Glory Of The Football Manager System

David Jones in the chair. And 4 of them, 2 either side, which they do not do. Sky do not sit 4 pundits down at 8 in the morning for the day after a semi-final, and I knew the size of it before a word was said, the same way I had known it the last time.

Carragher on the left, already forward on his elbows, and he did not have the grin this time. Neville next to him, sat back, arms folded. Keane on the right, looking like a man who has been kept from his breakfast. And on the end, in a dark polo, Henry.

”We have to start,” Jones said, ”with the manager.”

”Which one?” said Keane.

And that was the whole morning, right there in 2 words, and even Jones almost smiled.

They ran a bit of it. Not the goals.

They ran a clip of me on the touchline, not singing, jaw set, hands behind my back while 38,000 England fans sang the anthem at me, and then they cut to me on the white line at the final whistle not moving while my bench emptied round me, and then they let it sit.

Then they ran the flash interview, the one I had already had to watch off my own phone, except now it was 40 feet wide behind David Jones’s head.

”I was hired by Morocco to win a football match. I have won it. If that hurts people back home, I understand it, and I will carry it. But I would be no use to those players, or to anybody, if I did my job by halves. I did my job.”

My own room went quiet. The room on the television went quiet too. Jones let it hang the way they do.

”I did my job,” Jones said. ”Right. Danny Walsh. English. Manchester. And last night he knocked England out of a World Cup. Jamie.”

Carragher went, but slow, for him. ”I’ve thought about this all night and I still don’t know how I feel, and I’ll be honest about that, which is more than half of Twitter’s doing this morning.” He spread his hands. ”As a football man? It’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen a British coach do.

”As an England fan? Something in my stomach doesn’t like it, and I’m not proud of that, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend it isn’t there.”

”Go on,” Jones said.

”He’s ours. That’s the thing. He’s one of ours, off our streets, and he did that to us, and there’s a bit of you that goes, how could you. I know it’s not rational. He doesn’t work for us. We didn’t want him. But there it is.”

Neville came in from the side, flat, not moving. ”You’ve just answered your own question, though, Jamie.”

”Go on.”

”We didn’t want him.” Neville let it sit. ”That’s the whole story. That’s the only story. Everything else is noise.”

And he got up.

He does not get up much. When Neville gets up it is because he has decided he is going to be right about something and he wants his hands free to do it.

He went to the screen.

”Let’s do the FA first, because everybody at home is angry at the wrong person this morning.” He pulled up a graphic, a list.

”The season that has just ended. Crystal Palace. Second in the Premier League. Won the League Cup. Won the FA Cup. Won the Europa League. A treble, at a club that had never won a domestic trophy in its history, in one season, under him.”

He tapped the name.

”And when England picked a squad for this tournament, they looked at that, and they looked at the players he’d made, Wan-Bissaka, Tarkowski, all of them, and do you know how many of them went?”

”None,” said Carragher.

”None. Not one. They had the best young English coach of his generation sat in front of them, doing the most remarkable job in the league, and they let Morocco walk in and take him, and then they picked not one of his players.” Neville turned round from the screen.

”And now he’s in a World Cup final and we’re at home. Do not be angry at Danny Walsh this morning. Be angry at the men who let this happen. This is on the FA. All of it.”

I did not feel vindicated, which surprised me. I had wanted somebody to say that for 6 weeks. And when Gary Neville said it to 3 million people on a Sunday morning, I just felt tired, because it did not put one Palace player on a plane that had already gone.

”And before we leave him,” Neville said, still on his feet, ”look at what he actually did last night, because I don’t think it’s landed yet.” He pulled the team sheet up on the screen. ”He made 6 changes for a World Cup semi-final. 6. He dropped his captain.

”He started a goalkeeper who’d sat on the bench the whole tournament and got jeered by the away end for it. He also gave a 21-year-old his first start, in this, against Harry Kane.”

”That’s madness,” Carragher said. ”On paper.”

”On paper it’s madness. Any other manager in world football plays his big names in a semi-final and dies with them. He looked at 11 tired bodies and he trusted the reserves, the ones nobody rates, and told them to run.” Neville turned round. ”And they ran England into the ground.

”That is not luck, Jamie. That is a man who knows exactly what he has got and is not frightened to use it.”

”Right,” Jones said. ”Then let’s talk about the other one. Because it’s a hard morning to be Gareth Southgate.”

And that is where it got bad, and I did not enjoy it, and I want that on the record too.

Keane went first, because Keane always goes first when there is a hard thing to say and everybody else is deciding whether to say it.

”He bottled it.”

”Roy.”

”He bottled it. I’m not going to dress it up.” Keane had not moved in his chair. ”Easiest route to a final anybody’s had in 50 years. Tunisia. Panama. A Belgium reserve team.

”He gets 1-0 up in a World Cup semi-final, and what does he do? He takes off a forward and puts a defender on. Then he does it again. He’s sat on a 1-0 lead with 40 minutes to go against a team that runs, and he’s invited them onto him, and they’ve come, and they’ve buried him.

”That’s not unlucky. That’s a man who didn’t think he could win, so he tried not to lose.”

Neville was back at the screen, and he had the possession numbers up. ”The stats back it, Roy. Look at this. After they equalise, England have the ball for a fraction of the game. They stop playing.

”He’s got 5 defenders and a holding midfielder on and Harry Kane dropping into his own half looking for a touch. They took their own best weapon, set-pieces, off the pitch, because you can’t aim a corner at nobody.”

”It’s the same story,” Keane said. ”It’s the Euro all over again. It’s every big game. He goes ahead and he shuts up shop and he loses. When are we going to stop being surprised by it?”

And then Henry sat forward, and the studio went quiet on its own, the way it does when he does that.

”Can I be fair to him for a moment,” Henry said. ”Because it is easy this morning.”

Jones nodded.

”He did not have Walsh’s players. Remember that. He had a squad picked for him by an association that does not know what it is doing, and he did the thing that squad was built to do, which is grind out results and not concede.

”It is not a stupid plan. It is a plan for a manager who does not trust what he has.” He turned his hand over.

”The tragedy is he was right not to trust it, and he still lost, because on the other touchline there was a man who trusted 11 players nobody wanted, and asked them to run, and they ran until they were sick.”

Nobody said anything.

”That is the difference,” Henry said. ”It is not tactics. Both men can see a pitch. One of them was afraid, and one of them was not, and last night the whole world watched what fear costs you when the other man has none.”

And I thought about Gareth Southgate crossing that grass with his hand out while his tournament burned, and taking the one thing that could have cut me and leaving it on the floor.

And I did not feel one ounce of what a man is supposed to feel when the country is watching his rival get taken apart on the telly.

I felt for him. He is a good man who was afraid, and there are worse things to be, and the men who should be ashamed this morning were sat in a boardroom in London, not a dugout in Moscow.

”And the players?” Jones said.