at full volume. A drum.]

The first image was the Holmesdale on the night of the Salzburg second leg. Wide shot, from the back of the stand, with the tifo unfurled across the full width. Steve Coppell on the left in the sheepskin coat. Me on the right. ONE OF YOURS. ONE OF OURS. The drum kept going underneath it.

Then the image cut.

[A wet pitch. A small ground. Floodlights. The badge of Moss Side Athletic on a substitutes’ board.]

Spring 2016. I had been twenty-six. The footage was grainy and from somebody’s phone and I had not known it had existed until this moment. I was on the touchline at a county-league fixture in a black jacket two sizes too big for me, shouting at a centre-back who was not running fast enough.

Elena paused.

”Where did you get that?”

”Your taxi driver friend. Raj. We tracked him down in November. He had been recording your games on a phone all season because he had told you in 2015 that you were going to be on Sky one day and he wanted footage from the start.”

”Raj.”

”He sent us twelve hours of it. We have used three minutes across the four episodes. He has signed the release. He has been paid. He sends his regards.”

She nodded at Ruth.

The screen went again.

[Beckenham. Summer 2016. A twenty-six-year-old in an academy tracksuit walking through a corridor with a sports bag over his shoulder.]

Club archive footage. Probably from the day Paddy McCarthy had given me the academy tour.

[The under-eighteens lifting the FA Youth Cup. April 2017. The roar of the away end at Wembley.]

[Selhurst Park. The bench. The first match of the five-match interim. April twenty-third, 2017. A twenty-seven-year-old in an academy tracksuit standing on the touchline at Selhurst with one hand in his pocket and the other holding a piece of A4 paper that has been folded three times.]

I had been folding paper on the bench during the interim. I had not realised I was holding it. I had walked out of the dressing room with notes in my hand at four-thirty on the twenty-third of April last year and the paper had still been in my hand at the final whistle and I had not put it down once for ninety minutes.

[The fifth match. May fourteenth, 2017. The relegation-saving win. The dressing room after.]

The Sky lad with the camera. I had told him to come in only after I had finished my speech because I had not wanted my speech on Sky.

Lads embracing. Mama coming across. Tomkins putting his arm round Wilf. Christopher down on one knee with his head in his hands. The interim was over. The lads had not yet known the manager was staying. The manager had not known either.

[Summer 2017. Beckenham. The first day of pre-season.]

The new signings arriving one by one in the car park. Sakho with two suitcases. Konaté with one. Wayne Hennessey driving in. Pope walking through the gate from the bus stop because the car had not been delivered yet.

[Mateo Kovačić arriving in January. The carriers’ van pulling up. Mateo at the door of the building with a Real Madrid kit bag over his shoulder. Sarah meeting him at the entrance.]

Sarah’s face from the side, in the half-light of the entrance lobby in January. The way her shoulders had dropped a quarter of an inch when Mateo had come through the door.

Elena paused it.

”You knew she did that.”

”No.”

”I did not either, the first time we got it on tape. We were filming Pope’s arrival in July because that was the day we started filming, and Ruth caught Sarah doing it in the background of a wide shot and we did not notice it in the edit. Then Konaté in August. Then Ben in August.

Then the three loans in late August. Then Mateo. She does it for everybody. She does not know she is doing it. She did not let me show her this footage and she will not let me show it to her until the rough cut is locked. She is going to hate it for forty-eight hours and then she is going to be embarrassed about it for forty-eight more and then she is going to love it for the rest of her life because nobody has ever seen Sarah Tomlinson breathe out before.”

”Eleven signings.”

”Eleven. Including Antoine Semenyo coming up from the under-eighteens in October, which is the smallest one and the one I am proudest of having.”

Ruth restarted the cut.

[Various training-ground moments. Pato playing keepy-ups with Olise while Olise’s face does not change. James Rodríguez speaking Spanish to Pato in the canteen. Eze and Aviero sat at the same table at lunch with their plates touching. The U18 lads watching the first team train from the side of the pitch.]

[Bray in his office. The whiteboard with KB-22 in green marker. Bray walking across the analysts’ room to the kettle. Bray pouring three teas. Bray taking one each to Marcus, Dougie, and Sarah without being asked.]

I sat with that for a moment.

”Bray makes the tea.”

”Bray has been making the tea for the analyst room since November. He started doing it the week of the Burnley match. Sarah told me he had not been a tea person until then. He had become a tea person to bring it to other people. That is the documentary in one piece of footage.”

[The Carabao Cup lift. February 2018. The Holmesdale singing. The lads passing the trophy down the line. Mili holding it above his head. Steve Parish at the top of the steps in a club tracksuit he had not worn since 2010.]

[Anfield. December 2017. The dressing room after the one-one draw. Mama crying without making a sound. Wilf with his head against the locker. The silence of the dressing room. Me at the door.]