Glory Of The Football Manager System

By 8 that night I would know the name of the thing that was going to try to end us, and I could not make myself eat a thing until I did.

That is where the day had left me.

A World Cup final, 4 days off, the biggest match of my life and of every life in that squad, and I did not even know yet who we were playing, because the last 2 teams standing on the other side of the draw did not kick off in Saint Petersburg until the evening.

France, or Belgium. One of them was coming for us. And I had a whole afternoon to sit in a hotel room in Moscow and wait to find out which monster it would be.

So I did the only thing that has ever settled me. I went looking for football.

The club had a feed running for the analysts, so Marcus patched it through to us off the back of it, and 2,000 miles from Beckenham I watched my own football club kick off its pre-season on a laptop in a Moscow hotel room.

Against Norwich. A friendly. It meant nothing to a living soul except me.

The picture was a club camera on a gantry, one angle, the sound thin out of the speaker. A scatter of a pre-season crowd, a few rows on a warm Sunday, somebody’s kid banging a drum behind the goal, a bloke near the camera going he’s a mile off, ref, he’s a mile off.

My World Cup lads were with me or with their own countries. Kovačić was somewhere in a Croatia shirt still getting over the fact I had knocked him out of the thing 5 days before. Zaha was on a beach. The senior treble-winners I had given the summer off to were not going to lace a boot in July.

So the team sheet was my new signings, my old heads and my kids, which is exactly why I had the game on. A pre-season friendly is a shop window and a laboratory at once. You are not trying to win it. You are trying to look at people.

And I looked.

Grealish started. My £10m Villa boy, the one I had chased for a year and finally got on the right bad Monday, drifting in off the left with the ball glued to his laces like it owed him money.

Højbjerg alongside Eze in the middle, the Dane I had signed off Southampton on Thursday, already doing the running he was bought to do. James Rodríguez pulling the strings behind them. Connor Blake off the other flank, 18, the one Pato keeps promising a Lamborghini he will never buy him.

And old Benteke up top leading it, with Navas and Townsend for the legs, and Fletcher, my third keeper, a 19-year-old, getting a proper 90 minutes behind them.

New money, old heads, kids. And every one of them playing the exact same football.

That is the thing I have built at that club that nobody claps for. It is not the first 11. It is that a £10m signing and a 19-year-old off the 23s and a 33-year-old veteran all move the same way, because the way is the thing, not the man.

I drew that shape. I stood in a cold room at Beckenham drilling it into them until they could do it in their sleep, and here they were doing it in their sleep, without me, while I sat in Russia.

The back 4 shoved up to the halfway line, squeezing the pitch down to nothing. The midfield always showing for it, never hiding, always an angle. And the second Norwich gave it away, the whole team flew forward at once.

And Norwich are not nobody. They are the side the country has tipped to walk the Championship this year, a proper outfit, and my lot were knocking it round them 20 passes at a time, Norwich chasing shadows in their own half.

Then Norwich scored anyway, because football laughs at you. 20 minutes, a set-piece, a big lad up at the back post, and the away corner lifted, [yaaay], tinny out of a laptop, and it still put a hole in my stomach.

I leaned in. Because this was the bit that mattered, the first wobble, and a caretaker on the line who has never managed a senior game in her life.

Sarah did not move.

She did not touch it. She let them settle. She trusted the shape, because she knew what I knew, that we were miles better than Norwich and a set-piece is a liar.

And 8 minutes later Rodríguez slid it wide and Blake came in off that left onto his right foot, and the picture picked that exact second to freeze, [skhh-k-k], the ball a white smear halfway to the net, and I sat there with the whole thing hanging on a frozen screen.

It caught. Net bulging. 1-1. And I was up off the bed on my own in a Moscow hotel room with my fist in the air like it had won us something.

Then Grealish took over.

He got the second himself before half-time, cutting in off that left and bending it far post, the pace of it a level above everything else on the pitch, a Premier League player toying with a Championship one. 2-1. And I sat there and let myself enjoy, for a minute, the fact that he was mine.

At the break Sarah changed half the team, the way you do in a friendly, when the whole point is to get minutes into everybody who travelled. Off went Grealish and Benteke and Navas to a warm hand from the little crowd.

And on came my boys.

Not new signings. Mine. Olise, Tyrick Mitchell, Semenyo, the ones I had brought up out of that same Portakabin when I was still the under-18s man a year and a lifetime ago. These are not kids I inherited. These are kids I raised. I know their mothers’ names.

I know which of them cried when I dropped them and which of them sulked, and I know which ones ran through the pain last season when I asked them to.

Because they are the reason I am here at all.

When we went on those cup runs, the ones that ended in an FA Cup final and a Carabao Cup final, it was these boys doing the legs in the early rounds, on the cold Tuesday nights, so my seniors were fresh to go and win the things at the end.

The kids got us there. The men finished it. That was the whole plan, and it worked, and none of them got crushed under it.

And now here they were, in a friendly that meant nothing, playing the exact same football, and not dropping the level by an inch.

Semenyo got a third, bundling in a cross at the back post, all elbows and want.

And Olise ran the whole second half.

That boy. There is an ease to him that you cannot teach, a way of getting a yard without seeming to move, and I have known it since he was 16 in that Portakabin.

He is the best I have got coming, better than any of them, and he spent 45 minutes against a Championship side making it look like a warm-down. He is the one who keeps me up at night in the good way. The one the big clubs are going to come for.

Then, 10 minutes from the end, Brandon Aviero, 17, the youngest of my babies, dropped a shoulder in the box and put a pass through the eye of a needle, and Blake had his second.

4-1. Palace 4, Norwich 1. The side everybody fancies for the Championship, taken apart by my new signings and then by the boys I raised, on a Sunday, without me.

It was a friendly. It meant nothing. And it meant everything, because it meant the thing I built holds its shape without me in the room, run by the right woman, while I sat 2,000 miles away trying to win a World Cup.

My phone went on the duvet. Marcus, from down the hall, on the same feed.

Grealish is going to be a problem for the whole league. And Blake got 2. That’s your left side sorted for 10 years, gaffer.

Then a second, straight under it.

And you know who’s waiting for that lot in August, don’t you.

I knew. I had let myself not think about it, but I knew.

We won the Europa League last season. And the side that wins the Champions League plays the side that wins the Europa League, one match, in August, for the Super Cup. The team that won the Champions League this year was Real Madrid. Kovačić and James’ old mob.

The ones who rang him all tournament, the ones who would strip half my squad in a week if I let them.

Real Madrid. Waiting for my kids the second I got home.

And that thought led straight to the one that had been nagging me for a fortnight, watching Wan-Bissaka not play in this friendly, sat at home with his phone going off the hook.

Aaron is going to be the best full-back in the country inside 2 years. But I have one of him. One.

If he turns an ankle in training the week before Real Madrid, my right side is a 19-year-old and a prayer, and Real Madrid do not care how much promise a boy has, they will pour their young signing Vinícius down that flank until it caves in.

You do not go into a season with one of a player that good and no cover. That is not being brave, that is being stupid, and I have watched too many clubs lose a season to an X-ray in September.

So I need a right-back. A proper one, a starter in his own right, one who makes Aaron better by breathing on his neck. And I had known for weeks who it was. Hakimi, if I could get the FIFA mess untangled and prise him loose.

Theo Hernández if I could not, sat there as the fallback with his own engine and his own end product.

One of those 2 was going to be a Palace player before that Super Cup, or I was not doing my job. I made a note to ring Dougie in the morning, and put it away, because I had a France game to watch and a final to win first, and you climb one mountain at a time.

One mountain at a time. But I could see it back there behind the one I was on, a bigger one, its top lost in the cloud. And the part of me that has never in its life been able to leave a mountain alone was glad of it.

Then the whistle went at Beckenham, and the laptop went quiet, and I had nothing left to hide behind.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus and Kostas_Gounakis for the support.