Glory Of The Football Manager System

Pheep. Pheep. Pheeeep.

The whistle went and my bench came off the seats like a dam breaking.

”YEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSS!”

”WE’VE DONE IT! WE’VE ACTUALLY DONE IT!”

Marcus was first past me, tablet gone somewhere, both arms in the air, screaming something the noise ate whole.

Then Rebecca, then Steeley, then the lads off the bench, then the kitman with his bibs still bundled in his arms. Every one of them flat out for the pile in the middle of the pitch, tk tk tk across the grass.

And then I was going with them. I don’t remember deciding to. One second I was on the white line and the next I was into the pile and down under it, whump, arms and studs and soaked shirts, the smell of it hitting me all at once, sweat and cut grass and the sulphur off the flares.

Somewhere down in it my suit jacket went, wrenched half off my shoulder and gone. I never saw it again.

”GAFFER! GET IN HERE!”

Benatia was face down on the halfway line, fists driven into the turf, shoulders going. I got a hold of his shirt and hauled, and he came up heavy, dead weight, a big man with nothing left in the tank.

He grabbed the back of my head with both hands and pressed his forehead into mine and said nothing, because there was nothing to say.

Behind him was Ziyech and Sofyan and Bounou were in a heap. Sofyan couldn’t get up. Both calves had gone solid and he’d nothing left in him, grey in the face, eyes half gone.

And he was laughing up at the black sky like a madman all the same, while Bounou tried to drag him off the floor and Rebecca went in with the spray.

”I can’t feel my legs, boss.” He grinned at me, wrecked. ”I can’t feel my legs and I don’t care.”

I got down and took Bounou’s face in both my hands, and I felt the blood off his nose smear across my palm and I didn’t care.

”They’re alive because of you,” I said. ”You. You did that.”

He couldn’t get a word out. He just nodded, over and over, couldn’t stop himself.

And En-Nesyri last, the way it’s been all tournament. The lad who hadn’t said a word since the hotel, four days back. I pulled him into me and he put his mouth right to my ear so I’d get it over the top of everything.

”That’s for Wednesday, boss.”

That was it. Four days of silence and that was all he had, and it was the whole of it.

I looked at them then, the whole wrecked lot of them. Cramping, bleeding, sick to the stomach with it, up off the floor on nothing but the noise coming down off that end. They hadn’t won a game of football. They’d gone to war out there and come back, every last one of them.

Hakimi had gone up the fence, but he wasn’t just looking for the ultras. He was looking for his mother.

He found her in the front row, leaning over the concrete, crying her eyes out. He pulled her halfway over the barrier and buried his face in her shoulder, kissing her forehead, passing his soaked shirt into her hands.

Down by the corner flag Ziyech was at the boards, holding his own mum’s face in both hands, his forehead resting on hers.

That is what this team is. I learned it early. It is not just eleven lads and a badge. It is mothers, fathers, brothers. Family first, football second. I watched my players haul their families out of the crowd and hold them, tears running down faces, right there on the Kaliningrad concrete.

And then Benatia turned round. He didn’t just want the eleven.

He was waving both arms at the bench, roaring over the noise. ”Everyone! All of us!”

Bray, Steeley, Rebecca with her physio bag, the doctors, the kitman, the subs. Every one of us went. Benatia dragged me into the middle of it, and we made a long line, thirty of us, arms linked across the edge of the box, facing that red wall.

Benatia threw his free arm up. The drum stopped. For two seconds the whole end went silent, thirty thousand people holding their breath at once.

Then the captain brought his arm down, hard.

”SHHHHOOO!” we shouted from the pitch, clapping as one, clap.

”SHHHHOOO!” thirty thousand threw it back, clap.

He did it again, faster. Then again. Then the drum kicked in double time, boom boom boom, the brass came in over the top, paaarp, and the whole thing let go.

Arms linked, players and doctors and coaches, the whole stand stamping down on the concrete with us, thud thud thud, a squad and thirty thousand people bouncing as one thing.

I was wedged between Hakimi and Steeley, in my shirtsleeves now, jacket long gone, jumping till my calves burned, roaring the words with a team that had taken me in as one of their own.

”DIMA MAGHRIB! DIMA MAGHRIB!”

The old fella by the tunnel was up on his mates’ shoulders, cap gone, face soaked through, both fists in the air, singing with what he had left. I broke the line and got to the boards under him, and he looked down and jabbed a finger at his own chest, then at the pitch.

”1986,” he shouted down, tears running into his collar. ”I was here in 1986. I never thought I’d see it again. I never thought I’d live, son.”

I couldn’t get a word out. I reached up and he reached down and we got a hand each and held on.

The kid off his dad’s shoulders was at the front now, both little fists going. The drummer, the same lad from every match, had beaten his hands raw and didn’t care, hammering the skin, boom boom boom.

An old woman in a headscarf had both hands out over the boards, reaching for nothing, just to be nearer it. I held them a second and she said something in Arabic I couldn’t follow and kissed the back of my hand.

A fella with a boy on his shoulders was screaming my name, ”Danny! Danny Walsh!”, over and over, and I put a hand flat on my chest to him because I had nothing else to give back.

And then, over the top of all of it, I heard a sound I knew, and it had no business being in Kaliningrad.

I turned, and there they were. A knot of them, thirty, maybe forty, red and blue in a sea of Moroccan red. Palace shirts. Eagles scarves up over their heads, and a bedsheet strung across the front of them, black paint on white.

SELHURST TO RUSSIA TO THE WORLD CUP.

My lot. The far edge of Russia, a whole country of North African red and flares and noise, and there in the middle of it was a corner of south London singing at me.

”He’s one of our own! He’s one of our own! Danny Walsh! He’s one of our own!”

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the constant support.