Glory Of The Football Manager System

[Park Road. 13:40 BST.]

The trophies never stopped moving. The Europa went up on Dann’s shoulder, then onto Konaté’s head like a hat, then Pato had it and was pretending to drink out of it, then it was back. The Carabao. The FA Cup, which Mama held against his chest with both arms and would not let anybody else carry, and I knew why, and I left him to it.

And the medals. Three round every neck on the deck, Carabao and FA Cup and Europa, swinging and clacking together every time a lad jumped, and they jumped a lot. Hennessey wore his three over a bare chest and he had not played a minute of the final and I would fight any man who said he hadn’t earned them.

Pato lined the three cups up at the front rail like a man selling fish off a stall.

”CARABAO.” He held Mili’s cup out over the rail and the street went up. ”FA CUP.” Mama lifted it and the street went up louder.

”AND.” He took the Europa off Dann with both hands, the big one, the heavy one with no handles, and he did not bother saying its name, he just heaved it over his head and held it there, arms shaking with the weight, and the noise that came back was not like the other two. It was a different animal.

It was the one nobody at this football club had heard in a hundred and thirteen years. Tomás got all of it. Ruth got the crowd getting it. Somewhere there is a photograph of twenty-eight players and a chairman and a soaked manager and three cups with half of London behind them, and I have not seen it yet, and I already know exactly which wall it is going on. Olise had his three round his neck and his phone up in front of his face, screaming into it.

”DAD. DAD. LOOK. DAD, LOOK AT IT. CAN YOU SEE IT. CAN YOU SEE.”

He had the camera turned round, sweeping it over the crowd, the smoke, the cups, his own three medals. His old man was on the end of that phone somewhere in Cameroon at whatever hour it was there, watching a wall of red and blue down a phone held by his sixteen-year-old son who’d just won a European cup, and Olise kept laughing and wiping his eyes and saying ”CAN YOU SEE IT, DAD” like the line might drop any second and he had to fit a whole life down it before it did.

I had two medals. Mine, not three. The Europa one was eight hundred yards back round Emma’s neck and that is where it lives now.

Pato found that out and would not let it go.

”He has TWO.” He was telling the crowd. Leaning over the rail telling actual strangers. ”THE GAFFER HAS TWO MEDALS. HE GAVE ONE TO A WOMAN.”

”To Emma, you melt.”

”VERY ROMANTIC.” Then, swinging back round, finger up, the gag he had been running for two months and was not done with. ”Connor. CONNOR. The Lamborghini.”

”You’re not buying me a Lamborghini, Pato.” Connor was at the rail next to me, seventeen years old, a kid from Lewisham whose dad died nine years ago, gripping the rail with both hands like the bus might tip.

”Yellow. Yellow Lamborghini. I promised.”

”You can’t drive.”

”For YOU, Connor. Not for me. I cannot drive either.”

Pato put an arm round Connor’s neck and pulled him in and pointed both of them out at the crowd and the crowd roared at the two of them, the oldest lad and the youngest, and Connor’s face did something then, the laugh going funny at the edges, and he got his phone out fast and turned away to the front, and I saw him lift it to his ear, not the camera, the ear, and his mouth start to move, Mum, and I looked away because some calls are not yours to watch.

Mateo was up the back. On his feet. On his crutch. Iza had begged him to sit, Rebecca had begged him to sit, and Mateo Kovačić was standing on a moving bus on one good leg and a crutch with three medals round his neck and his face wet, and every time the bus lurched two lads grabbed him without looking, Neves on one side and Bowen on the other, holding him up between them, and he let them, and he did not sit down once, not once the whole way.

[Holmesdale Road. 14:05 BST.]

Two buses. You need two for a thing like this. The lead bus had the squad and the three trophies and me. The one behind, close enough to shout to, had everybody else, and that was the one I could not stop looking at.

Sarah.

Top deck, both hands flat over her mouth, tears coming straight down, no composure left in her anywhere, none, after thirteen months of being the one who holds it together. Sarah who drove a minibus full of fifteen-year-olds to Rotherham on a wet Tuesday in 2016 when the away end was eight mums and a dog.

Sarah on the top deck of a European parade. I caught her eye across the gap and she took one hand off her mouth and jabbed a finger at me and I jabbed one back and that was the entire conversation and it was plenty.

Bray next to her, crying with absolutely no expression on his face, doing nothing about it, while a bedsheet four storeys up said KB-22 LEGEND in dripping paint because some set-piece-obsessed fourteen-year-old in SE25 knew exactly whose corner started the final. Bray saw it. Bray pretended he had not seen it. Bray had seen it.

And the rest. The whole building. The two kit men who had both buses stickered red and blue by seven this morning.

The lad from the analysis room who lives on energy drinks. The women from the canteen who fed twenty-eight footballers and forty staff every day all season and had never once been to a match, up there now, blinking at half a million people. The groundsman. Reception.

The Tuesday after Lyon I was going to walk into Beckenham and buy the lot of them so many cookies the canteen would run out of plates, because that is the only thank-you a manager gets time for in May. Today South London was doing it for me.

And Paddy McCarthy, with his U18s, the kids, holding the two youth cups up between them, because there were five trophies on these two buses and two of them belonged to a Portakabin. Paddy was not looking at the crowd. Paddy was looking at our bus, at Eze and Olise and Connor and Nya, the boys he had had at thirteen, and the look on his face I am going to keep for the rest of my life.

The crowd found that second bus. I don’t know how the word goes round half a million people but it goes. Heads turned. And the song changed and it was not for the players.

”SAR-AH! SAR-AH!”

They knew her from the touchline, from the minibus story, and South London does not forget a person who turned up when nobody else did, and so half a million people sang the name of a chief of staff down Holmesdale Road and Sarah sat down on the bus seat because her legs had quit.

I have given that woman thirteen months of being the one nobody thanks.

A street full of strangers fixed it in four seconds.

[The railway bridge before the ground. 14:20 BST.]

There was a banner off a railway bridge, big one, two bedsheets, and the bus went slow enough that I read it about nine times.

113 YEARS. THREE CUPS. ONE WALSH.

And under it, smaller, a different hand, a different tin of paint, plainly an afterthought somebody could not resist:

ARSENAL HAVE NONE.

I had it. I am not going to stand here and tell you I was above it, because I was not, I had it and I held it.

This club is a hundred and thirteen years old and until thirteen months ago it had won nothing. Not a cup. Not a shield. Nothing you could put behind glass.

And four miles up the road there is a club that has not won the league since 2004, that has never in its whole existence won one European trophy, that gave twenty-two years and three European finals to the best manager any of us will see and never once got a continental cup in their hands. And on Thursday we went to Lyon and took one off them.

A club with nothing. Beating a club that thought it was owed everything.

That is the entire point. That is why a man leaves a till in a convenience store on Princess Road at eight pound fifteen an hour and ends up on the top of this bus. Because there is always a club that wins nothing and waits a hundred years to matter, and somebody has to be soft enough in the head to think it could be them.

I waved at a man on a roof. He lost his footing and disappeared backwards into a beer garden. A cheer went up. He stood back up holding a pint that was somehow still full. The cheer doubled.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.