Glory Of The Football Manager System

The referee stood with one arm flat out to hold the goal and the other at his earpiece, head cocked, listening to a room of men none of us could see. The purple square hit the big screen.

VAR, they keep spamming this on us which is frustrating if you ask me.

30,000 in red went to stone. They knew that square. They had watched it reach onto this grass and gut them once already. The lines came up. Boutaïb. Level by a bootlace. My heart was up in my throat and I could not have got a word past it.

The referee dropped his arm and jabbed a finger at the centre circle. Goal.

”YESSSSS!” It ripped out of me, and then I lost it altogether. The manager, the grown man, the one who is meant to keep his head, gone.

I was 10 yards down the touchline with both fists over my head before my legs told me they had moved, roaring into a wall of sound, because the machine that robbed us on this grass had just handed it straight back on the same square of Moscow.

Down on the pitch, Ziyech had made it to the corner and gone to his knees and found the camera and done it, the wink, the one that went round the planet after Spain. And then they hit him.

Sofyan got there first off a sprint from halfway and took him clean off his feet. Boutaïb went in on his knees beside them. En-Nesyri had Ziyech’s face in both hands, roaring into it.

”YOU BEAUTIFUL MAN! WE’RE IN THE QUARTERS!”

Bounou was coming the length of the pitch, 80 yards from his own goal, arms already up. Benatia stood over the heap of them and jabbed one finger down at the turf.

”This grass! This grass! We take it back!” he screamed at the silent side of the ground.

And the red end came apart. 30,000 of them, the diaspora, my 40 from South London, drums going, flags going, red smoke climbing into the floodlights.

”TWO-NIL! TWO-NIL! YOU’RE GOING HOME!” hurled across at three silent sides of a stadium that had been a fortress an hour ago and was a graveyard now.

After the second, the ground turned on itself.

The РОССИЯ chant did not come back. Not once. Whole blocks of red and white were up out of their seats and streaming for the exits with 20 minutes still on the clock. Seats banged up behind them. CLACK. CLACK. CLACK. It sounded like slow applause for their own funeral.

And the ones who stayed had started to whistle their own, a low ugly wall of it rolling round three sides, at Zhirkov, at Cherchesov, at anyone in red and white who went near the ball. Behind the dugout a man was screaming himself hoarse at his own bench, purple with it, and not a soul told him to sit down.

The fortress was a wounded animal now, and it was turning on the men who had built it. It had got into the players too.

Dzyuba stood in the centre circle with his hands on his hips and his head hanging, a giant with nothing left to climb for. Golovin was screaming at a linesman about a throw-in that did not matter, at anything, because it was easier than looking up at the scoreboard.

On 85 minutes Russia went for the throat one last time, everyone forward for a corner, Akinfeev himself up on the edge of our box, throwing the last of the sink at us to save their tournament. It came to nothing, the way it had all night.

Bounou plucked it clean out of the air. THUP. He did not catch it and wait. He rolled it out low and flat in the same motion, and Achraf Hakimi was already gone.

60 yards of open Russian grass. One dead-legged defender turning to give chase, and 78,000 people up on their feet at once to watch it. He ate the ground alive, the ceiling of him off its leash, and knocked it past the last man. Now it was Achraf Hakimi bearing down on goal and Akinfeev scrambling back across his line to meet him.

He did not blast it. 19 years old, 60 yards on the break in a World Cup, and he had the ice in him to slow down, take the touch, sit Akinfeev down on the grass, and roll it into the empty net.

SWISH.

And Hakimi did not do a routine. He tore his shirt clean off over his head and ran, swinging it round his head like a lasso, a daft disbelieving grin splitting his face wide open, and not one of his team-mates could get near him.

”I LOVE THIS GAME! I LOVE THIS TEAM!” he bellowed up at the floodlights, at nobody, at everybody.

I had both hands flat on top of my head and I was laughing, a mad sound I could not hear over the din, laughing at a 19-year-old kid who had just kicked a country into the last 8 of a World Cup.

They caught him at the corner flag. Sofyan and Boutaïb got him down first and the rest came in on top, En-Nesyri, Ziyech, Nordin sprinting off the bench, Bounou yet again from his box. At the bottom of it Hakimi’s arm came up out of the pile with a fist on the end of it.

Benatia got there last, because on the way he had stopped to scream at his own back four to stay switched on, 3-0 up with 5 minutes left, because that is exactly who he is.

And up in the red the noise climbed and climbed.

”THE LAST EIGHT! WE’RE IN THE LAST EIGHT!” a lad hung half over the front rail howling it into the Moscow dark.

Somewhere at the far back of my skull there was a café, and a price, and a boy we probably could not have. I did not let it in. Not tonight. Tonight he belonged to a country, and to 30,000 people singing his name into a stadium with nobody left to stop them.

Russia had one last go, because you always do, and Smolov stole half a yard in the box in the 89th and got a shot away. Bounou came off his line and swallowed it whole. THUMP. He lay across it and would not let it go.

His clean sheet. He was not giving it up in the last minute of the loudest night of his life.

Four minutes of added time went up on the board. Half the ground had already gone home, and the four minutes meant nothing, and everyone left in Moscow knew it. I stood on that white line and watched the clock run down on the impossible, on 32 years of waiting, on a country a whistle away from somewhere it had never been.

The old man high in the red corner had his cap off and his face turned up into the floodlights, tears running down it. My 40 from South London had the bedsheet stretched flat over the rail, SELHURST ON TOUR, at a World Cup.

Benatia was still barking at his back four to hold the line one more time. ”Concentrate! One more clearance!” Because that is who he is, in the 93rd minute of a game long won.

And then the referee looked at his watch, and put the whistle to his lips, and blew it.

PHEEP. PHEEP. PHEEEEEEEP.

”WE DID IT! WE ACTUALLY DID IT!” Boussoufa screamed, and folded straight onto the turf where he stood.

The bench went past me in a wall of tracksuits, water bottles going up into the floodlights, and I was swallowed in the middle of them before I could take a breath.

Full-time. Morocco 3, Russia 0. On the grass Portugal robbed us on.