Glory Of The Football Manager System

God, the noise.

I heard it coming before it got to me.

The top tier goes first. It always goes first. They are up over the goal and they see the whole of the net before anybody down at grass level can.

So I was stood on that white line on my own, in the last quiet place left in Moscow, and I watched 18,000 people at the far end of a stadium come up out of their seats with no sound on them at all.

A wave going up a beach with the volume off.

Then the tier under them. Then the one under that.

It came down the bowl and across the grass towards me, row by row, and I could see it moving, and I could not hear one thing.

Half a second.

That is how long I had.

Then it hit.

KRAK.

That is the first of it. Not a roar. A crack, like ice going on a pond, like a tree coming down, 40,000 mouths opening inside the same quarter of a second.

And then the wall arrives behind it.

RRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

And I cannot write it down. I have tried, for 8 years, and it cannot be done, because it is not one sound.

40,000 people do not make a sound. They make 40,000 sounds, and every one of them gets to you at once.

Men roaring flat out with their heads back. Women shrieking. Drums, boom boom boom boom. Air horns, paaaarp, and more of them than I knew were in the ground. Seats banging up, clack clack clack clack, a whole tier of them.

A bloke 3 feet behind me making a noise I have only ever heard come out of an animal.

lu-lu-lu-lu-lu-lu-lu-lu.

And over the top of the whole lot of it, riding it, the women in the upper tier. Hundreds of them. Then thousands. That sound that nothing else in football makes.

And then, underneath, holding all of it up, the low one.

The bass. The one you do not hear at all.

You feel that one in the floor of your chest and in your back teeth and in the soles of your feet through the studs, and it does not stop, and it does not stop, and it does not stop.

Mustapha was 6 inches from my ear screaming with everything he had and I could not hear a word of it.

Crk. Crk. Crkkk.

The stand was moving.

I want that written down because nobody believes me. The concrete was moving.

Dust came off the roof beams and drifted down through the floodlights. Somebody’s phone came out of the upper tier and turned over and over in the light and I lost it in the crowd.

40,000 people were jumping in the same rhythm and the whole east side of the Luzhniki was going up and down like a chest breathing.

”YEEEEEESSSSSS.”

That was me.

I do not remember opening my mouth. I have watched the footage back 400 times since and there is a man on that touchline with his head thrown back and both fists in the air and his mouth wide open, screaming into nothing, and it is me, and I have no memory of it whatsoever.

”GET IN! GET IN, GET IN.”

I was on my knees on the paint.

I do not know how I got there.

And the bench came off like the thing was on fire.

BANG. The dugout roof. BANG BANG BANG. Somebody put a boot through a plastic chair and it went over sideways and nobody stopped for it. The subs went first, the ones who had sat on their hands for 2 hours, vaulting the barrier with their tracksuits half off.

Then the staff.

Marcus, holding a laptop, still holding the laptop, running 60 yards down a World Cup pitch clutching it to his chest like a baby.

Rebecca with a strapping roll bouncing out of her pocket, gone in the mud, never found.

Bray, who has stood next to me for a hundred nights and never once shown me his face doing that.

And Mustapha. 54 years old, 2 stone overweight, a man I have never once seen run for anything, sprinting the full length of that touchline with his tie over his shoulder and his arms already out, howling, and he did not stop for 60 yards, and he hit that pile of bodies like a wave hitting a harbour wall.

”YALLAH! YALLAAAAAH!”

And while all that was going on, the referee walked to the goal and pulled the ball out of the back of the net himself.

shhk.

The only sound in that stadium that nobody on earth heard. He tucked it under his arm and he left.

Nobody watched him go. Not one soul in 80,000. He had just decided who goes to a World Cup semi-final and he went down that tunnel like a man clocking off a shift, and I have thought about it since, and I do not know a lonelier job on this earth.

And in the middle of that pile, at the bottom of it, under all of them, was my goalkeeper.

He had got there first. He had been the nearest man and he had gone to the boy and put his forehead on his and lifted his face up out of the mud, and then 10 of them had landed on top of the pair of them and buried him.

So they dug him out.

Saïss got a fistful of his shirt on one working leg. Ziyech got the other side. They hauled Yassine Bounou up out of that heap by the armpits with the mud running off him, and he came up out of the bottom of it with his gloves gone and his face streaming, and they put him on their shoulders.

The green end came apart.

”YA-SSINE BOU-NOU!” clap-clap. ”YA-SSINE BOU-NOU!” clap-clap.

40,000 people sang his name until the sound went ragged and broke.

boom boom boom boom boom.

The drums behind the far goal had lost every scrap of rhythm they ever had. It was not a beat any more. It was just men hitting things.

Hsss. A flare went up in the green. Then 20 of them.

And Michael Steele, who has coached goalkeepers for 26 years and screamed STAY BIG, YASSINE at that man from a white line in 5 stadiums across this country, stood on his own on the edge of the technical area and did not move a muscle.

He was not celebrating. He was watching him go up on those shoulders with both hands over his mouth like a man watching a house burn.

I put an arm round him and he said one word into my shoulder and I did not catch it.

Then somebody hit me from behind and I went down.

Whumpf.

Flat. Face-first. Mud in my mouth, and I did not care, and I was laughing, and I could not get up because there were 3 of them on top of me and one of them was En-Nesyri’s uncle, who I had never met in my life.

Hands under my arms. Hauled me up.

”BOSS! BOSS!”

Ziyech had me by both sides of the head and he was screaming into my face from 4 inches away, tears and snot and mud all over him, and I could not make out one word.

I screamed something back. I do not know what.

He hugged me so hard I felt something go in my ribs and I have never once complained about it.

Then Mustapha got both hands round the back of my skull and put his forehead on mine and shouted, and shouted, and shouted, and I heard exactly one word of it.

”Casablanca.”

And I was crying.

I do not know when that started. I did not feel it start. My face was wet and my chest was going and I stood in the middle of 40,000 people in a stadium in Moscow with an assistant coach’s forehead against mine and I have never been so far outside my own body.

BANG BANG BANG. Somebody was still hammering the dugout roof and there was nobody left on the bench to hammer it.

And then the big screen showed it again.

40,000 people watched Youssef En-Nesyri hit that ball a second time, 40 feet high on a screen at the end of a stadium, in slow motion. They saw the glove get to it. They saw the post.

And 40,000 people who had been screaming solid for 5 minutes found some more.

RRRAAAAAAAAAAAA.

Hoarse now. Torn at the edges. They stood there and roared at a television showing them a thing that had already happened, and they meant every bit of it.

The screen showed it 3 times. The ground came apart 3 times. And every time, the checks in the other half of that bowl had to stand there and watch it with them.

It went on for 4 minutes.

Nobody left. Nobody sat.

”DI-ma Magh-RIB!” CLAP. ”DI-ma Magh-RIB!” CLAP. ”DI-ma Magh-RIB!” CLAP.

They would not stop singing and they would not stop and they would not stop, and there is a moment where you understand that these people are not going home, that the stewards are going to have to switch the lights off on them, that they have waited their whole lives for this and they are not handing it back.

And that is when the cold came.

I turned round and Mateo Kovačić was stood there.

He had come across 60 yards of that pitch to find me. Through his own dead teammates, through the flags, through the pile, through all of it, and he was crying, and it was not the same crying, and the noise did not stop for him.

That is the thing. The noise did not stop.

40,000 people were singing my keeper’s name and this boy stood in front of me in a white shirt with his whole tournament finished and he had to shout to be heard.

”GO AND WIN IT, BOSS!”

His voice went on the second word.

Then he was gone, back into the wreckage, and I stood in the middle of the loudest thing that has ever happened to me and felt the floor drop out of the bottom of it.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the Massage Chair.