Glory Of The Football Manager System

I let the week be loud up north and quiet where we were. The lads thought it was the funniest thing that had ever happened.

Hakimi made it his personal mission to read me the worst headline at breakfast every day in a posh English accent he did not have, and by the Thursday even Benatia, who finds almost nothing funny on principle, had cracked.

Then it was the fourteenth of June, and the noise stopped mattering, because the thing itself began.

We watched the opening together. All of us. I made it a thing, told Nadia to sort the big room and the big screen.

What I had not arranged, what Nadia had arranged behind my back off the date on my own accreditation, was the cake.

It was sitting on a physio table when I walked in. A slab the hotel kitchen had been ambushed into making at no notice, TWENTY-NINE in wonky icing, one candle, because Nadia said the smoke alarms were sensitive and she was not having me end the tournament under a sprinkler.

The whole squad sang. Three languages, none of them in time with each other, Hakimi conducting like a man landing a plane, En-Nesyri a full bar behind everyone, Benatia mouthing it with the face of a man honouring a contract.

It was the worst version of that song ever performed by professional athletes, and I would not trade it for a tidy one.

Clap clap clap.

”Twenty-nine, two weeks ago, on a mountain, alone, with your phone in a drawer, and you told nobody,” Nadia said. ”Which is the saddest thing I have heard in years. So. We are late. Blow it out, Mister Walsh, and do not cry on the cake.”

I blew it out. I did not cry on the cake. It was closer than I would like.

Then the whole squad and all the staff piled in with the lights down, recovery shakes and what was left of the cake and a mountain of fruit, and we sat and watched a World Cup start the way I’d watched every one since I was nine years old.

Off a settee.

Except the settee was a row of physio beds and gym mats in a hotel in Voronezh, and the lads next to me weren’t my mates from Moss Side. They were a squad I’d take into the same tournament tomorrow.

And the gap between the boy on the sofa and the man in the room opened up under me, and I had to look at the floor.

Twenty years. Twenty years of watching other men walk out under those lights. And now.

On the screen, Robbie Williams walked out into the middle of the Luzhniki, BOOM of music big enough to rattle the camera, and started singing, and the room half cheered and half groaned, because that is the correct response to Robbie Williams.

”This is England?” said En-Nesyri, baffled, delighted. ”England sends this man? After the football?”

”He’s not the football, son. He’s just the warm-up act.”

A Russian opera singer arrived on the back of an enormous mechanical eagle, which I did not feel I could explain to a room of confused Moroccans, so I didn’t try.

There were dancers. There were people twirling in shiny costumes. The trophy came out in the hands of a man who’d lifted it for real, gold and small and the realest thing on the screen.

And then, as they cleared the pitch, Robbie Williams turned to the camera in front of a global audience of half the earth and stuck his middle finger straight up it.

The room came down.

Hakimi was on the floor. Bray laughed so hard he had to put his cup down. Even Steele, our silent man, made a sound, a single short bark of a thing nobody had heard before, and looked almost frightened by it.

”THIS,” Hakimi shouted over the noise, pointing at the screen, ”is the country that called you a disgrace! THIS! They sent THIS to the World Cup!”

”He’s freelance, Achraf, he’s not on the FA’s payroll, ”

”He did it for the whole world, coach. Your whole country, in one finger.” Hakimi wiped his eyes. ”I have never loved England more.”

And then the football started, and I tried to be just a man on a settee, and I could not manage it, because the manager in me does not switch off, not even for joy.

So I did both. I watched it like the boy I’d been and studied it like the man I’d become, and both of them had the night of their lives, because what came next was the best opening night of football I have ever watched, and I have watched all of them.

Russia. The hosts. The lowest-ranked team in the entire tournament, the worst side of the thirty-two on paper, a team nobody fancied to get out of a soft group, against Saudi Arabia.

It should have been nervy, the way opening games always are, two sides terrified of being the answer to a bad trivia question, poking it about, get it over with.

It was five-nil.

Twelve minutes, a corner half-cleared, thock of a head meeting it, and a midfielder I could not have named threw himself at the first goal of the whole World Cup.

ROAR. The Luzhniki came off its hinges, eighty thousand of them, and our room went up with it three thousand miles away.

And the manager in me, even up off the gym mat with everyone else, made the note. A corner, half-cleared, a striker reading the drop a beat before his marker. The exact thing Bray and I had sat in the dark drilling against for three nights.

A half-cleared corner is a half-cleared corner in any language, and tomorrow night it might be ours to defend.

Then I let the boy have the next one.

Their best player, a kid called Golovin, started running the game like he owned the deeds to it, and their man Dzagoev pulled up with a hamstring and hobbled off.

The lad who came on for him, Cheryshev, raised in Spain, a man I learned later had not scored in eleven games for his country, flicked the ball over a defender’s head and battered it in, thwack, top corner.

”He’s a sub,” said Sofyan, quietly, from beside me. He’d gone very still. ”He came on and he did that.”

”He did, son.”

Sofyan didn’t say anything else. He sat there with his match ball in his lap and watched a substitute light up the opening night of a World Cup, and I watched him watch it. He knew exactly what he was looking at. So did I.

Then Dzyuba came off the bench and scored with his head about ninety seconds after his boots touched the grass. Cheryshev got his second with the outside of his left foot like he was showing off now.

And Golovin, who’d had a hand in half of it, curled a free kick into the top corner, ting off the underside of the bar and in, to finish the party at five.

OHHH went our room, the whole squad up off the mats, En-Nesyri with both hands on his head, because by the fifth one we’d long stopped being neutral and started just loving it.

Five-nil. The opening game. The host nobody rated putting five past a team on the biggest night their country had ever had.

I sat in the dark in Voronezh with a fruit bowl and a room full of the men I’d take to war in the morning, and I was as happy as I have ever been at a football match I had nothing to do with.

”This is good,” El Ahmadi said. He’s a quiet man, the bolt, thirty-three and not given to speeches. He nodded at the joy pouring off the screen, a whole nation up off its feet. ”This is what it is. We forget, in the work. This is what it is.”

He was right. A country up off its feet because eleven of its sons did something on a Thursday.

We’d have our turn tomorrow. Tonight we only got to watch somebody else have theirs, the last evening, maybe, that we’d be the ones on the settee instead of the ones watched.

And the lads knew it. You could see it under the fun, the same quiet sum going round the room. We’d roared the goals like supporters, and somewhere around the fourth one a stillness came in underneath, because supporters go home, and we had Iran in the morning.

Rebecca was on her feet at the final whistle, clapping her hands like a schoolteacher. Bed. All of you. You’ve a World Cup tomorrow. And for once nobody argued, because they could all feel it now, the size of the next day pressing in through the walls.

The room emptied, and I sat a while in the dark with the highlights looping, Cheryshev’s flick, the header, the free kick, the whole five of them.

Benatia was the last out. He stopped at the door, the captain, four weeks ago a stranger, and he looked at me looking at the screen, and he understood it all without me saying any of it.

”Tomorrow,” he said. That was the whole sentence. Tomorrow was the whole thing now.

Then us. Tomorrow our settee turns into a dugout, somewhere a country holds its breath, and it’s me sending eleven men out under those lights instead of watching them.

And not only us. Tomorrow, in another Russian city, Spain played Portugal, Ronaldo and all, the two monsters of our own group going at each other on the same day we played the team the world had pencilled us in to draw with.

The group was starting. The whole thing was starting. And we were in it now, not on a settee, in it.

”Goodnight, captain.”

”Goodnight, coach.” A pause at the door. ”We will not lose to Iran.”

He said it flat. Final.

I turned the screen off, and the room went dark, and Russia kept playing somewhere out there, in the country that had decided to love us.

Twenty years off a settee.

Tomorrow, mine.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.