Glory Of The Football Manager System

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

And that, of everything, was the one that did me. That daft old song from home.

Because fourteen months back I’d walked into a Crystal Palace side sat five points off the drop with five games to go, into a dressing room that had stopped believing and a ground that had turned on the last fella. Those same people. That same song, only nobody was singing it then.

Five games. We won all five. Eighth, and into Europe, and half the country calling it a fluke.

Then a season that had no business happening. The Carabao Cup. The FA Cup. The Europa League, us, Crystal Palace, champions of Europe. Second in the land behind a City side that cost ten of us, on a budget that never touched seventy million, with twelve men shipped out of that building to make room.

I’d won the lot that year. Lifted things I’d only ever watched other men lift. And none of it, not one night of it, had felt like this.

They’d crossed a continent to stand in a Moroccan end and sing my name into a World Cup.

I put both fists on my chest, thump thump, and held them there, and I had to look at the grass a second, because a grown man running a football match does not cry in front of forty thousand people, and I nearly did.

Somewhere in it Elena’s camera was in my face, Tomás beside her, and I didn’t mind. This was the thing she’d flown across the world to get, and here it was, all of it, and no lens was ever holding it.

The neutrals were still in, Russians, the Brazilians in yellow, the lads in England shirts, and half of them were bouncing with the Moroccans now, because that’s the thing this tournament does.

For ninety minutes a country you’d never once thought about becomes yours, and their heartbreak becomes yours, and their joy nearly folds you in half, and you go home changed by a game you had no stake in at all.

And I made myself turn and look at the other end of it, because you should.

If our end was an earthquake, theirs was a hole in the world. The noise stopped dead at the halfway line, and the whole Spanish half of the pitch sat under a cold silence you could feel on your skin.

Spain were scattered across it like a battlefield. Ramos had dropped to his knees on the halfway line where he stood, staring at nothing, a whole tournament draining out of him. De Gea hadn’t moved from his goal, looking back into the net like the answer was in there.

Isco had his shirt pulled up over his face, his chest heaving. Piqué was flat on his back near the penalty spot, an arm thrown over his eyes, staring up at the black sky.

A whole tournament of a team, favourites, gone, and their end down the far side stood in that dead silence and watched us sing. I felt it. Next time it is us stood there. It always is.

Ramos got up in the end. He came the length of the pitch through all of it, found Benatia, and pulled him in. Held him a long time.

It looked like a king handing over something he’d carried a long way and couldn’t carry a step further, and Benatia took it off him and held him up. That was the game too. That was the beauty of it.

They got us in eventually, Bray and Steeley half carrying Sofyan between them, the lads soaked and hoarse, shirts gone into the crowd.

And as we went down the tunnel the noise came with us, pressing through the walls the way it had pressed through them at half-time, when we were losing and I was telling them what forty-five minutes was worth.

It was worth this.

I stopped at the dressing room door and let them all spill in ahead of me, Marcus, Rebecca, Steeley, the players, the room filling up loud.

And I stood in the corridor on my own one more second and listened to it, the lot of it, the racket in front of me and a country behind the walls, boom boom through the concrete, that hadn’t made this sound since 1986.

Then I went in to them.

The door shut behind me and the room went off.

Music out of somebody’s phone speaker, up too loud and distorting, bzzt. Water bottles going up and coming down like rain. Sofyan, who couldn’t walk twenty minutes back, up on the physio bench with his shirt round his head, leading a chant you couldn’t make the words of. Benatia emptying a full bottle over Bounou’s head.

The whole room bouncing, steam coming off them, the smell of it thick, sweat and deep heat and soaked kit.

Same four walls I’d stood in an hour before, telling them what forty-five minutes was worth while it was all slipping away. You would not have known it was the same room. You would not have known it was the same team.

Elena and her Netflix crew were right in the thick of it, two cameras up, Tomás down low getting the faces, Elena herself in the doorway with her arms folded and the biggest grin I’d seen off her all tournament. She’d flown across the world for this and no script could have written it.

They wanted a speech. Benatia hammered the lockers till the room near gave him quiet, bang bang bang, and they all turned to me, soaked, wild-eyed, waiting, and I stood there in my shirtsleeves with no jacket and no voice.

”I’ve got nothing,” I said. ”You lot said it all out there.”

That was as far as I got. Hakimi started them up again and the room came apart, and an arm went round my neck and dragged me in, into the middle of the whole daft lot of them, and I was as wet as they were inside ten seconds.

It was Sofyan who put his phone in my face. He’d gone quiet with it, off on his own a second, and he held the screen up and his hand was shaking.

Casablanca. The Corniche, and you couldn’t see the road for people. Thousands of them, cars stopped dead in the middle of it with lads stood up on the roofs, flags, flares, a whole city poured out into the dark and screaming at the sky.

He swiped. Rabat, the same. Marrakech, the big square packed solid, wall to wall. Every city in the country emptied into the street at midnight over what eleven men had done in a stadium thousands of miles from home.

”That’s home, boss,” Sofyan said, and his voice went. ”We did that.”

I looked at it. I didn’t have anything for that either.

They came for me not long after. There’s no hiding from it when you win one like that. I got pulled out of the warm of that room and back into the cold of the tunnel.

The cameras were stacked six deep, the lights were up, and a line of reporters had their arms out with the microphones.

I said what you say. That I was proud of them. That these players had given the country a night it would talk about for thirty years. That it was not my team, I was only borrowing it, and the credit was theirs.

Flashbulbs, questions coming in three languages at once, and Elena’s camera in behind the lot of it, catching me catch my breath.

Then the press room, a top table and a Morocco backdrop and a hundred faces looking up. I sat down next to Benatia and we did our half hour, the two of us, the whole thing in French and Arabic.

I took every question in French, the way I had all tournament.

There’d been an English reporter down the front at every one of these, and every match he’d asked me in English and every match I’d answered him in French and left him to get it translated after. He tried again tonight. He got French again.

Every other question was the same one anyway, turned a different way. How. How did you do it. And in whatever language it came, neither of us had a better answer than the one En-Nesyri had already put in my ear out on the grass.

Somebody near the back asked who we wanted in the last sixteen.

And that was the first time it hit me, sat at that table, that we weren’t finished. We were through to the last sixteen, the first time this country had gone through since 1986, and there was a team out there somewhere we’d be playing next.

I told him the truth. That I didn’t know and I didn’t much care yet. That the other groups weren’t even done, that we’d find out tomorrow who we’d drawn and we’d worry about them tomorrow.

Tonight belonged to the lads. To that old boy up on his mates’ shoulders. To Casablanca at midnight.

I got up from the table and went back down the tunnel towards the noise, because that was where I wanted to be. The music was still going when I got the door open.

So were they.