Glory Of The Football Manager System

The Croatia plan came together on the pitch, and it was a cruel little thing, and I loved it.

I stuck one of our kids in a yellow bib and told him he was Modrić. Get on the ball. Boss it. Then I set Sofyan and Boussoufa on him in pairs, hunting him, herding him, never letting him turn, forcing him back the way he did not want to go.

We ran it an hour. By the end the kid in the bib was bent double, hands on knees, blowing hard.

”Encore,” I said.

He gawped at me like I had gone soft. Benatia was laughing. ”He thinks you are joking, gaffer.”

”Tell him Modrić will not be blowing after an hour. Tell him Modrić is 32, played 120 minutes on Sunday, and will still be jogging about when this lad is flat on his back. And tell him that is the whole point.”

That evening it was me and Bray and Marcus in the little analysis room the federation had thrown up for us, a laptop and a projector and three cold coffees, taking Croatia apart a frame at a time.

”Watch him here.” Marcus froze it on Modrić. ”Denmark let him turn. Every time. He turns, his head comes up, you’re dead.” He let it run, froze it again. ”Now watch when somebody actually gets tight to him. There. He plays it backwards. He does not force it. He is too clever to force it.”

”So we make backwards the only ball he’s got,” I said.

”Every time he touches it.”

Bray sat forward. ”It is a lot of running, gaffer. For everyone. 90 minutes of it, maybe more, against a side that is built to make you run.”

”I know it is.”

”And there’s a semi-final 4 days after, if we win.”

”If we win,” I said, ”they can run in that one too. No sense saving legs for a party you’ve not been invited to yet.”

He grinned. It is the kind of line he throws back at me most weeks. Felt good to hand it to him for once.

We do not out-pass Croatia. Nobody out-passes Croatia. Modrić and Rakitić will keep the ball off you until your legs turn to sand and your spirit goes with them.

So we would not chase the ball at all. We would chase the men. Make the two best midfielders in the tournament defend, turn, run backwards, cover ground they hate, over and over, until the class drained out of a pair of 30-year-old legs and the last quarter of an hour belonged to whoever had done the running.

A thin edge. Every edge we have ever had was thin. Thin is the whole of the trade.

Emma rang that night, before I had said hello.

”I’ve booked it. Thursday. Me and Jessica fly into Moscow Thursday, we’ll be there for Saturday, so you had better not lose or I’ve come a long way for nothing.”

”You’re coming with Finch?”

”She invited herself onto the flight. Danny, you have no notion what is going on out here. Your phone’s been off a week and she’s been stood in front of the whole avalanche of it on her own.”

”What avalanche?”

”A boot company want to dress you head to toe. A publisher wants a book.

There are film people. There is a club in Saudi Arabia after a conversation about something with a frightening number of noughts on the end of it. Jessica says if she doesn’t fly out and sit on you, you’ll sign something daft at three in the morning or turn down something you shouldn’t out of plain contrariness.”

”I don’t want any of it.”

”I know you don’t. That is the exact reason she is getting on a plane.” A beat. Her voice came down and went soft. ”And I miss you, you daft article. I’ve watched you on a telly for 8 weeks. I’d like to watch you from a seat, if that’s allowed.”

I am no use on a phone and she has always known it, so I did not say much back. But I sat a good while after she rang off, and something in the whole spinning business of it settled a little.

Emma coming Thursday. Emma in a seat on Saturday, telling me I need a haircut in front of the world. It is a small thing to balance a man’s sanity on. It has held so far.

Jessica Finch has been my agent since before Palace. Since a phone call out of a clear sky when I just got my A licence and deep into a caretaker job when I met her.

Sharp as a razor, does not indulge me for a second, and I would trust her with the lot of it. If Jessica was flying to Russia, it was because the noise had got loud enough to need a professional stood in front of it, and Jessica does not board a plane for a small noise.

That is the other face of a walking record. Somewhere out there is a version of me worth a great deal of money to a great many people, and it is not the version in this room fretting about a 32-year-old Croatian. Jessica minds that other Danny. Apparently it is a full-time job now. God help her.

The world would not lie down either.

Murals, Marcus said. Going up in Casablanca, in Rabat, further out than that. The sujood three storeys high on the gable end of a building. Bounou at full stretch, painted the size of a house.

For a lot of people out there, kids who had rarely once seen anyone who looked like them or prayed like them held up as the best of anything at all, this had stopped being football a while back. Marcus started to put it into words and then let it go, because some of it goes straight past words.

Then Sarah sent a photograph from home, and it caught me square in the chest.

A queue. Out the door at Selhurst, round the block, halfway down the high street. Season tickets for the new season. One line under it. ”Look at them.”

Palace had known since May they were in the Champions League. Won the Europa, finished second, two ways into it and never a shred of doubt about it.

But knowing a thing and feeling it are different animals, and somewhere between the fixtures coming out and the tickets going on sale, it had finally begun to feel real to them.

First time in 113 years. A club born before two world wars, never once in Europe’s biggest competition in all that time, and now the little club was going to walk out under those lights and stand for that anthem.

They were counting the sleeps to the group-stage draw, arguing over which giant they wanted out of the pot first, letting themselves dream out loud in a way that club has not dared to in a hundred years.

The transfers had them tied in knots, though, because none of them out there knew the half of what I knew.

The papers had Gnabry linked with a move, but no fee anyone could stand up, no buyer they were sure of, just a rumour with legs on it.

And the forums were split down the middle over it. Half of them certain I was about to flog the crown jewels for a song, the other half begging me not to.

Not one of them had the number. Not one of them knew it was already done, and to who, and for how much. That comes out when we choose to let it out, and not a day before.

Somebody had put ”In Walsh We Trust” under Sarah’s photo, the same line they had typed all summer. Three time zones off, for once, I did not think they had it wrong.

I turned in late, and the last thing I heard before I went under was a Voronezh kid knocking a ball off a wall out in the dark. Thump. Thump. Thump. The boy in the gloves, maybe. Maybe another one entirely.