Glory Of The Football Manager System

On the Saturday I gave them a game.

Not a real one. A behind-closed-doors run-out against a good Swiss club side brought up the mountain on a promise of no press and a decent fee. No cameras, no record, no stakes. A rehearsal, to see if a fortnight on a notepad survived contact with eleven men actually trying to win the ball off you.

It survived. I’ll give you the good first.

The block held like it was bolted down. El Ahmadi screened in front of the four, Benatia organised, Sofyan ate everything that came through the middle, and for long stretches the Swiss had the ball and nowhere on earth to put it, knocking it sideways across a back line that would not break.

And then we won it back, and the 4-1-4-1 became the 4-3-3, and they saw what I’d been telling them.

Twenty-two minutes. They overcommitted a full-back. Bounou claimed a cross, smack into the gloves, rolled it out before he’d hit the ground, and the clock started.

El Ahmadi to Sofyan. Sofyan to Ziyech, half a turn, already three passes ahead of everyone. Ziyech to the channel, the outside of the boot, into the space where Hakimi was already gone.

Nineteen years old. Sixty yards. Nobody near him.

Square ball. En-Nesyri. Thock. Net.

Four passes. Their corner to our goal in the time it takes to read this.

The bench was up, all of them, because you cannot watch that and stay sat down. And the eleven who’d built it did not celebrate like it was lucky.

They celebrated like it was theirs.

We scored two more the same way. The Swiss coach found me after and said, in careful English, that he was glad there were no cameras, and shook my hand like he meant it, which from one coach to another is the highest thing there is.

But.

A manager who watches his side score three like that and only counts the goals is about to get found out.

Twice, the Swiss got in behind us. Both down our left. Both because Mendyl went hunting the break a half-second before we’d actually won the ball, and left the flank open behind him.

The Swiss weren’t sharp enough to punish it. They got in behind and found nobody to finish.

I made the note that night. Mendyl. The left. Too early on the turn. The aggression that makes us deadly going forward is the same aggression that leaves a hole going back, and you do not iron that out on a quiet mountain against friendly opposition.

You iron it out against someone trying to hurt you.

And as it happened, someone was about to.

The bus going down felt different than the bus going up. Quieter, but the good kind of quiet. The quiet of men who knew each other now.

Two weeks before, twenty-three strangers had walked into a room to look at an Englishman they did not trust.

Coming down, they sat in their own shape without being told. The spine of the team near the back. The kid Sofyan in among senior men who six months ago wouldn’t have known his first name. Ziyech with an arm slung over the seat next to Hakimi, the two of them watching something on a phone and laughing.

I’d walked up that mountain with a notepad and a squad.

I was coming down it with a team that understood each other, an identity they’d run through a wall to protect, and a dressing room that had decided, somewhere in fourteen days of thin air and truth told to their faces, that they’d go where I pointed.

That is influence. Not the French. Not the press. You earn it in the part nobody films.

And on the way down, I told them who we were playing first.

I stood up at the front as the bus came into the valley, and I waited until I had all twenty-three of them, and then I told them the federation had a warm-up booked for the week before Iran. On Russian soil. Arranged long before anyone knew who’d be standing in the Morocco dugout.

Against England.

You should have seen it go round the bus.

Because they knew. Every one of them knew what England meant, to me and to them. They’d read the same fortnight of headlines I had. Fraud. Vanity trip. A boy out of his depth who couldn’t say good morning to his own players. All of it printed in England, about the Englishman now stood at the front of their bus.

And the first match the world would see of the team we’d built on that mountain was going to be against the country those headlines came from.

You could not have written it.

It didn’t land as fear. It landed as the other thing entirely.

Benatia turned right round in his seat to look at the lads behind him. A grin went down the bus like a lit fuse. Because every footballer alive knows the feeling of being told nobody fancies you, and then being handed the exact team whose country said it loudest.

”They think you’re plucky,” I told them. ”A song, a clean sheet, an early flight home. They’ve already written it. In a week, on a pitch in Russia, we get to answer them.” I let it sit. ”Not in the papers. On the grass.”

Hakimi said something to Ziyech I didn’t catch, and Ziyech laughed, the bright one, and the whole back of the bus went up with him.

They were ready. I could feel it coming off them like heat.

And quietly, where they couldn’t see it, I had my own reason to want this game. Mendyl’s flank, the early turn, the hole the Swiss couldn’t punish and a Premier League front line would. Better it gets torn open in a warm-up than by Spain when it counts.

England were going to test the one thing about us that wasn’t finished. I wanted them to.

And there was one more thing I wanted out of that match, and I told them this part out loud, because it changed how every man in that bus would train for the next week.

The team sheet I’d settled on up the mountain was written in pencil. Not pen. Pencil.

”England’s a friendly,” I said. ”Which means it’s the one game before this gets real where I can do what I like. So here’s what I’m doing.”

”I’ll start a side. But near enough every one of you gets on that pitch. Because I’m not flying into a World Cup having seen some of you train and never once seen you play under lights against a team trying to end you.”

I let that sit, and I watched twenty-three men do the same sum.

”What you do against England decides what you wear against Iran. The shirt’s not Bounou’s because I said so on a mountain. It’s his to keep if he earns it in Russia, and somebody else’s to take if they play their way into it.”

”Same for all of you. There’s no XI. There’s an audition, it’s ninety minutes, and the whole world’s watching it.”

You have never seen a bus go so quiet so fast.

Because I had just turned a warm-up nobody outside two countries would have cared about into the most important ninety minutes of their summer that didn’t have a trophy on it.

The lads who’d assumed they were starting sat up straighter. The lads who’d assumed they were bench leaned forward. A second-choice keeper, a kid midfielder, a winger on the fringe, every one of them had just been handed a door and told it was open if they kicked it.

That is the other thing England was for. Not just to find Mendyl’s flaw. To make every man I had play the best ninety minutes of his life trying to take a shirt off the man beside him, in front of the only audience that mattered.

The team that started against Iran was going to be the team that earned it against England. And every one of them now knew it.

Emma texted as the signal came back in the valley. She was in London, three jobs deep, eight hundred miles and a whole different June from mine, and she’d sent four words and a photo.

The words were go and shock them.

The photo was the boy of nine in the Rabat shirt, the one from the day it broke, arms still folded, chin still up, screenshotted off somebody’s feed because she knew exactly what it would do to me.

I looked at it the whole way down.

We flew to St Petersburg on the Monday.

And somewhere ahead of us, an England side was finishing its own preparations, with no idea that the warm-up they’d booked as a gentle run-out against a plucky African team had just become the most personal ninety minutes of football I would ever coach.

A week to England.

Then the world found out what the mountain had built.