Glory Of The Football Manager System

Hakimi had been filming since Switzerland.

He had the phone pointed out the window when we came down through the cloud, narrating to it like a man on the telly nobody had hired.

”And now, the landing. We are landing. Coach, say something for the people.”

”Put the phone down, Achraf.”

”He says hello,” Hakimi told the phone.

Out the window it was a white afternoon and a banner the length of a terminal, the only thing on the whole apron I could read. FIFA WORLD CUP RUSSIA 2018. Everything else was Cyrillic, letters pretending to be letters I knew and turning into something else when I looked twice.

There were plane tails parked up in a row. A green one. A blue one. A white one with a crest I half-knew. Other countries, already here, getting off their own jets into their own week.

I had a daft thought, belt still on. I had watched this tournament off a settee for twenty years, and I did not actually know what you were meant to do when you landed at one.

I was about to find out I did not know, in front of a lad with a camera.

The cabin door cracked and the noise fell in.

ROOOAAAAR.

The heat came in under it, thick for a country I’d had down as cold, and below the roar the engines still winding down, a whine you felt in your teeth.

”Bloody hell,” said Marcus, up out of his seat, over me, at the glass. ”Gaffer. Gaffer. There’s people on the fence. Why are there people on an airport fence. That’s a security, that’s an actual security problem, who’s let, ”

”Marcus.”

”There’s hundreds. I’m not being, that’s hundreds, that’s a Tuesday at Selhurst, that’s, ” he was counting, I watched him try to count people through a plane window, ”that’s two thousand, gaffer, minimum, two, ”

”Marcus. Breathe.”

Bray leaned across from the row behind, looked once, sat back.

”That’ll be for the next plane,” he said. ”Somebody famous coming in.”

I pointed at the flag going left to right along the fence, the one the size of a five-a-side goal. It had a green star on it.

Bray looked at it a while.

”...Right,” he said. ”Aye. That’s us, then.”

Hakimi had the camera round on the pair of them now.

”The English staff are realising,” he narrated, soft, like wildlife. ”It is a beautiful thing.”

The thing about never having done a thing before is you find out exactly how much of it you assumed. I had assumed you got off a plane.

You did not just get off a plane.

You got off a plane into a thing a country had spent a month building.

A strip of red runner ran from the bottom step toward the terminal. Down both sides of it stood two lines of young volunteers in grey-and-teal, hands clasped, beaming at us like we were the part of their summer they’d been waiting for.

Over the doors hung a banner I couldn’t read a word of, except for the green star somebody had stitched into the corner of it. For us.

Off to the side an accordion started up, skirl of it riding over the engines, and two lads in red boots and shirts stiff with embroidery went up on their toes and started to dance.

”They’ve laid on dancers,” Marcus said, faint. ”Gaffer. There’s actual dancers.”

A woman was waiting at the foot of the steps with a lanyard and a clipboard and the calm of someone nothing on this earth could surprise. Grey-and-teal like the kids, but older, sharper. A woman who had met a great many planes.

”Mister Walsh.” One firm pump of the hand. ”Nadia. I’m yours for six weeks, so learn the face. Anything you need, any hour, you ring me before you ring your own mother.” A glance back at the bedlam, unbothered, like it was weather she’d ordered. ”Looks like chaos, I know. It isn’t. It’s mine. Come on, before they lose one of yours.”

A tannoy was laying long Russian words over everything, krrk, not one of them for us. A man in a peaked cap walked the line of players tapping a pen against each laminated pass round each neck, the Fan-ID the federation had spent a fortnight on so we could so much as set foot down.

Nadia walked me down the runner the way you’d walk a man who didn’t know the steps, which I didn’t, and at the end of it stood an old woman in a headdress stiff with gold thread, holding a round loaf the size of a steering wheel with a little dish of salt pressed into the top.

I had no idea on God’s earth what I was meant to do with it.

I had said it on the plane. I did not know what you did when you landed at one. And now here it was, made flesh, in the shape of a loaf.

Nadia, not moving her lips, out the side of her mouth. ”Tear a piece. Into the salt. Eat it. Smile for the photograph.”

So I tore a piece off a stranger’s bread on a runway in Russia, dipped it in the salt, and ate it. The old woman’s face cracked open into something so pleased that I forgot every camera on the apron and just grinned back at her like a daft lad at his nan’s.

Snik snik snik. I remembered the cameras.

Down the line they were doing the same, flowers going into the players’ arms, En-Nesyri holding a fistful of carnations like he’d been handed a baby and wasn’t sure which way up. The federation’s own people moved among them in crested blazers, fussing, fixing a collar, a press officer with a folder steering the senior lads toward the noise.

A volunteer was trying to do the welcome speech at Bray, who stood there like a man being read a will in a language he didn’t speak.

”What did she say,” Bray said.

”No idea. Smile and hold your badge up.”

En-Nesyri, twenty years old, had stopped dead beside me and gone the colour of the underside of a fish.

”Coach. The man in the blazer, he’s crying. What did we do? We’ve not done anything yet. We landed a plane.”

”I know, son.”

”Why is he, ”

”I don’t know, son, I’ve never done this either, keep walking.”

That last bit came out before I could stop it. Hakimi, of course, had it. He lowered the phone an inch and looked at me over it, delighted.

”You have never done this either?”

”Down the runner, Achraf.”

”He has never done this either!” Hakimi announced, to the phone, to the squad, to the dancers, to the Russian Federation, to anyone. ”The coach! First time! Same as the babies!”

”En-Nesyri’s twenty, he’s not a, just walk, ”

Benatia solved it the way he solves everything, by not having the problem. Somebody put flowers in his hands and he took them and kept walking, past the loaf, past Nadia, past the crested blazers and the whole laid-on welcome of it, straight out across the tarmac to the fence with his hand already out.

”Where’s the captain going,” said Marcus, still slightly grey himself.

”To them.”

A man got both of Benatia’s hands and would not give them back. A dad lifted a kid clean over the rail and Benatia caught him under the arms and held him up, click-click-click, and put him back over.

”You can’t coach that,” Bray said.

”I keep telling people.”

Hakimi was already gone, down off the runner, walking backwards along the fence filming the whole length of it, and I watched him reverse at full confidence into a steel kit skip, bong, not even break his narration.

”Achraf, the skip, ”

”I see it, coach!”

He did not see it. He walked into a second skip.

The fence saw it. Three hundred Moroccans watched their right-back fall over a box on a live phone, and the roar for that was bigger than the one for the captain. Hakimi got up, found the camera still running, and bowed to them, and they lost their minds.

”That one,” Bray said, watching him milk it, ”is going to be a problem and a half.”

”That one’s going to win us a game on his own.”

”Both. He’ll be both.”

”Media’s that way.” Nadia at my shoulder, a nod the other way. ”You don’t have to. But they’re a lot kinder for a fortnight if you give them a minute now.”

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.