Glory Of The Football Manager System

2-1.

The whole place came back from the dead, the red end up as one. Behind me the big fan was on his feet, the flag off his neck, leaning right over me. ”NOW! Now you cry, English!”

The lads’ heads came round to me, all of them. I clapped once, hard, two fingers up and then one, the shape we’d drilled, and pressed both palms at the air. Tighten. Hold.

The fourth official, a neat, busy man who owned the strip of grass between the two dugouts, put a hand up at me, and I stepped back into my box.

He lifted his board a minute later, a red number off and a green one on, and Bouhaddouz came on for En-Nesyri. The kid came off soaked through, both arms up to the green corner.

They held. El Ahmadi sat in front of the back four and took the heat out of it a safe pass at a time, and slowly the red came off the boil.

Eighty-two minutes. Iran won a corner and sent everyone up but their keeper, eight red shirts in our box.

El Ahmadi read it before it was kicked, stepped in front of their number 8, and took it clean off his boot. Marcus’s thumb came down on the watch.

El Ahmadi to Sofyan, and Sofyan drove out of our half through all the grass they’d left behind them. Ziyech tore up on his left, Hakimi flew down the right and took the last defender with him, and Sofyan slid it wide. The cross came back low across the six.

Bouhaddouz threw himself at it.

THWACK. Far corner, past the keeper. 3-1.

”GOAL!” I had it out before I knew it, both fists driven down. ”YES! Get IN!” I was four yards onto the grass before the fourth official’s arm came across my chest.

Behind me the big fan sat down very slowly with the flag in his lap and said nothing, and God forgive me, I enjoyed that nearly as much as the goal.

The fourth official held his board up. Four minutes, red. Iran came one more time, a last free kick, their number 3 standing over it again, the whole red end up with their hands at their mouths.

In it came, high into the lights. Bouhaddouz climbed at the back post above the lot of them and headed it clear, and the whistle went while the ball was still rising.

PEEP. PEEP. PEEEEP.

3-1.

Then my feet came back under me, and I shook the other manager’s hand.

It was a hard one, honest, a man who had built something stubborn and run into something a fraction better tonight. We did not say much. There is not much.

Then I turned round and got my first proper look at what we had done, and it did not feel like any final whistle I had stood through in my life.

I have won things. A relegation battle, an FA cup, a league cup, a European night at Selhurst, a European trophy I thought would never be topped. This was not that. This was not even the same sport. This was a nation.

Nobody went near the tunnel. The whole soaked, knackered line of them turned and walked the length of the pitch to the green corner, to the four thousand who had crossed a continent to be here, and stood in front of them with their arms up.

RAAAAH. The corner met them like a wave breaking.

Benatia got them in a row, arms over each other’s shoulders, and players and supporters bounced as one thing, twenty years of waiting let out at once. Boom. Boom. Boom. went the drums.

Saiss had his shirt off and swung it round his head, and the young ones were crying, and not one of them hid it. Click-click-click-click. A hundred pitch-side shutters went at once.

And up behind the hoardings, the families.

Hakimi went straight to the boards where his were and put his head down against his mother’s, a woman in a headscarf with both hands pressed over her mouth, and stayed there with his eyes shut.

One of the young subs lifted a little girl over the advertising boards, his own, tiny in a pair of ear defenders, and held her up to the singing like a cup while somebody behind him filmed it through tears.

Another of the lads stood on his own a moment, looked up into that sky that would not go dark, and pointed two fingers at it, at somebody who should have been in that stand and was not.

Our corner did not stop. Not for one second.

Four thousand of them making the noise of forty. Fwap-fwap went a hundred flags, scarves up over their heads, every soul of them hoarse and soaked and out of their minds.

MA-ROC. MA-ROC. MA-ROC. It came up off them in one voice and bounced round the bowl. Hsssss. Fzzt. A green flare caught in the heart of them and the smoke climbed into the white sky.

Moroccans do not watch their football quietly. They had sung for ninety-five minutes without a breath, and a final whistle was not about to shut them up.

Down the front of it, a great bull of a man with a dead megaphone in his fist, the one who had conducted that whole corner all night, leaned so far over the rail I thought he would go clean over it, the dead megaphone swinging off his wrist and banging the steel. Clack. Clack.

He got both hands on my face. Actual hands, a stranger, on my face, tears running into a beard you could lose a fist in.

”You,” he said. ”You gave us this. You hear me, English? Twenty years. My father died waiting for this. Morocco will never forget you. Never.”

I had no word back for him. I put my hand over his and held it there a second, and that was all I had.

Behind me a man in a federation blazer, who I had barely heard say three sentences in three weeks, took my hand in both of his and would not give it back.

”You keep us in this,” he said, low, close to my ear. ”You take us out of this group, and the Kingdom looks after you. Whatever it is. Whatever it costs. You will not have to ask twice.”

I nodded like I had taken it in. The truth was I would have done it for nothing, and he knew that, and that is most likely why he said it.

The whole stadium was up now, not just our end of it.

Up in the dear seats I clocked the faces the cameras kept hunting. A film star half the planet would know, in a Morocco shirt two sizes too big. A singer on her feet beside him. A couple of players from countries already on their way home who had come along just to watch us.

Morocco does that to people. It collects them.

And the neutrals. The locals who had bought a ticket for a game with no dog in it for them, and gone and found themselves a team.

The Russian two rows back from my dugout who had come for the show and backed nobody had a green scarf on now, from God knows where, roaring along like he had been born in Rabat.

He was not on his own. Half that neutral end had drifted green over ninety minutes, won over by a side that played with its heart hung on the outside of its shirt.

Even the one Iranian who had spent the whole match bawling at the back of my head. He had gone quiet at the third, and now he caught my eye.

Instead of a curse he gave me one short, grudging nod, hard man to hard man, and set his flask of tea down on the bench by my feet before he went. Clonk. Strong enough to stand a spoon in. I drank it. You would be a fool not to.

En-Nesyri had found his little mascot in the front row and was leaning over the boards to high-five her, the two of them grinning like the goal had been hers.

And down the front the flag-lad had his flag pressed flat to the boards, the name and the date on it turned to face the grass, so whoever it was could watch the lap of honour.

I went over and laid my hand on it. You take whoever got you here, and on a night like this one, you make sure they see.

Then Marcus was at my shoulder with his phone held out and his face doing a thing I had not seen it do before.

”Gaffer. Look at this. Look at home.”

It was a video off the internet, shaky, a phone held up over a street somewhere in Casablanca. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. The whole road wall to wall, flags and flares and the green smoke climbing up between the buildings.

Parp. Paaarp. A city pouring out of its own front doors at gone midnight because eleven men had won a football match a thousand miles away.

”That’s Casa,” Marcus said. ”There’s one from Rabat. One from Tangier. Same in every one of them. The whole country, gaffer.”

My own phone had not stopped going in my pocket since the whistle. Bzz. Bzz. Bzz. I did not reach for it. All of it could wait.

Forty million people.

That is the thing I had not let myself think about until that exact second, stood on the grass with a dead man’s flask going cold in my hand. Forty million of them, in the streets, up on the roofs, behind us.

In the Premier League you carry a city, and a city is a lot of people. This was forty million, and a flag, and a thing that mattered to them the way nothing in my old life had ever mattered to anyone.

I got the lads in before they scattered, because the job does not stop for a good night.

”They got that one back because we got greedy at 2-0. That’s on the desk in the morning.” I let it land, then let the rest of my face go.

”Now look where you are. Go on, look up there. This country had never won its opening game at a World Cup. Not once, not ever. You just did. In here. Tonight. In front of all of them.”

Played one, won one, top of the group for a night, and a whole tournament still in front of us.

Twenty years I had watched men walk out under lights like these from a settee in Moss Side, and never once let myself dream I would be one of them.

Tonight I walked off the grass in green, forty million people I will never meet singing my players’ names up into a sky that would not go dark.

I gave that corner one last look, the kind you keep until you die. Tk-tk-tk went a camera somewhere. Then I went up the tunnel to face them.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.