Glory Of The Football Manager System

Across the pitch, on the edge of his technical area, Arsène Wenger watched Eze cross the white line and stood very still.

He turned to his assistant. Said something. His assistant started shouting at the back four, pointing at Eze, pushing them another two yards deeper with his hands.

I am still frightened of him, the old man had said in the tunnel. Tonight I think I pay for it.

The Arsenal end had gone quiet. Quiet enough that for the first time all night I could hear individual voices in it, fifty-six thousand people and you could pick out one bloke in red screaming ”WAKE UP ARSENAL!” like his life was in it. Maybe it was.

And from the other end of the bowl, Glad All Over again, louder than before, the clap like gunfire.

[68’.]

Wenger went for it. Say that for the old man, with twenty-two years on the table he did not hold what he had. Bzzt. Lacazette on. Two up top, Aubameyang freed to roam the whole front line, and the last half hour opened up like a knife fight in a phone box.

[74’.]

And then the test came back around. The exact same test.

Xhaka got a yard in his own half, looked up once, and I knew before he hit it, the whole bench knew, Bray was up shouting ”RÚBEN!” and Rúben lunged and missed by a fingernail.

WHUMP.

Sixty yards. Flat. Dipping. The same horrible dropping diagonal, bouncing once in the same acre of no-man’s-land, with the same yellow boots already moving.

And Konaté ate it.

He did not step early. He did not step late. He read the bounce like he’d been reading it in his sleep for fifty minutes, which I’d bet the club he had, and he took it off the drop on his chest with Aubameyang arriving at full sprint, and he rolled his body round the contact, thud, and walked out of the back of it with the ball at his feet like a man carrying his shopping home.

The away end ROARED his name. The whole end. KO-NA-TÉ. KO-NA-TÉ.

He didn’t smile. He pointed one finger at the patch of grass where the first one had beaten him, said something to it, and played the ball to Aaron.

Behind me Bray exhaled like a man stepping off a ladder.

[80’.]

Bzzt. The board again.

BLAKE ON. BENTEKE OFF.

The whole away end stood for Christopher. Twenty thousand of them, on their feet, singing his song, the one with his name in it, and he came off slow, slower than a man needs to, drinking every yard of it, and you couldn’t blame him, and our whole bench stood up too, and so did I.

He reached the line. Hugged Connor. Said something in his ear that turned Connor’s face from white to something else.

Then he got to me and stopped.

”Gaffer.”

”What a way, Christopher. What a way.”

”Finish it,” he said, and pointed at the pitch, at all of it. ”Finish it for the lads.”

Connor ran on. Seventeen years old, into a European final at 2-2, and as he crossed the line Eze drifted past him and said two words, and I read his lips from forty yards.

Grass is grass.

[87’.]

Eze had been on the ball for twenty-six minutes and Arsenal had not got near him once, and you could see it spreading through them like damp, the fear of him, doubling men onto him, and doubling men onto Eze is how doors get left open.

Xhaka lunged at him in the centre circle. Last legs, last idea. Eze let the ball roll across his body and skipped the lunge like a puddle, and now he was running at a back four on its heels, and to his right, wide, high, sixteen years old and completely unmarked, the knife came out of the drawer.

Kolašinac saw Olise coming and set himself. A door, getting ready to be a door.

Bray’s voice, Tuesday, in the video room: you go at the space, never at the man.

Eze didn’t pass to Olise. Eze passed to where Olise was going to be. The run is the first thing. The ball is the second thing. He clipped it first time, no backlift, no look, into the acre of grass behind Kolašinac’s shoulder, and Olise hit that acre at the speed only the quickest lad at the football club can hit an acre, and the door turned, and the door was turning all night and never finished the turn.

Olise, into the box. Ospina coming, big, spreading.

Sixteen years old.

He opened his body up like he was at Beckenham on a Tuesday with nobody watching, and he passed it, passed it, calm as his own heartbeat, inside the far post.

Skhh... riiip.

[Crystal Palace 3-2 Arsenal. Olise, 87’.]

I don’t remember the next ten seconds in order. I remember the bench going past me, all of them, Pato first, sprinting onto the pitch in his bib. I remember Mili, who I’d taken off half an hour before, overtaking Pato. I remember the away end as a single moving thing, a cliff coming loose, pink smoke and limbs and the drum gone mad, DUMDUMDUMDUMDUMDUM, and a noise that wasn’t a noise anymore, it was pressure, it was the air itself changing its mind.

I remember Olise running to the corner and standing there with his arms out the exact way Konaté had stood in the first half, because the kids copy what the men do.

And I remember looking up, because by then it was the only place I ever looked.

The old man had the radio pressed so hard against his ear it must have hurt, the French commentary screaming into one side of his head and fifty-six thousand people screaming into the other, and his fist was up, and his son was down there on the grass with the armband on, dragging Olise out from under a pile of footballers by the waistband of his shorts, laughing, laughing like a kid, the captain of Crystal Palace, laughing.

”GAFFER!” Bray, both fists clenched, eyes wet, no calm left anywhere in him. ”THREE MINUTES! THREE MINUTES AND WHATEVER HE ADDS!”

[88’.]

Whatever he added was five.

Bzzt. The board. +5. The away end booed the board, then sang louder.

Wenger emptied everything. Koscielny went up top, a centre-half with twenty years and a taped Achilles playing the last five minutes of his manager’s life as a battering ram. They went long, and long, and long again.

[90’+2.]

Lacazette, on the half-turn, six yards out, a snapshot.

BANG.

Pope.

Saved it with the meat of his left hand, saved it the way keepers save things they have no business saving, and the rebound spun up and Mkhitaryan came steaming in and Pope got up and took the second one off his head with both fists, thump, punched it forty yards.

The away end sang his name into the roof.

[90’+4.]

Last throw of it. You always know the last throw, you can feel a stadium decide. Bellerín, deep, one final cross winding up, fifty-six thousand people inhaling at once.

It came in high. High and hanging, with everything Arsenal had left underneath it, Koscielny and Mustafi and Lacazette all rising, the whole twenty-two years of it rising.

And above all of them, the way he had risen above everything since the under-elevens of Massy, since the RER trains two hours each way, since a thousand headers his father had watched and not one of them lost, went Mamadou Sakho.

THUD.

Forty yards clear. Into the Lyon night. Into the lights.

The old man upstairs had never once seen his son lose a header. He was not going to start tonight.

[90’+5.]

Bojan had the ball at the corner flag, ninety-four minutes into a promised ninety, both calves gone, shielding it with his body from two men like a lad guarding a fire in the wind, and he would not give it up, he would never give it up, and the referee put the whistle to his lips, and the whole bowl, both ends, all of it, every soul under that roof rose up off its feet at once, and...

BLEEP. BLEEP. BLEEEEEEEEEP.

[FULL TIME: Crystal Palace 3-2 Arsenal.]