Glory Of The Football Manager System

”And the players?” Jones said.

Carragher blew out his cheeks. ”Carried. Half that team was carried. The country wanted a golden generation and when a team of nobodies came at them head-on and fought, they hid. That’s the truth and the fans know it.”

”The plan let some of them down, Jamie,” Henry said. ”Do not put on the players what belongs on the men above them. Kane had one chance and his manager had already taken the game away from him by then.” He shrugged.

”But yes. On the night, they were second best to a squad that on paper should not be able to lace their boots. That will take some of them years to get over. Some of them never will.”

Jones turned to the camera, and I knew what was coming because they always do it at the end.

”So the last word. He’s from Manchester. He’s got a World Cup final in 5 days. What do we call a manager who does what he just did with what he just had?”

And Carragher, who had been quiet, came alive.

”I’ll tell you what I’ve been calling him since about midnight.” He leaned in. ”He takes players nobody wants, players other clubs have thrown out, kids who’ve been told they’re not good enough, and he turns them into a team that beats England in a World Cup semi-final. He builds them. From nothing. Out of parts everybody else binned.”

”So what is he,” Jones said.

”He’s the Architect.”

And Keane, deadpan, not looking up: ”It’s better than what they’re calling him in the other half of the country.”

And the studio laughed, all of them, even Neville.

And I sat on the edge of a hotel bed in Moscow and watched 4 men I had grown up watching on that exact programme give me a name I did not ask for and was not sure I wanted.

Because a lad from Moss Side does not know where to put himself when Jamie Carragher calls him the Architect on the telly.

I turned it off.

And the phone, which had not stopped, went once more, on the duvet, and it was not a number.

MUM.

I answered on the second ring, because I do not care if the world has ended. You pick up the phone to your mother.

She did not say hello. She did not say a word about any of it.

”You’ve not eaten.”

”Mum.”

”I can hear it. You’ve had a coffee and nothing else and you’ve been on that phone.” A pause. Then, down the line, the click and the rising roar of a kettle, because she has never had a conversation in her life without putting one on. ”I watched it again.”

”You watched it.”

”All of it. Every minute. The end went on for about a fortnight.” Another pause. ”There’s people saying terrible things about you, love. I’ve seen. Your auntie Pat sent me one and I told her to take it down and not be so daft.”

”I know, Mum. It’s alright.”

”It’s not alright, but you’ll not let it in, because I didn’t raise you to.” And then, quieter, the nearest she comes to it: ”Your dad would have been beside himself. He wouldn’t have known which way to face. His team and his lad.” A breath.

”He’d have watched it 3 times and said nothing and gone the whole next week without telling a soul, and been fit to burst the entire time. That’s what he’d have done.”

I could not say anything to that. She let me not say it.

”Have you eaten,” she said again, and it was not a question this time, it was her telling me she loved me the only way she has ever known how to say it.

”I’ll eat, Mum.”

”Good lad.”

And she was gone, because she does not do goodbyes either.

And I sat there holding a dead phone and I could see him, my dad, doing exactly what she said, watching it 3 times in a locked front room and telling nobody and being fit to burst. And I had to put the phone down and sit with that for a bit.

Then the phone buzzed once more, and it was Sarah.

No message. Sarah does not do messages. She has communicated in team sheets since she was 11 years old, and she still does. Just a photograph.

A team sheet, written out in her own hand in a school exercise book. The Palace side for this afternoon.

Because that is the other thing nobody remembers on a morning like this. The world does not stop for you.

2,000 miles away it was a Sunday in July, and my football club had a pre-season friendly at 3 o’clock, against Norwich, who everybody has tipped to walk the Championship this year, and I was not going to be there, because I was in Moscow trying to win a World Cup.

I read her team down the phone. And I saw it.

I saw the shape I have been drilling into them for a year, the back 4 pushed high, Connor Blake off the left the way I like it, 2 of the youth boys on the bench that I had told her to trust.

My football, on a Beckenham pitch, without me, picked by a woman who has never once played the game and understands it better than half the men who have.

She had put no words with it. She never does. She did not need to.

The football was travelling. That is what the team sheet said. Whatever happens this afternoon, the thing I built is still standing, a whole continent away, and it does not need me in the room to hold its shape.

I sent her back one word. Good. Which from me, to Sarah, is a team talk.

Emma found me there.

She came in with 2 coffees and yesterday’s mascara still not quite gone, and she did not ask if I was alright, because she does not ask questions she knows the answer to. She put a coffee in my hand and sat down next to me on the edge of the bed and looked at the blank telly.

”They’re calling you the Architect,” she said.

”I heard.”

”It’s better than what they’re calling you on the other side.”

”That’s what Keane said.”

”Then Keane’s right.” She drank her coffee. ”You know what Marcus told me downstairs? He’s had the number for the final. The projection.” She said it into her cup, not looking at me. ”The semi did about 400 million. The final’s going to be around 4 billion.”

I did not say anything.

”4 billion, Danny. Half the people alive. Watching one football match.” She turned and looked at me then. ”Watching you.”

And there it is. That is the thing I carried out of that room and did not put down again until it was over.

4 billion people. And every one of them about to watch whether a lad off a settee in Moss Side can do the one thing he has dreamed of since before he could read.

The thing his father dreamed of, and never got, and died 20 years short of, in the wrong shirt, and I would win it in green and red instead of white and it would still be his, it would be his more than anything I have ever done.

The thing a nation has waited 32 years for, standing in an old man on a rail with his hands shaking.

The thing a whole continent has never, not once, in the entire history of the game, been allowed to have.

All of it. Stacked up on one man, in one match, in front of half the world, in 5 days.

Emma took my hand off my knee and held it in both of hers, the way she does.

”You wanted this,” she said. ”You’ve wanted this your whole life. So don’t you dare stand there and be frightened of it now.”

And I looked at her, and I felt the last of the noise go quiet. The socials and the shirt-burners and the panel and the name I did not choose, all of it.

And underneath it there was only what has always been there, the cold clean familiar pull that turns up when somebody points me at a mountain and says it cannot be climbed.

”Right,” I said, and I stood up. ”What time’s the other semi?”

Emma looked at me, and then she laughed, properly, for the first time all morning, because she knows me, and she knew exactly where I had just gone.

”Tonight,” she said. ”Saint Petersburg. France and Belgium.”

”Get Marcus up here with the laptop and whatever he’s got on both of them. And ring down for some food, or my mother will have me.” I was already up, hunting a clean shirt out of the case.

Because in about 12 hours, in Saint Petersburg, one of those 2 teams was going to become the last thing between all of that and a lad off a settee, and I was going to sit on this bed and watch every minute of it and start taking it to pieces before the whistle had even gone.

You do not stand at the bottom of a mountain and be frightened of it.

You go and learn every rock on it. Then you climb.

By the time I put my head down that night, I would know whose face was waiting for me on the top.

And then I was going to go up there and take it.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the Massage Chair.