Glory Of The Football Manager System

[23:31 CEST.]

The families had come through the gate at the corner flag. Kids in oversized shirts chasing confetti. Iza steering Mateo across the grass at crutch speed with one hand on his back. Aaron’s old man with the Telegraph clipping framed in his hallway, stood on a European pitch in his good coat, not knowing where to put his hands.

And Emma, at the front of it, my old Macron jacket thrown over a dress with the sleeves shoved up, her hair wrecked from ninety minutes of screaming and her colour up, and in the middle of fifty-six thousand people she looked like the only one in France worth looking at.

She did not say a word. She got two fists in the front of my shirt, pulled me down, and kissed me, the kind you feel in your teeth, and for about four seconds I forgot the trophy and the cameras and the whole continent and thought about one thing only, which was getting her somewhere with a door that locked.

She felt me think it. She always feels me think it.

”Later,” she said against my mouth, low, just for me. ”You won a cup. Behave yourself.”

”I’m behaving.”

”You are not. It’s all over your face.” She pulled back an inch, eyes bright, and ran her thumb along my jaw once, slow, and that was the whole of what either of us was giving forty long lenses, and it was plenty. ”You stink of smoke.”

”There’s been a lot of smoke.”

She’d been crying and she was going to deny it to her grave.

”Flares.”

”Course it was.”

I took the medal off over my head and put it over hers, and she was shaking her head before it cleared her hair.

”Walsh, no. That’s yours, you’ve waited your whole...”

”I held the trophy for thirty seconds, it nearly took my arms off, and it was enough. The medal’s yours. You drove me to the Carabao final and back the same night so I could take the under-eighteens at half eight the next morning. You’ve earned one more than half my bench.”

She stopped arguing. She does that when you land it exactly right, just stops, and her hand came up and closed round the medal where it sat against her and stayed there.

”Five,” she said. ”Five, Walsh.”

”I know.”

”Your mum rang me at full time. Her and Margaret finished the biscuits at half-time when you were losing, and she says to tell you she never doubted you for a second.” She pulled back. ”She had her coat on at 2-1. Going to walk to the church.”

”She was not.”

”Coat. On. Margaret talked her down.”

I laughed, properly, and she watched me do it like she was checking my work.

”Em. I’ve got something for you. After Friday.”

Her eyes went over my face, and they are very good at my face. ”What is it.”

”Not here.”

”Not here with forty cameras, or not here in France?”

”Not here. Full stop. It’s ours, not theirs.”

She went quiet, and studied me, and whatever she found made her look down at the medal on her chest and smile at it and decide, visibly decide, not to chase it, because she is Emma and she has never opened a present early in her life.

The ring was eight hundred miles away, locked in the safe in my office at Palace, where it had sat for a month. Not in my pocket. Not in France. Not for confetti and a stranger with a long lens. When I did it there would be the two of us and a shut door and nobody filming a second of it, and she would be the first to know and the only one in the room.

”Friday first,” she said. ”Manchester. Your mum. The grave. Then mine, whenever you’re ready, and not a minute before.”

”Deal.”

”And in the meantime.” She let go of my shirt and took my hand, laced her fingers through mine. ”You’re not getting rid of me for one second of tonight. Up there, the dressing room, the bus, all of it. I came eight hundred miles in your jacket.”

I kissed the side of her head and didn’t bother answering, because there was nothing to add to that and we both knew it, and we went to meet a captain’s dad.

[The Box. 23:41 CEST.]

Mama would not give the trophy to the kit man.

Fifteen kilos, no handles, four flights, and he carried it the whole way himself with both arms under it like a man bringing his firstborn home from the hospital, and Dann walked beside him still in the armband because Mama had threatened him about taking it off, and Konaté walked one step behind the pair of them the entire way without being asked, hands half-raised, spotting the trophy like a gym partner. I came behind with Eze and Olise because Mama had stopped at the bottom of the stairs and pointed at the three of us and said, ”You also. He asked for the small ones,” and Olise had said ”I’m not small,” and Mama had looked at him until he got in the lift. Emma came too, my hand in hers, because I was not letting go of it and she was not offering to let me.

Ping.

The box door opened.

Emma stopped in the doorway. She has tact in her bones, and a box with a dying man and his son and a European trophy in it did not need a manager’s girlfriend in the middle of it, so she stayed at the frame with her hand on the wood, and I felt her choose to stay, and loved her for it.

The old man was sat forward in his chair with the blanket finally where the nurse wanted it, and the radio was still on, still going, krrk, a tiny French voice rattling out of it through the static into the quiet of the box, and his wife had her hand on his shoulder, and his other son stood behind him with his phone out and his hand over his mouth.

Mama crossed the room and knelt, and set fifteen kilos of silver down on his father’s lap, marble base on the blanket, and held it steady there with both hands so the weight stayed his and the trophy stayed his father’s.

The old man looked at it for a long time.

He put one hand flat against the cold of the cup, between the little silver footballers, and patted it twice, gently, the way you pat a horse.

Then he said something in French, one short sentence, and reached up with his other hand and pressed the radio against Mama’s ear, hard, insistent, holding it there.

”What’s he doing?” Olise whispered.

The brother answered without taking his hand off his mouth. ”He recorded it. Found the button this afternoon, made the nurse show him twice. He is playing Mamadou the radio from the ninety-fourth minute. He wants him to hear what the radio man shouted when he won the last header.”

We stood there, six footballers and a manager filling up a hospitality box, Emma just inside the door, and listened to a tiny tinny French commentary screaming out of a thirty-year-old radio pressed to the ear of the captain of Crystal Palace, kneeling, with a European trophy balanced between his hands and his father’s lap.

I could not understand one word of it.

I understood all of it.

And then the glass started to hum.

Below us, the away end had found the box. Twenty thousand faces turning up towards the glass, twenty thousand phone lights coming up like a field of white flowers, and the song rolling up the stand, his name, the captain’s name, SA-KHO, SA-KHO, twenty thousand voices aimed at one old man in a chair, and the old man heard it, and looked down at all of it, and got his fist up one more time.

The trophy came an inch off his lap. Mama’s hands under it, his father’s hands on it, both of them lifting.

I looked away and out at the pitch, at the confetti still coming down through the floodlights, because some things you only get to see the edge of, and even the edge of it was nearly too much.

Behind me, very quietly, in his careful English, Konaté said, ”He did not lose a header.”

”No, lad,” I said. ”Not one. Not ever.”

On the way out Emma crouched at the mother’s chair and said something to her I did not hear, and the old woman took Emma’s face in both hands the way Mama takes Konaté’s. Emma told me on the stairs it was nothing. I have known her since we were fifteen. It was not nothing.

***

Thank you for 200 Power Stones.