Glory Of The Football Manager System

Benatia found me last.

My captain. The man who could not jump. The man I dropped for the biggest match of his life, who ran my back line for 90 minutes from a touchline in a bib and lost his voice for a team he was not playing in.

He came over slow, on the legs that cost him his place, and did not hug me. He took my hand and shook it once, hard, and held my eye, and behind him the team was still down on the turf.

”You were right. To leave me out. You were right, and I was angry, and you were right.” He did not let go. ”That is a hard thing for a captain to say. So I say it one time. You built this. These boys nobody wanted. You.”

I have been given a lot in this game. I am not sure I have been given anything better than that, from that man, on that grass.

And I let myself stand still for a second and understand the size of it.

This was not a Tuesday in the league. Marcus had told me the last match pulled a shade under 400 million pairs of eyes, and this one was bigger. There were more people watching me stand on this white line than live in most countries on the earth.

And every man on that grass had been left off somebody’s plane. Holland did not want Ziyech or the Amrabats. Half of them play their football in places the big scouts do not fly to. We came through the group of death and got robbed by Portugal and beat Spain anyway.

We put out the hosts in front of their own people. We ran the title contenders into the ground over 120 minutes and a shootout.

We earned every round of it the hard way. And now we were in a World Cup final, and 38,000 of my own were behind me calling me a traitor for it.

And up on the rail behind the bench, where he had stood the whole match without once sitting down, was the old man.

I do not know his name. A boy in 1986, somebody told me, the last time this country got out of a group, 32 years of waiting standing in one man. All match his knuckles had been white on that rail. He never sang and he never shouted.

He watched, the way you watch a thing you have waited a long time for.

He was not watching now. His face was in his hands and his shoulders were going, and a steward had a hand on his back.

I went over. I do not know why. I climbed the boards and reached over the rail and put my hand on his arm, and he lifted his face, 80 if he was a day, and said something in Arabic I did not understand.

Then he took my face in both of his old hands, hard, and pressed his thumbs into my cheeks and would not let go, and looked at me like he was trying to memorise me, the tears running into the white stubble on his jaw.

”I know,” I said. ”I know.”

And I climbed back down and could not see well again, and I did not wipe my eyes, because a manager does not.

She was coming down the aisle when I turned round.

Row 9. She had come across a continent for every one of these, stood in the wrong shoes for 120 minutes against Croatia, and here she came down the steps with her coat over her arm and her hair loose, and she did not run, because Emma does not run. She came, with her eyes already on me.

I met her at the barrier. And she did not say congratulations, because she knew better than anybody alive what tonight was. That it was the best thing I had done. That I had done it to my own country.

That there was a stand 40 yards away calling me Judas and meaning it, for the rest of my life. And that I stood in the middle of the greatest night of my career unable to feel one clean thing.

She got both hands on my face over the barrier. Cold hands. She always has cold hands. And she made me look at her.

”There he is,” she said.

That was all. That was the whole thing.

I got my arms round her and lifted her off the step, over the barrier, the way I had after Croatia, and held onto her while a stadium came apart around us, and into my neck, quiet, so only I would hear it, she said it.

”Your dad would not have known where to put himself.”

And I did not hold it together.

Because that is nearly the whole of my father, the little I have. I was 8 when he died. I have his hands on a steering wheel. I have the smell of a coat.

And I have one Sunday. Sat on his knee in a front room in Moss Side, the telly on, 11 men in white on it. His voice going somewhere over the top of my head.

Me understanding none of it, except that this was the most important thing in the world to the most important man in the world. And so it became the most important thing to me.

A song, a white shirt, and a Sunday. That is my dad.

And I had just spent 90 minutes taking that white shirt apart. On purpose. With everything I had. In front of 400 million people, with a team that was not even mine, and I had done it so well they carried me up into the Moscow sky for it.

For about 4 seconds, with my face in Emma’s hair and 78,000 people making the loudest noise I have ever stood inside of, I could not have told you, if you had put a gun to my head, whose side my dad would have thought I was on.

She held the back of my head and let me. She did not tell me it was alright, because she does not lie to me. She held on until I set her down, and wiped my face with her thumb, once, quick, so nobody would see.

”Go on,” she said. ”Go and be with them. I will find you after.”

But I did not go straight back.

I turned round first, because you should always look at the thing you have done, and I made myself look at the away end one more time.

And the hate had gone out of it.

The hate does not last, because underneath it was only ever grief, and the grief was coming now. The singing had stopped. The man with the belly and the shirt was not screaming any more. He had his arm round the boy in the Kane shirt and he was steering him up the steps, and he did not look back.

Somebody in the away end tried it one more time, small and cracked. [”...it’s coming...”] Nobody took it up. It died in his throat, and that dying is a sound of its own.

38,000 of them turned toward the exits, filing up the concrete steps in a silence I could hear, and that is what a big away end gives you when it dies. Not quiet. The sound of quiet. A hole punched in the middle of all the noise.

And up through that hole, from near the back, came the last of a song.

One man, not ready to stop. Then a few around him. Going up the steps and singing it anyway, softer and softer as they climbed into the dark.

Three lions on a shirt.

I knew every word. I have known every word since before I could read.

And I knew that walk up those steps as well. I had walked it.

As a boy with my father’s hand on the back of my neck, both of us saying nothing, both of us knowing it was not our year again, and it was never going to be our year, and we loved it anyway, because loving it was the point and the winning was only ever a rumour.

They would hate me for years. From tonight I was the most hated man in England.

And some traitor part of me, the 8-year-old part, the part that still had a coat and a pair of hands and one Sunday in it, went up those steps into the dark with them. On the losing side. Where I had come from.

Singing my dad’s song under my breath, while behind me a continent that was not mine roared a joy I had built with my own 2 hands and could not quite let myself hold.

A young lad, 20 maybe, 3 lions on his chest, stopped halfway up the steps and looked back down at the pitch. At me.

He did not sneer. He did not swear.

He nodded. Once.

Then he went up into the dark and took the song with him, and I stood on my white line with a World Cup final behind me and my father 20 years gone, and I listened to it get quieter, and quieter, until I could not hear it any more.

Then I turned round, and I went back to my boys.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the Massage Chair.