Glory Of The Football Manager System

[Selhurst Park. Saturday. 15:20 BST.]

Friday there had been half a million people on these streets.

Today a bloke walking a dog and a traffic cone nobody had come back for.

I went in through the players’ entrance. Mick on the door said nothing about Friday, just nodded the way he had been nodding at me since the week we were 0–5 at home to Wolves in August of last year, which was the season we did not lose another league game.

Inside, the ground was doing the thing empty grounds do at half past three on the day after a parade. The floodlights warming. The mmmm off the rig. My own footsteps coming back off the empty Holmesdale.

Nobody had finished sweeping. There was red and blue paper still in the corner of the hoardings, and a Palace scarf hanging off a seat in row F where somebody had lost it on Friday and not noticed yet.

Down on the touchline it was all cable and crates.

Tomás was bolting a camera onto a length of track laid across the grass. Ruth had two monitors going and was swearing at one of them in two languages. Two of the club media lads were fighting a cable that did not want to be fought.

Elena was in the middle of it with a coffee in each hand, not because she wanted two, because she had forgotten she was already holding one.

”He’s here,” she said, to the crew, not to me. ”Mark him up.”

Then she shoved one of the coffees into my chest so I had to take it.

”You’re late.”

”I’m not late.”

”You’re never late and you’re three minutes late. Hold that. Stand on the cross.”

There was gaffer tape in a cross on the tunnel floor. I stood on it.

”You know what we’re doing,” she said, already back at Ruth’s monitor.

”You’ve not told me.”

”We did it after the Carabao. We’re doing it again. Walk, cabinet, card.” She glanced up. ”Three cups this time, so you’re carrying a hundred and thirteen years and a hernia. Don’t drop the Europa. It costs more than the stand.”

We had made this video back in February, near enough on this spot. The week of the Carabao, the first thing the club had won in a hundred and thirteen years, and at the time it had felt mad.

A lad six weeks off pricing beans at the Co-op on Princess Road being filmed like he was somebody. They had me carry the one cup up the dark tunnel into the lit ground and all the way to the cabinet in the directors’ box.

The cabinet was empty. That was the whole gut of it. One cup on a middle shelf with a century of dust round it, and then the screen had gone black and three words had come up.

More to come.

I had been bricking it the day we shot that. Not on camera.

On camera I was calm, I had learned to put the calm on like a coat. But I was a caretaker with a UEFA A badge, no Pro Licence, and exactly one cup, telling four million people more was coming with no earthly clue if it was. Most frightened I had ever been of three words.

That was the part that was different today.

I was not scared. You cannot bluff a thing you have already gone and done. I was standing at the mouth of the tunnel with three trophies stacked to my chin taking the mick out of Tomás’s haircut, and back in February at the same spot I could not have told you my own name.

”Walk slow,” Elena said into the dark. ”Don’t act. You already won, you’ve nothing to sell.”

”Right.”

”And stop grinning. You look unhinged.”

”You said don’t act.”

”Don’t act and don’t grin. It is not difficult, Daniel.”

I walked.

Tap of my own steps off the empty stands, out of the dark and into the lights with the whole bowl silent on every side. The pitch had been mowed Friday morning and the stripes were still sharp. The cups were heavier than I had been ready for. Fifteen kilos of Europa on top, the FA Cup tucked into my left elbow, the Carabao in the right.

I got halfway down the touchline.

A pigeon came off the rafters and went straight through the shot.

”That’ll be a do-over.”

”That’ll be a do-over.”

I went back.

I did it again. Tomás said the track caught. I went back. I did it again. The FA Cup slid on the second attempt, my arms going from holding to surviving, and I caught it on a knee with a clang that was not in the script, and Ruth said over the open mic, ”Lovely, keep that in,” and the youngest of the media lads laughed so hard he sat down on a flight case.

”Again,” said Elena. She had not laughed.

By the fourth take my arms had packed in completely and I had stopped performing because I physically could not, and that was the take. Tomás lowered the camera.

”That one.”

Quiet, the way they say it when it is there.

We went up to the box for the cabinet shot.

It was not empty.

That got me, and not much got me this year. The Carabao that had sat on its own since February. The badge from the 1990 final on the back wall. The Premier League runners-up plaque from May.

A photo I had not seen put up yet, of the Croydon crowd from the back of the stage, half a million faces. I opened the glass and put the three of them in. The Carabao back where it had been. The FA Cup beside it. The Europa on the shelf above because nothing else in there was built to hold a thing that size.

I stood a beat too long.

Elena let me. She knows when a man has stopped acting.

”Last thing,” she said. ”The card.”

Nobody had said a word about it all afternoon, which was how I knew it was the only thing any of them had been thinking about.

”More to come,” one of the media lads tried. ”Same as the February one. Bookend it. People’ll cry.”

”They will,” Ruth said. ”I’ll cry.”

It would have worked. Empty cabinet, full cabinet, same three words, the internet would have done the rest.

”No,” I said.

Elena was already grinning at her screen. She had known I would say no. I reckon it is why she drove down.

”Last year was a promise. You make a promise once, terrified, when you’ve got nothing. Then you shut your mouth and go and do it. You don’t stand here and make the same one twice.”

”So what’s the card?”

I looked at the three of them behind the glass.

”Black screen. Then it says, We told you.”

It went quiet.

Then Ruth, very low behind the monitor: ”Oh, that’s wicked.”

Tomás just shook his head, delighted.

Elena was already typing it.

”We post tonight,” she said. ”While the whole world is still looking this way.”

The crew broke it down. The ground went quiet again.

I did not leave straight off.

I went up to the office in the dark with half the corridor lights gone on the timer. Behind the bad print of the 1990 team that Coppell had given me as a joke at the start of last season, there was a safe I had not had cause to open for anything else in a fortnight. I opened it. The box was where the box had been. I put it in the inside pocket of my coat, the left one, over the chest.

It weighed more than every cup downstairs put together.

The cups were a promise I had already kept. The box was one I had not yet found the nerve to make.

The phone went in my hand on the way to the car park. Elena. A link, no words.

I stopped under the floodlight by the players’ tunnel and watched it.

Sixty-one seconds. A man coming out of a dark tunnel into a lit, empty stadium with three trophies stacked to his chin. No music. Just footsteps. Setting them, one by one, into a cabinet that in February had held nothing. Black screen. Three words.

We told you.

Ninety thousand views by the time I got the door of the car open.

Past Friday’s crowd by the time I was out of the gates.

The little counter on the side of the screen was spinning the way a thing spins when it has come loose off its bracket.

I turned north for Dulwich with two words posted to the world behind me and the box sitting over my heart.

You can prove a club wrong. You can do it in silver and glass and a sixty-one-second video and the internet will give you the count back inside an hour. A woman is different. A woman, you have to ask, properly, with your face on, and mean every word of it, and the only person counting is her, and the count is in or out.

Emma had picked me on a bench when I had nothing.

You cannot bluff that.

You just have to ask her, in the morning, in the kitchen, with the light coming in the way she likes it, and the ring in your hand.

I drove home with it in my coat.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.