Glory Of The Football Manager System

[Lyon. Friday. 08:40 CEST.]

I woke up in a hotel in France with a European Cup winner’s medal on the bedside table and no idea what day it was for a good ten seconds. Friday. Parade day. Emma was already up, sat in the window with a coffee and her phone, my medal still round her neck, and she didn’t say morning, she just turned the screen to me.

It was a photo of Whitehorse Lane. Taken an hour ago. Six hours before the buses were due to move, and you could not see the pavement.

”Danny,” she said. ”Look at the road.”

”Where’s the road?”

”That’s what I’m saying.”

The flight home was an hour and change of grown men asleep in club tracksuits with three medals each round their necks, the Europa strapped into its own seat because the kit man takes no chances, and Mili walking the aisle filming everyone who snored.

Croydon Council had been on to Sarah twice before we even landed. They had planned for big numbers. The numbers had stopped being big somewhere around nine in the morning and become something the police liaison, when he briefed us at the depot, could only describe by taking his hat off and rubbing his head.

”Half a million,” he said. ”Give or take. We’ve shut everything from the A23 across. Gentlemen, the bus will be doing walking pace, because there is nowhere for it to go.”

Half a million people. For a forty-five minute route through SE25. For us.

The lads came off the team coach at the depot into a yard where two open-top buses stood waiting, stickered red and blue down every inch of them, CHAMPIONS OF EUROPE across the front of the lead one, and the second one for everybody else, the whole building, because you do not fit a season like ours on one bus. Crates went up the stairs. Pato went up the stairs already singing. Parish arrived in a suit, took one look at the crates, and sent his driver away.

Then the engines started, vmmm, and the gates opened, and we turned out of the yard towards the top of Whitehorse Lane, and the noise arrived before the people did, through the floor, up the handrails, into your chest.

[Whitehorse Lane. 13:01 BST.]

The bus came round onto the top of the hill and Pato screamed.

Not a word in it. Just a sound, full lungs, both fists over his head, because there was no road. Where Whitehorse Lane should have been there was a solid thing, red and blue jammed kerb to kerb and down the hill and round the bend and gone, no tarmac, no gaps, half of South London poured into a street built for a number 75 and a chippy.

PSSSHT. The brakes. The driver had nowhere to take us but a crawl.

”DANNY.” Pato grabbed two fistfuls of my jacket and shook me, beer going everywhere, his eyes enormous. ”DANNY. WHERE DID THEY ALL COME FROM. WHERE DID THEY COME FROM.”

”They’re ours, Pato.”

”THEY ARE OURS!” He let go of me and turned to the street and roared it at them, ”YOU ARE OURS,” and forty thousand of them roared it back, and that was the last properly coherent thing anybody on that bus said for about an hour.

It is very loud at the top of a bus in half a million people. I had not known that.

You think you know loud, you have stood in the Holmesdale at a derby, and then half of London gets within ten feet of you on three sides and it stops being a sound and becomes a thing pressing on your chest, a pressure in the teeth, and you cannot hear the man next to you scream and it does not matter because nobody is saying anything worth hearing, they are just letting it out, a hundred and thirteen years of it, all at once, in your face.

[Whitehorse Lane. 13:12 BST.]

Steve Parish was up the front in a suit that had cost more than my first car and was now see-through with champagne, a bottle in one hand and a fistful of my shoulder in the other, screaming into the side of my head, ”THIRTEEN MONTHS, DANIEL. THIRTEEN MONTHS.”

Then he tipped the whole bottle over my head, splosh, and I came up spitting and laughing, and somebody got me from the other side with a beer, splosh, and that was me finished, soaked to the bone by ten past one and not caring, because today I was not the manager stood apart with his arms folded watching them have it.

Today I was one of them and they made sure of it. Every thirty seconds another of them found me and emptied something over my head. Pato. Pato again. Wilf. Olise with a can of Lilt because he is sixteen and it was all he had. I stopped being dry and I stopped trying to be.

Three feet away, Tomás was walking backwards down the top deck with the camera up on his shoulder and the little red light on.

Elena had pulled every lens off us in Lyon. Some nights belong to you and not to the lens, she had texted. But she had said the other half too.

See you on the bus. And here they were, Tomás and Ruth and the boom held up over the bedlam, filming a soaked manager and a soaked chairman and twenty-eight soaked lads, because Lyon had belonged to us and this one belonged to everybody. When the camera swung onto me I did not turn away from it.

I grinned straight down the barrel. Let them have it. Let the whole world have it.

The smoke came up off the crowd in great soft walls of it, red one side, blue the other, hssss, and a flare went off close enough that the heat of it brushed the side of my face and the whole left of the street vanished into red, and out of the red came hands.

Just hands. Thousands of them, reaching up at the bus, and I leaned over the rail and slapped as many as I could reach and a lad of about nine got my hand in both of his and would not let go, hanging off it, his dad holding his legs, and I had to actually prise him off and he looked at his own palm like I’d handed him something.

Wilf had gone.

I mean gone. Zaha, on the seat at the front, both arms out wide, head back, eyes shut, and the tears were just running off his jaw and dropping onto the deck and he was not wiping them and he was not embarrassed. A Croydon boy.

Three miles from the maternity ward he was born in. And when the crowd worked out it was him, when ZA-HA, ZA-HA started up under the bus and climbed, he opened his eyes and pointed off to the left, down a side street, and shouted at me over the noise, ”MY NAN’S ROAD, GAFFER. THAT’S MY NAN’S ROAD. SHE’S DOWN THERE. SHE WOULDN’T COME, SHE SAID SHE’D SEE IT ON THE TELLY, SHE’S EIGHTY-ONE,” and he was laughing and crying at the same time, ”SHE CAN PROBABLY HEAR THIS FROM HER KITCHEN.”

”Wave down it anyway!”

He waved down it anyway. He waved down an empty side street at an eighty-one-year-old woman who wouldn’t come, for a solid thirty seconds, while half a million people screamed his name, and that is the most South London thing I have ever seen in my life.