Glory Of The Football Manager System

The whole of the Luzhniki, seventy-eight thousand people from every corner of the earth, up on its feet as one, and it would not let my players go. It got in underneath them and it held them up.

And up in the stands, the people who’d made these men were coming apart.

Benatia found his own before I’d even clocked them, going to the hoarding under the lower tier with both arms up.

A woman in a green shirt had both hands clamped over her mouth, her shoulders heaving, and beside her a little girl was bouncing up and down screaming a word I couldn’t hear but could read clean off her lips.

Baba. Baba.

Too young to know why her mum was crying. Old enough to know her dad was down there and the whole world was up on its feet for him.

Benatia reached up and the girl reached down and their fingers couldn’t quite meet across the gap, and he stood there on his toes a second with his hand stretched up to his daughter, and I had to look away from it.

A steward hoisted a boy of seven or eight clean over the advertising boards, a full kit on him, HAKIMI across the back, and Achraf caught him up and the boy’s legs wrapped round his middle and his face went into the lad’s neck. A photograph round the planet by morning.

The old fella behind our dugout, the one in the shirt two sizes too big, was on his feet with the tears running into his collar and his lad holding him up by the elbow.

”MAGHRIB!” he was roaring, at no one and at all of them, his fist shaking over his head. ”MAGHRIB! MAGHRIB!”

And off in their corner, my daft Palace lot in red and blue, who’d flown across a continent to follow me to a country that wasn’t even in their half of the draw, were bellowing my name into the Moscow night like we’d gone and won the thing.

”WALSH! WALSH! WALSH!”

I gave them a fist. Then I had to look at my boots, because my eyes had gone and a manager blubbing on the telly is no use to anybody.

I’ll not pretend it didn’t happen, though.

Then, broken as they were, my players did the thing nobody had asked of them.

Not one of them trudged off. Not one of them hid. They turned, all of them, and walked the full length of that pitch to the green end, and they stood in front of their people with their hands over their heads, and they clapped them back.

”Clap. Clap. Clap.”

And the green end gave it straight back down, thirty thousand voices on eleven men.

”DIMA MAGHRIB! DIMA MAGHRIB!”

Benatia had En-Nesyri under one arm and Saiss under the other, holding his two centre-backs upright. Sofyan could barely stand and Bouhaddouz had him round the waist. Bounou came down the line in his gloves gathering the stragglers as he went, making sure not one of his lads was left back there on his own to grieve.

They stood shoulder to shoulder in front of that wall of green, and they took the love and gave it back, and you could watch grown men’s faces breaking all over again under the weight of it.

I was halfway back to the tunnel when Santos caught me. The Portugal manager, the man I’d out-thought all night and who’d beaten me anyway, put his hand out, and we shook, the two of us knowing exactly how it had gone. He didn’t say a thing I’d want to put in his mouth. The look did the job.

And then, the way he had in the tunnel three hours before, a man who misses nothing found me in the crowd.

He’d swapped already, Ronaldo, a Morocco shirt knotted in one fist, and he came over and put his hand out.

Up close he was just a knackered fella with the sweat dried white at his temples, the best footballer who’s ever lived, who’d needed every inch of himself tonight to beat a side he ought to have beaten in his sleep.

We shook. And he gave me the nod. The same small one from the tunnel, the corner of the mouth, barely there at all. Only this time I knew exactly what it meant, because I’d spent ninety minutes learning it the hard way.

Then he was gone into the white shirts, and I let him go.

The dressing room was the worst place I’ve ever stood in, and one of the best.

You think a losing dressing room is loud. It isn’t. It’s the quietest room in the world.

I came in behind my players and there was almost nothing in it. The drip of a shower nobody had turned off. The squeak of a stud on the tiles. Here and there, a breath that caught and shuddered on its way back out.

Drip. Drip.

Men sat against the wall with their boots still on and their eyes fixed on nothing. Towels over heads. A couple of them not bothering to hide it any more, just sat there with it running down their faces.

I left it alone a while. You have to. You can’t talk a man out of that, and you shouldn’t try. They’d earned the right to hurt.

Then I crouched down in the middle of them, where they could all see me.

”I’m not going to stand here and tell you it doesn’t hurt.” My own voice came out rougher than I meant it, and I let it.

”It’s meant to hurt. You scored a goal good enough to draw with Portugal in the last minute, and they took it off you, and I’ll not insult you tonight by pretending that was right.

And you took the best player who’s ever lived to the very last kick. You made him score twice and then beg a teammate to finish it, because he couldn’t finish it on you. Sit with how much that hurts. It means you were that close.”

”But you hear me now. There’s not a soul left in that stadium tonight who doesn’t love this team. Their fans. The Russians. Their bench. Him. You did that. Not by winning. By the way you played, and the way you stood up when it broke your hearts.”

Then I got to my feet, and I said the thing I say after every game, win, lose or draw, the thing that had gone round the whole world after Iran without me ever meaning it to.

”Right. We leave this room the way we found it.”

And my heartbroken players, every one of them, got up off the floor.

The bin bags came out. Rustle. The strapping and the empty bottles and the torn-off tape got picked up off the tiles. Somebody found the brush. Shhk. Shhk. Bouhaddouz, who’d nearly been a hero an hour ago and would be having nightmares about that miss for a month, was on his knees wiping down the showers.

Benatia folded the spare kit into neat squares. Sofyan, who could barely walk, was stacking bottles into a crate one at a time, clink, clink, because it was the only job his legs had left in them.

Over by the door, Tomas had the camera low and steady and said not a word, Elena beside him with her arms folded and a look on her that had stopped being a director’s look.

They’d flown to Russia to film a man and his system.

What they were getting, what the whole world would get when it went out, was a room full of grown men who’d just had their hearts torn out, on their knees, cleaning a floor that was never theirs to clean.

By the time we were done you could have eaten your tea off that floor.

And when the last bag was tied and the last crate was stacked, I got them in around me one more time, and I changed the temperature in the room.

”Heads up. All of you. I’ve got news, and you won’t want it tonight, but you need it.”

”It isn’t over. Not even close. We lost tonight, and we’re still alive in this World Cup, because of what you did to Iran. Three points. We’re still in it.”

”Spain played tonight as well. They beat Iran. They’re sat top of this group alongside Portugal, full of themselves, knocking it about lovely, and in five days they’re stood across that white line from us with a place in the last sixteen on the table.”

”So here’s where we are. Matchday 3. Morocco against Spain. We win, we go through. We don’t, we go home. No more nearly. No more brave. We don’t need brave against Spain. We need to beat them. Three points, and we’re in the knockouts.”

I looked round at them, at the wet eyes and the cleaning still on their hands, and I felt the thing in the room start to turn, grief tipping over into something with teeth in it.

”You just stood toe to toe with arguably the greatest who ever lived and made the whole world get up on its feet for you. You’re not the little team that nearly did it anymore. You’re the team that did this. So grieve it tonight. Sleep on it. And tomorrow we get up, and we go and we put Spain out of this tournament.”

They didn’t roar. It wasn’t a roaring sort of moment. But every head in that room was up now, and there were jaws set hard that hadn’t been five minutes before.

And Benatia gave me a single nod off the back wall that told me the whole room was already five days down the road, already across that line from Spain.

We filed out of a dressing room you could have performed surgery in, past Tomas and his quiet camera, up the tunnel, studs ringing off the concrete, clack, clack, clack, and out into the Moscow night, a beaten team that didn’t walk like one.

Behind us, somewhere up in the bowl of the stadium, you could still hear them. The green wall. The neutrals. Thirty thousand and more who wouldn’t go home.

”DIMA MAGHRIB! DIMA MAGHRIB!”

Five days. Spain. Everything still sat in our own two hands.

I couldn’t wait.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.