Glory Of The Football Manager System

[tok.] A bottle came down out of the top tier and bounced off the advertising boards by my feet.

The man with the belly had his hands cupped round his mouth now, leading it, the veins in his neck up. [”JUDAS! JUDAS! JUDAS!”] [STOMP. STOMP. STOMP.]

And I stood and I took it, all of it, because I had earned every note.

Understand what this was to them. The softest road to a World Cup final an England team had been handed in 52 years, and they knew it. Tunisia. Panama. A Belgium second string. Colombia on penalties. Sweden.

Not one team in that run that could hurt you, and they had struggled with half of them anyway, and still a whole country let itself believe, because the draw opened up and the song said it was coming home.

And then, in the one match where somebody put a team in front of them that came head-on, that fought, that ran, they froze. They went in their shell in the 47th minute and tried to hold what they had, and we took it off them.

That is why the hate ran so hard. It is one thing to be beaten. It is another to be beaten by nobodies, on the one night it counted, after the easiest run you will ever get, by one of your own.

So I let them sing it. I did not look away and I did not drop my head. A Manc on a white line with his own people calling him Judas. And then I turned my back on them, because behind me a continent was waiting, and it had earned its half of me the hard way.

[Lu.] One voice. [Lu-lu.] Then a second. [Lu-lu-lu-lu-lu-lu-lu!] Then thousands, that sound the women make climbing over the roar like birds going up off a fire, and I turned into it and the green end hit me in the face like an open oven.

And the stands were coming down onto the grass.

Not stewards. Not officials. Families.

The barriers opened at the front of the green end and they came down, the way I have only ever seen this team’s people do it. Mothers and wives and children flooding out onto a World Cup pitch to find their men.

And the whole thing stopped being a football match and became something older than that.

[”DI-ma Magh-RIB! DI-ma Magh-RIB!”] Not from one end now. From all of it, from the families on the grass, from the boys on their fathers’ shoulders, one country saying its own name over and over.

[Hsss.] A flare, close, the smoke rolling flat across the middle of the pitch. A woman in a headscarf reached Saïss and took his face in both hands.

A boy, no more than 6, came running across the middle swamped in a green shirt down past his knees, screaming a name, and Fajr turned and saw him and went down on his knees with his arms open.

And I saw Sofyan’s mother.

I knew her by now.

She has cleaned 3 houses a day for 20 years and she has never once missed a game. She came down out of that green end in her good coat and found her son.

He went to his knees in front of her and put his forehead against her the way he did after Croatia, and she held the back of his head with both hands.

Not quite Dutch. Not quite African. And his mother came 3,000 miles to hold his head on the grass of a World Cup.

And Munir lifted a child up over his head, and the child was wearing his gloves, the huge gloves flapping off the ends of a 5-year-old’s arms, and Munir was laughing and crying at once, and I had to look away from that one.

Then the players did the thing.

Most of them came together and walked as one to the green end, to the loudest, deepest part of it, and they went down.

And the green end saw it coming and the roar changed, went up an octave, [AAAAAAAAAAAH!], 40,000 people watching their sons put their faces on the grass for them. All at once. Foreheads to the turf, in the oldest thank-you there is.

I watched 11 men no big club had wanted put their faces on the grass in front of a continent, and I will not pretend what it did to me. I picked every one of them. I put Harit out there when a country said he was not ready.

And there they were, on their knees in a World Cup, thanking the people who crossed a continent to watch them do the impossible.

You cannot coach that. You can only find the men who have it, pick them when everybody with a microphone tells you not to, and get out of their way.

Sofyan came up off the turf and found me, straight through the families and the flares, and grabbed me by both shoulders, his face streaming and his eyes on fire.

”THEY WILL HAVE TO SAY MY NAME NOW.”

A boy told no by everybody who ever had the chance. And now a stadium full of people who would name their children after him were screaming a name Holland never wanted.

”They will, son,” I said. ”They will.”

Then he was gone, and I let it sit in me, because he was right, and there is a specific fury in the ones who were told no, and it had just poured itself out onto the biggest stage there is.

They came at me after that and I have lost the order of it.

Da Costa wrapped both arms round me and said nothing, which from Da Costa is a speech. Aït Bennasser, who strangled England’s one good midfielder for 90 minutes and will never get a headline, put his forehead against mine. Fellati leaned on me because his legs would not hold him.

Bouhaddouz found me, off his knees now, and could not speak. He had put one on the roof an hour ago and then buried the next one, and he stood there with his shirt off and clean tracks cut through the grime on his face. I got a hand round the back of his neck.

”You did not snatch at it,” I told him, into his ear, over the noise. ”An hour after you put one on the roof, you had ice in you. You know how many players never learn that in a career?”

He nodded into my shoulder. He did not need to talk.

And I went and found Harit myself, because I was never going to wait for that boy to come to me.

He was up now but on his own, a pocket of stillness in the chaos, 21 years old, looking at his own hands like he did not know whose they were. I got to him and he looked up and fell into me and shook.

Over his head I could see the whole thing, the families and the flares and 40,000 people, and a flare went up orange behind him and a drum was going and a mother ran past us both to reach her son, and I held the boy who scored the goal in the middle of all of it.

”You were the bravest man on that pitch,” I told him. ”When you are 40 and telling your grandkids. The gaffer said it, on the night.”

He nodded into my chest.

Then Nordin came and got him, because that is what Nordin does, hoisted him up onto his shoulders and carried him back into it, and the boy was laughing now, both fists up.

And the drummer with the split drum found a rhythm on it anyway, [boom, boom, boom-boom-boom], and 40,000 people put Harit’s name on top of it and threw it back up at him.