Glory Of The Football Manager System

The whistle went for the second half, Pheep.

The pitch lay green and bright under the floodlights, cut into its mowing stripes, and behind the far goal the wall was already up, thirty thousand of them standing from the running track to the roof, red and green, scarves and flags going, a haze of flare smoke drifting flat across the lower tier.

And we went straight back at Portugal.

Hakimi tore up the right at Guerreiro again, that door still hanging off its hinges from the first half. Ziyech dropped into the pocket between their lines, took it on the half turn, and drove at the heart of them.

Sofyan and Boussoufa rolled it side to side through a midfield that couldn’t lay a boot on it, the white shirts trotting two yards behind the ball wherever it went.

”DIMA MAGHRIB! DIMA MAGHRIB!”

That was the whole truth of the night. Take the 7 out of their team and what was left was ten good professionals, and not a man among them I’d have swapped for one of mine.

Across the technical area, the other manager was up out of his seat for the first time all night.

Santos. Arms going, bawling at his back four to push up, to get a grip of it, a man watching his team get run ragged by a country that hadn’t seen a World Cup in twenty years. He didn’t like what he was looking at. I knew the feeling. I’d had it myself, for four minutes, in the first half.

On 49 minutes Pepe ended a Ziyech run with a forearm and a trailing leg, cynical as you like, and went in the book for it, Pheep. Thirty thousand people stood up to tell him exactly what they thought of him, a wall of whistles with a roar of pure fury underneath.

Fweeeeeee.

He didn’t care. Stood there in the middle of it with his chest out, the one man in white who fancied the fight.

Their lot loved him for it. Up in the far corner of the Luzhniki there was a wall of red and green of their own, a few thousand against our thirty, and they did not sound beaten.

”POR-TU-GAL! POR-TU-GAL!”

Outnumbered ten to one and not bothered about it in the least, because they had the one thing in the ground that frightened the rest of us, and they knew it.

On 51 minutes Ziyech worked it onto his left twenty yards out and bent one for the top corner, and Rui Patricio threw a hand up and clawed it over. Tip. The green end groaned as one and sang louder.

Three minutes later Nordin whipped one in from the right and En-Nesyri rose at the back post and met it clean, a downward header arrowing for the bottom corner, and Patricio threw himself low and strong and shovelled it round the post. Smack. Two world-class saves in five minutes. We were battering them.

”We’re miles the better side,” Marcus said at my shoulder, the tablet a wall of green arrows. ”Everyone but him. We keep this on them, we score.”

I knew we would. They were hanging on by their fingernails, hoofing it clear, kicking Ziyech up in the air, the white shirts backing deeper and deeper toward their own box with every wave.

And at 58 minutes, it broke.

It came from nothing, the way the best ones always do. Boussoufa rolled it square to Ziyech, twenty-five yards out, a yellow shirt already closing him down, no angle on, nothing.

And Ziyech looked up just the once.

He took one touch to drag it onto that left foot, the wrong side of the defender, half a yard of room and not an inch more, and he leaned back and hit it.

I lost the ball against the lights. A white streak rising, bending, and the whole stadium pulled in one breath and held it, seventy-eight thousand people watching a thing climb into the Moscow night.

It dropped late. Wickedly late. Rui Patricio went up at full stretch and got nothing but the air it had left behind.

Thwack. Off the underside of the bar and in.

2-1.

And the sound that came out of the Luzhniki then was a different animal to anything before it.

The 1-1 had been relief. This was the dream landing. Thirty thousand people and a whole continent and twenty years of waiting all finding out in the same half-second that it was real, that Morocco were beating Portugal, that the gentlemen were actually going to do it.

The old fella behind the dugout had gone, just gone, both fists in the sky and his lad screaming into the side of his head. The painted man was over the hoarding to the waist. The Russian lad in the borrowed scarf had his arms round two strangers he’d never met.

”OLÉ! OLÉ! OLÉ! OLÉ!”

Tomas had ducked under the hoarding and his lens was a foot off the side of my face, drinking it in, the manager at the very top of the mountain. I let him have it. We were winning. We were beating Portugal in a World Cup.

For ninety more seconds we nearly buried them. Hakimi tore Guerreiro again and squared it and Ziyech’s first-time crack beat Patricio all ends up and smacked off the foot of the post and stayed out. Crack. A yard either side and it’s 3-1 and the night is over and none of the rest of it ever happens.

It stayed 2-1.

And then, because I can’t not, because that’s the curse of the thing in my head, I went looking for him.

He was stood on the halfway line. On his own, the way he always is. Hands on his hips, looking up at our celebrating end with no more on his face than a man watching a bus go by. The System laid its number over him, calm as you please.

Cristiano Ronaldo. Rating 7.4.

He’d done nothing all half. We’d seen to that. And the cold came up through me anyway, straight through the middle of the best moment of my whole career, because I knew what a man like that does the second you take the lead off him.

He decides it’s time.

It started two minutes later, and it didn’t start on the pitch. It started in the other dugout.

Santos had seen enough. The fourth official’s board went up on the far side, two numbers in red. Andre Silva on for Joao Mario, a second striker thrown into the mix. Quaresma on for Guedes, fresh legs and a bag of tricks down their right.

He shoved his full-backs ten yards higher, pulled Ronaldo off the front and let him roam wherever he fancied, and pointed everything they had left at one idea. Get it to the 7. Higher, more often, in worse places for us.

I read it the second the shape moved. The System showed me their two full-backs charging up past the halfway line and the green acres opening at their backs, showed me Ronaldo’s touch count climbing after a half of starvation, showed me his number lift off its 7.4 and start to walk.

Rating 7.9.

And here was the trap, the one I could see whole and still couldn’t climb out of.

Hold my line and trade, and those fresh legs and that spare man got at us. Drop deeper to kill the space, and I invited the entire white tide onto our box, and a man who needs one yard gets it handed to him.

I could out-think Santos all night. I’d been doing it all night. But there is no coaching answer in the world to the fact that if you sit on a 195, sooner or later he finds the inch.

I went for the lead. Course I did. You don’t hand back a one-goal lead over Portugal without a war. Fresh defensive legs on, El Ahmadi dropped in alongside the centre-halves, narrow, kill the cutback. Protect it.

And every yard I gave them to protect it, the System fed back to me as one more yard for him.

On 68 minutes my heart went straight into my mouth. Sofyan, dead on his feet by now, lunged at Bernardo twenty-two yards out and caught him, and the whistle went, and for one horrible second all I could see was the patch of grass and a man already walking toward the ball.

Free-kick. Dead centre. Exactly where you cannot let him have it.

The wall went up. Bounou was screaming, shoving it into a line. He stood over it, did the stance, the little shuffle, and the whole green end stopped breathing at once.

He hit it. Thunk. Up over the wall, dipping nastily, and Bounou flew across his line and palmed it up and over the bar. Smack.

The green end let go a roar that was pure relief, ”YA-SSINE! YA-SSINE!”, and under it I could hear my own voice gone to nothing, screaming at them to wake up, to concentrate, to not give him another.

I was out of my box again. The fourth official had me by the arm, walking me back to the white line for the third time tonight, and I told him I’d stand where I liked in my own technical area, and he told me I wouldn’t, and the cameras got every bit of it.

Quaresma had Mendyl twisted in knots down their right by now, dropping a shoulder, bending those outside-of-the-boot crosses into the heart of our box, and twice Bounou had to come flying off his line to punch one away from over Ronaldo’s head. Punt. Every cross a coin toss.

And the whole time, Ronaldo had Karim El Ahmadi in his sights, my booked man, running straight at him every time, hunting the second yellow that would leave us with ten.

Karim knew it. Backed off every time, jockeyed, never dived in. A man managing his own yellow card in a World Cup quarter-final, in his head, while the best player alive tried to bait him into the sea. Good lad.

We held it like that to 74 minutes.