Glory Of The Football Manager System

[The Ceremony. 23:12 CEST.]

UEFA build the podium on the pitch at these finals.

A blue stage, clank, clank, clank, assembled out of nowhere by a small army in polo shirts while the lads did their laps, and the trophy came out of the tunnel on its table with an honour guard either side and ribbons in red and blue already on it, because somewhere in the last twenty minutes a man whose whole job is ribbons had cut the white ones off.

Arsenal went up first.

That is the cruelty of these nights, the losers climb the steps before the winners, and Koscielny led them up on his taped Achilles, twenty years of football limping past a trophy he could not touch, and our end, I will say this for our end forever, our end applauded every single one of them up and down those steps.

Then the announcer said Crystal Palace and the bowl went up like a fuel fire.

The lads went up for their medals and I lost most of it, the way you lose the best things while they are happening. The one I caught and kept was Hennessey. He gave this final to Pope without a word of complaint and played every round it took to get us here, and he climbed up for the same medal as everyone, and Pope went two steps behind him with both hands on his shoulders the whole way.

And then there was just the trophy.

It is bigger than the telly tells you. Sixty-five centimetres of silver on a slab of yellow marble, fifteen kilos, the heaviest thing UEFA hand out, and no handles. Nothing to grip. Just a ring of little silver footballers round the base, straining upward, holding the cup off the marble with their arms.

Mama walked towards it.

And then Mama walked straight past it.

The whole stage hesitated. The UEFA man with the white gloves hesitated. Fifty-six thousand people watched the captain of Crystal Palace walk past the European trophy his club had waited a hundred and thirteen years for, down the line of his own teammates, to the back of the stage, where a man in a club suit was stood trying to stay out of every camera shot in France.

Scott Dann. Ten years the captain of Crystal Palace. The man who lifted the Carabao in February with a goal of his own in the final, and had not kicked a ball since the spring, and had flown to Lyon in a suit to clap us, because that is what Scott Dann is.

Mama reached up to his own sleeve and tore the armband off it. Skrrp.

”Mama.” Dann was already backing up, hands coming up, shaking his head. ”Mama, no. No. I’ve not played a minute of this. Not one minute of the whole run, I’ve been on a treatment table since March, this is yours, this is...”

”Ten years.” Mama took Dann’s arm, the suit arm, and pulled the band over the sleeve, up past the elbow, and pressed it flat with two fingers, once, the way he does it on his own arm before every match.

”Ten years you carried this club when carrying it meant relegation fights and rain at Selhurst on a Tuesday. I borrowed this from you in March. A man returns what he borrows.”

”Mama...”

”You lift it with me, capitaine, or nobody lifts it at all, and we have a very embarrassing night in France.”

The lads were already roaring. Wilf had Dann by the suit jacket, dragging him forward, and Christopher was shoving him from behind, and Dann’s face had gone, completely gone, ten years of being the most composed man at the football club gone in four seconds, and the two captains walked to the front of the stage together.

No handles, so they did it the only way it can be done. Mama took the marble, Dann got both arms under the silver footballers, and they lifted it together, the suit and the shirt, up into the Lyon night.

The fireworks came off the roof, BOOM, loud enough that I felt them in my chest a half-second before I heard them, and the light of them went red and gold across Dann’s face. He was not looking at the trophy over his head. He was looking down at the away end, mouthing something none of us will ever get to know, letting it land on him after ten years and a spring spent on a treatment table.

[23:26 CEST.]

Then they came for me, the way they have come for me three times now, and it is a club tradition because nobody asked my permission the first time either.

”GAFFER!”

”Lads. Lads! My suit, lads...!”

Up. Once. Whoomp. Twice, higher, the floodlights swinging across my eyes. The third time they nearly dropped me and I could not have cared less, and from up there, for half a second at the top of the throw, I could see the whole away end at once, all twenty thousand, every phone light on, and a fifty-year-old man on the front hoarding with his shirt off swinging it over his head.

They put me down, and before I’d got my balance back Mama was stood in front of me with fifteen kilos of Europe in his arms.

”Your turn, Daniel.”

”Mama, it’s the players’...”

”Daniel.” He was already loading it onto me. ”Shut up and hold your trophy.”

Fifteen kilos is a number until somebody puts it in your arms.

Then it is alive, all of it trying to get to the floor at once, and there are no handles, nothing, so your fingers go hunting and they find the little silver footballers round the base and you hang on to them, eight tiny men straining upwards, and now your hands are part of the design too.

The silver was cold right through my palms. The marble edge dug into my forearm. My own face looked back at me out of the curve of the cup, stretched and bent and grinning like an idiot, with a hundred flashbulbs going off in it.

K-chk. K-chk-k-chk-k-chk.

I lifted it.

Not gracefully. Nobody lifts that thing gracefully, it is not built for grace, it is built to cost you something, and my arms shook at the top of it and I did not care, and the bowl went off like a bomb, and somewhere in front of me twenty thousand South Londoners were singing about being champions of Europe, and I stood on a blue stage in France with my arms shaking under the heaviest trophy in the European game and let them shake.

Thirteen months. Five matches, Steve had said, and after that we will see.

We saw.

Then I turned round, found Sarah, and put the whole fifteen kilos into her arms before she could open her mouth.

She nearly went over. Bray caught the iPad as it fell out from under her elbow, and for the first time in thirteen months Sarah had absolutely nothing to say. She stood there holding a European trophy with her eyes going, properly going, no pretending left anywhere in her.

”You drove to the under-eighteens away matches when the car park was empty,” I said. ”Five of these are yours.”

”Daniel...”

”Five in thirteen months, Sarah. You taught me to count them.”

Bray got an arm round her, all pretence of three-millimetre eyebrows abandoned forever, and the two of them held the trophy between them while the silver came down through the floodlights. Then she passed it to Bray, wiped her face once with the flat of her hand, and looked over my shoulder, and her face did the thing it does about twice a year, which is soften.

”Family gate’s open,” she said. ”Ten minutes. Then upstairs. He’s waiting.”