Glory Of The Football Manager System

The fourth official came across with his hand up, telling me to get back in my box. I told him where he could stick his box. He pointed at the white line. I got behind it, for now.

Then they came at us, and I went to work.

The job in a spell like that isn’t to feel it. It’s to do six things at once and let the lads think you’re calm as a millpond.

My eyes were everywhere. Moutinho’s feet, for the next ball through the lines. Ronaldo’s live number in the corner of it all, ticked up to a 7 on the strength of one header and nothing else, the System paying him just for breathing.

Mendyl, diving in, getting done. Marcus at my shoulder with the tablet.

”He’s dropping,” Marcus said. ”Off the front, coming into the ten to get it.”

I’d seen it. The System had nudged the 7 the second the man came short, into the channel between Sofyan and Boussoufa, asking for it to feet now we’d cut the service off.

He’s bored of waiting. Coming to fetch it himself. Right.

”SOFYAN! BOUSSOUFA!” Both of them, hands chopping the air. ”He drops, you swarm him. Two of you on him. Do not let him turn.”

Then back to the four. El Ahmadi had drifted high and left a road behind him, so I dragged him ten yards deeper with both arms, screaming his name till he clocked me and sat right on the toes of the centre-halves and the road shut.

”Mendyl, HOLD.” He kept getting sucked up the pitch chasing Bernardo. ”Hold your line. Let him have it in front of you. Behind you is where the 7 lives.”

It was patching a dam with your fingers. Plug one gap, another sprang. And all the while that little 7 sat there in the corner of my eye, patient, waiting for one of my fingers to slip.

On 12 minutes one did.

Moutinho slid the ball through the lines to Guedes, and Guedes didn’t even look up, just clipped it first time over the top, and Ronaldo was already running.

He’d gone off Saiss’s shoulder a yard before the ball was struck, the way he’s done it for 15 years, and now he was through. Clean through. The whole of our half open in front of him and nobody left but Bounou.

And seventy-eight thousand people stood up at once and made no sound at all.

Hssss.

Bounou came. Didn’t sit, didn’t backpedal, came flying off his line to kill the angle, and the pair of them closed on each other in all that silence.

Ronaldo took one touch to set it. Dropped the shoulder. Went low and hard across Bounou for the far corner, the finish he’s scored a thousand times.

And Bounou threw everything he had sideways and low, made himself enormous, got a forearm to it.

Smack. Off the outside of the post and away.

And the roar that came back was bigger than the one the goal had taken.

”YASSINE! YASSINE! YASSINE!”

Bounou was up before the ball had stopped rolling, screaming into his back four with his arms wide and his voice gone.

”STAY BIG!” Steele was off the bench beside me, bellowing it through cupped hands at his keeper. ”STAY BIG, YASSINE!”

The save bought us a breath and nothing more, and I spent it reading the rest of them. Because if I couldn’t subtract the 7, I had to beat the other ten, and the System had been muttering at me where for ten minutes.

I’d been running the numbers on their back four since the restart. Pepe, nasty, a born leader, and slow as a wet Tuesday. Fonte steady. Cedric fine. And then the left-back.

Raphael Guerreiro. Marking 11. Positioning 12.

The two lowest red numbers on the grass, and the daft lad couldn’t help himself. Kept tearing fifty yards up the pitch to join the fun and leaving those two numbers switched off behind him, a barn door swinging in the wind.

There. That’s the door. That’s where we live the rest of the night.

Marcus had got there the same second I had, no system at all, just eyes and a stopwatch. He put his mouth to my ear. ”Behind their left-back. Every single time.”

”I see it.” So I let Hakimi off the leash. Up, I told him, both hands shoving the air. Go. The one word the System had always stamped on the lad. Unleash.

It cost me El Ahmadi to buy the room. A cynical little clip on Ronaldo as he turned to drive, Pheep, yellow card, and now my deepest man was booked for an hour and Ronaldo had clocked it and started running straight at him on purpose.

I filed it to worry about later. You learn to keep three problems in the air and only solve the one on fire.

For the next ten minutes I steered us down that right side like I was driving a car. Hakimi higher. Nordin tucking inside to give him the overlap. Ziyech drifting over into the pocket Guerreiro kept abandoning. Push, push, find the door, again, until they were sick to the back teeth of defending it.

On 31 minutes, it opened.

Sofyan won it first, a clean foot in on Bernardo in our own half. Thock.

”YES!” The whole green end barked it as one.

He didn’t dwell on it a second, just stabbed it flat and wide into Hakimi’s run.

”YALLAH, ACHRAF! GO! GO! GO!”

And Hakimi was already gone. He’d seen the gap before the ball was even loose, and by the time it reached him he was at full tilt with Guerreiro two yards back and losing more with every stride. Down the line, eating the grass, the whole green end coming up off its feet in one long rising howl.

He carried it right to the dead line, dead cool in all that din, and stood the full-back clean up.

Then he pulled it back. Slap. Flat, hard, low, across the face of the six.

And for one whole second that ball ran across the front of the goal with nobody on it, just skidding through the daylight, and my heart stopped.

En-Nesyri was there.

He’d gambled the length of it, peeled off the back, arrived at the second post at a dead sprint, and he didn’t break stride. Right foot, first time, no backlift.

Thwack. Roof of the net.

1-1.

”GOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAL!”

And the Luzhniki came apart. The sound came down like a building coming down on top of itself, and it did not stop.

The old fella behind the dugout went clean off his feet, lifted bodily by his lad. A forest of flares. Red smoke rolling. The painted fella was halfway over the hoarding, both hands on my blazer, crying tracks through the paint.

”WE LOVE YOU, DANNY! WE LOVE YOU!”

And down the front, the Russian lad in the borrowed scarf had got it now, every word, screaming it perfect into the night.

”DIMA MAGHRIB! DIMA MAGHRIB!”

There’s a version of me that stays in that moment. I had Bray by the shoulders, the both of us roaring nothing at each other, and the read of the game in my head was singing too. We’d found their weakness and hit it. We were level with Portugal and we’d earned it.

And then the coach in me let go of Bray and turned back to the pitch, because there was one thing I hadn’t checked yet, and I already dreaded the answer.

Down the other end, walking back to halfway on his own through all of it like the noise was falling on a different man entirely, was Ronaldo. He looked at our exploding end the way you’d look at a bit of drizzle. Then he looked at the ball on the centre spot.

And my stomach turned right over, even with my own thirty thousand screaming at my back.

You haven’t started yet. Have you.

They saw the half out from there. I spent the last ten minutes managing it, keeping us patient, hands flat, telling Ziyech to mind the ball and not force it, telling the lads we did not need a second before the whistle, we needed the whistle.

Right on it, Ziyech ignored me and curled one that beat Rui Patricio all ends up and came back off the inside of the post, Dink, and the whole green end grabbed its own skull as one.

I had my hands on my head with them. Then the fourth official lifted his board, and the ref blew it. Pheep.

1-1. Against Portugal. Against him.

The green end was still singing as we came off, every last one of them, ”Olé, olé, olé” chasing us all the way down the tunnel.

The dressing room was loud too, but a smaller loud, a room of men after a stadium, the crowd still thudding faint through the wall. Boom. Boom. Boom. I let it run a few seconds, let them have the high. Then I clapped once. Crack. It came down.

”That goal’s gone. We’ve fixed it. Mehdi’s on him for every dead ball now and it does not happen again.”

Benatia put his hand up, which a captain doesn’t have to. ”On me,” he said to the room. ”It won’t be two.”

”It’s nobody’s. It’s done.” I crouched to their level, found their eyes one at a time. ”Now hear the important bit. We are better than them. Everywhere that lad in the 7 isn’t stood, we are the better team, and they know it, and they’re rattled.

Their left-back can’t live with Achraf. So we keep going down that right until it breaks for good.”

”And we get the second. We do not sit on this and invite him on. Remember Iran, we got greedy at two and gave it back. Tonight we go the other way. You sit deep on this man, he finds a yard, and a yard is the only thing he’s ever needed. So we don’t sit. We go.”

Sofyan, 21 and running the middle of a World Cup, spoke up from the bench. ”Karim’s on the yellow. I sit, I take the runner off him.”

”Good lad. That’s it exactly.”

Boussoufa, 33, the watchmaker, nodded slow from his corner. ”We keep the ball. He can’t score it if he hasn’t got it.”

Over by the door, the little red light. Tomás had the camera up and tight on my face, Ruth on the boom, Elena with her arms folded, watching it land. I’d half forgotten they were there. Then I remembered, and let them have it, because if they wanted to film a man working they were welcome to it.

In the far corner Steele had Bounou by the back of the neck, quiet under the noise, showing him something with his hands about his angles.

I stood up. ”Forty-five minutes. We’re level with Portugal and they are frightened of us. Now go back out into that, and win the game.”

They went out roaring, and the second the door opened the wall came back in to meet them.

”DIMA MAGHRIB! DIMA MAGHRIB!”

I hung back a moment in the sudden echoing quiet of the empty room. And then I did the thing I’d not let myself do across the whole half.

I found him in my head, the man sat in the away room thirty yards down the corridor with a towel round his neck, and I pulled his card up on purpose.

Cristiano Ronaldo. CA 195. Rating 7.2.

Forty-five minutes. My best lads had emptied themselves. The loudest night of all our lives. I’d out-thought the bench in the other dugout at every turn, found the one crack in their team and hammered it, and we were level. And the number sat there and hadn’t moved by a decimal.

A 7.2. For a man who’d had 4 minutes on the ball, scored one, rattled the post, and otherwise been kept quieter than I have ever kept anyone in my life.

That was the bit that put the cold in me, stood alone in that concrete box. Not that he’d played well. He hadn’t, much. It was that he hadn’t needed to yet.

We’d spent the whole tank just to draw with ten good players and a man on cruise.

I took a breath, tasted the last of the flare smoke on it, and walked back out into the wall of sound to go and try and win it anyway.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.