Glory Of The Football Manager System

3-2. 15 minutes from a World Cup semi-final. Morocco. Us.

The bench went up like a bomb.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Palms hammering the dugout roof, subs spilling onto the paint in a riot of green tracksuits, and Mustapha with both hands locked on my shoulders, shaking me like a snow globe.

”Fifteen minutes, Danny. Fifteen...”

”I know. I know. Get off...”

”Wallahi, fifteen minutes...”

And he was not saying it the way I would have said it. Tears standing in his eyes, voice gone somewhere I could not follow, because for him this was not fifteen minutes of a football match. He grew up on a street in Casablanca where they still talk about Mexico ’86 like scripture.

I grew up in Croydon.

I put my hand flat on his chest, pushed him back, and looked past his shoulder.

Dalić was off his seat. The fourth official was up with the board.

And I knew the way you know your own front door in the dark exactly whose number was coming.

My own lad pulled his tracksuit off over his head. 24 years old. Fresh. Legs like new rope in a game full of dead ones.

The card floated up the second he crossed the line.

[MATEO KOVAČIĆ. CA 168 / PA 174.]

I’d read that card a hundred times on my own training ground.

”Oh, you’re joking,” I said, to nobody. ”You are having a bloody laugh.”

Sofyan and El Ahmadi were bent double at halfway, hands on their shorts, lungs going like bellows.

”OI! Both of you! On him! Do not let him turn!”

Right call. Also like sending 2 dead men to run down a fresh horse.

Tk. First touch inside ninety seconds and El Ahmadi was a yard behind him and going nowhere and away down in the far corner a drum started.

I’d heard that drum all night. 3,000 of them wedged in behind the flags, and near the front a shirtless lad painted red and white to the belt, big flat drum strapped across his chest. He’d beaten that thing for 118 minutes. Through 3-1 down. Through 3-2. Didn’t stop when they lost the lead. Didn’t stop when we scored.

Some men are only there to make the noise, and they make it until they drop.

Now it was going faster.

Bmm. Bmm. Bmm-bmm-bmm.

”...and Croatia have found something. Mateo Kovačić, on for fourteen minutes, and suddenly they’ve got a heartbeat again.”

”He’s playing against his own manager, Guy.”

”...say that again?”

”Danny Walsh signed him in January in a loan. Twenty-five million in the summer. He’s stood on that touchline right now watching a player he bought take his own team apart.”

Every yard of it was me. The half-turn out of pressure. The hips. Head up early, before the pass is on. I drilled it into him on a wet Tuesday in Beckenham with Marcus Reid holding a laptop under an umbrella and the rain coming sideways off the Kent side.

He had it now. He had it forever.

Three rows behind our bench there was a bloke in a Zenit shirt. Russian. Not one reason on this earth to care walked in that night for a beer and a day out and somebody had draped a green-and-red flag over his shoulders, and he was up on his seat screaming himself hoarse in a language nobody near him understood, while four Mexicans in sombreros screamed it straight back at him.

By 115 minutes there was not a neutral left in the building.

Up on the rail at the back of the lower tier stood an old man in a green scarf. He had not sat down once. Not at kick-off, not at half time, not for 118 minutes.

He hadn’t come to celebrate. He’d come to watch.

118 minutes.

And Kovačić got it in the half space.

That patch of grass. The one I’d watched him make his own on a hundred grey mornings.

He settled it. Lifted his head.

And I knew what he could see, because it was the same picture I’d watched him pick out all spring.

”MATEO! NO!”

Screaming it like he was still mine. Like he could still hear his gaffer.

He didn’t rush. He never rushes.

He opened his body and clipped it, and I watched the ball come off his laces and climb and hang and start dropping towards the back post, and I knew exactly where it was going, because I had watched him land it on that sixpence a hundred times on my own pitch.

”AWAY!” Bounou, off his line. ”GET IT AWAY...”

Mandžukić was already moving.

32 years old. Dead on his feet. And still he found the half yard, still he came off the back of Saïss because being first to that ball is the one thing he has done every day of his working life.

He got there a heartbeat before Bounou set his feet.

He didn’t head it at goal. He headed it down, into the turf, so it kicked up over the dive and into the bottom corner.

Thwack.

Fmmp.

And then all hell came off the chain.

Mandžukić didn’t stop running. Sixty yards, dead legs, 120 minutes in them, and he sprinted arms wide, mouth open, straight down the touchline past our bench and went to his knees and slid ten feet with his fists in the air and his face turned up into the smoke.

And the entire Croatian bench came with him.

Every sub. Both fitness coaches.

The kit man in his tabard with a bag of bibs still in his fist. Twenty-odd men in white sprinting sixty yards down the paint and burying him. Six deep in front of the corner flag. Arms, legs, somebody’s boot in the air, and the 3,000 hanging over the barrier screaming down into it, reaching for anyone they could touch.

”IDEMOOOO! IDEMO, IDEMO...”

Their keeper came too.

Subašić ran eighty yards. From his own line, gloves and all, and threw himself on top of the pile like a man diving off a bridge.

Hsss. A flare. Then two more. Smoke rolling flat across the whole corner and the pile still moving inside it.

And Kovačić was in there.

I saw him go in. Four men grabbed him and threw him into the middle and he went under laughing screaming, both fists up and I could hear him from where I stood.

Because he’s a 24-year-old footballer who has just put his country into a World Cup semi-final, and there is not a man alive who doesn’t scream at that.

Not one. Not if he’s human.

Then somebody shoved somebody.

Saïss went first, dragging that cramped leg into twenty Croatians, roaring then Ziyech, then El Ahmadi hands on chests, forearms, shirts twisted in fists, and their kit man was shouting into Ziyech’s face with the bibs still in his hand, and the whole thing rolled up the touchline and slammed into our dugout.

”OI! OI! GET OFF HIM...”

I was in it before I knew I was in it. Both hands on my own captain’s chest, hauling backwards, three feet outside my area with the fourth official screaming in my ear.

Peep. Peeeeeep.

The referee came running with the card already out.

Yellow. Me.

”Take it,” I said, not even looking at him. ”Take it, I don’t care, get them apart...”

And I didn’t care. Not a bit. A caution in the ninety doesn’t carry into a shootout. It’s worth nothing after 120 minutes. It’s a free scream, every manager alive knows it, and I’d have taken ten of them right then.

Crk. Crk. Something came out of the green and skittered across the running track. A bottle. Then another. Then a wave of them.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.