Glory Of The Football Manager System

The last training session I ever took as manager of Morocco lasted 48 minutes and I spent 40 of them not looking at one man.

Saturday. Overcast, warm, a pitch on the edge of Moscow with a wind sock hanging dead on its pole and a helicopter somewhere a long way off, whup-whup-whup, going round and round because the whole world knew where we were.

There were 300 people at the fence. FIFA had said closed session. FIFA can say what it likes when a country decides to come and look at you.

Boom. Boom-boom. Boom. Somebody had a drum against the mesh. Somebody always has a drum.

Thwack. Thwack. Boots on dry grass and the ball going flat and fast, and 23 men breathing, and Mustapha somewhere behind the goal banging cones together to make a point about something.

We did nothing. That is what the last one is for.

20 minutes of keep-ball at half pace, some shape work, a few set-pieces. Then Steeley took the keepers away to the far goal.

And I let them finish with a game of one-touch that had the whole squad laughing by the end of it, because I have never once seen a team play well the day after a serious session.

Ziyech put 14 balls into the same square yard at the back post and did not miss once, and Saïss got on the end of 9 of them, and nobody said anything about why.

And in the corner of my eye the whole time, on the far side, my top scorer doing ball work with Rebecca standing 5 yards away with her arms folded.

Straight lines. Shooting. No turns.

I let it run to the end and then I said the thing I had been carrying since Thursday.

”Youssef. Rebecca. My room, 20 minutes.”

He got there first and stood up when I came in, and I told him to sit down, and he sat on the end of the bed with his hands between his knees like a lad outside a headmaster’s office.

Rebecca came in and shut the door with her back and stayed against it.

”Tell him,” I said.

She did not soften it. That is why I employ her.

”You have a tear in the adductor. Not a strain. A tear.” She said it to him, not to me. ”Straight lines are fine. Jumping is fine. Shooting is fine. Turning off that side at speed is what tore it and turning off that side at speed is what will finish it.

”If you start tomorrow you get an hour. If it is a bad hour you get 20 minutes. And when it goes, it will not be a twinge. It will be a bang and you will be on the floor and you will not walk off.”

Youssef En-Nesyri is 20 years old. He plays for Málaga, who finished bottom of Spain and got relegated with him in the team. Before this tournament nobody outside 2 countries could have picked him out of a queue.

He has 5 goals in this World Cup.

He listened to all of it and then he looked at me.

”Coach. Do you want me to say it, or do you want to say it?”

”Say what?”

”That you are going to play me anyway.”

Rebecca made a noise by the door.

”Danny.”

”I know.”

”Say it out loud then, because I want it said in this room.” She came off the door. ”If you start him he will not finish. That is not a risk. That is a fact with a clock on it.

”And there is a chance, a real one, that this ends his career at 20 years old, and I am not going to be the only person in this building who says that sentence.”

Nobody talked for a bit. Down the corridor somebody was hoovering, hnnnnnn, back and forward, back and forward.

”Youssef,” I said. ”Look at me. What does your mother say?”

That knocked him sideways. He blinked.

”She says do not be stupid,” he said. ”She rang last night. She said, you have 5 goals, you are 20, there will be another one.”

”She is right.”

”She is not right.” He said it flat. Not angry. He said it like a man reading a price off a tin. ”Coach, there is not another one. Ask Boussoufa. He is 33 and this is the first time and there will not be a second. Ask Benatia.

”Ask any man in this hotel over 30 what the next World Cup looks like for them.”

He put his hands flat on his knees.

”I have waited my whole life for tomorrow, and I have got an hour of it, and you are asking me if I want the hour.”

I have been in football since I was a boy and I have never had a conversation like it and I hope I never have one again.

”Right,” I said. ”Here is how it goes, and I am only saying it once.

”You start. You do not chase anything down the channel that is not on. You do not turn on that side unless you have to and you will know when you have to. And when I take you off, you come off.

”You do not argue, you do not wave me away, you do not do the thing where you point at the clock. I put the board up and you walk.”

”Yes, coach.”

”Say it back.”

”When you take me off, I come off.”

”Rebecca?”

She looked at the pair of us for a long moment.

”I want it in writing that I said no,” she said.

”You have said no in front of a witness and I will say the same in any room you like, for the rest of my life.” I meant it. ”But he is playing.”

She went out and did not slam the door, which was worse.

I put the sheet up on the wall of the meeting room at 6 o’clock and stood at the back while they came in and read it.

23 men. You learn everything about a squad in the 90 seconds after a team sheet goes up.

Bounou read it and closed his eyes.

Munir read it, and nodded once at his own name down in the substitutes, and went and sat down. He had told me on Friday he thought I was wrong. He never said another word about it, then or since.

Hakimi read it and grinned like a kid. Boussoufa read it and did not change expression, and then went and shook Munir’s hand, which nobody asked him to do.

Harit read it and read it again, which they all do, in case the second time is different.

And Youssef En-Nesyri read his own name in the number 9 shirt in a World Cup final team sheet and had to go and stand by the window for a minute with his back to the room.

Benatia came past me on the way out and stopped.

”He is playing.”

”He is playing.”

My captain nodded slowly, and did not ask me anything else about it, and that was the last conversation anybody in that building had about Youssef En-Nesyri’s leg.

Sunday.

I woke at 5 and gave up at half past and stood at the window in the dark watching the drummer, who had been there since Friday and had brought a folding stool.

You could not get down our street by 9. By 11 the police had shut it at both ends and there were men on the roof of the building opposite with cameras.

The coach left at 4 for a 7 o’clock kick-off, and it took an hour and 10 minutes to do a journey of 8 miles.

I have never seen anything like that drive and I never will again.

They were on every bridge. Green and red on the barriers, on the lamp posts, hanging off the overhead signs. Families out on the verge of a Moscow ring road with flags and cool boxes, having come out of their flats to stand next to a road because a bus was going to go past.

Police outriders in front of us, whoop-whoop, cutting the traffic, and the coach doing 15 miles an hour through it with the windows shaking every time we passed a group.

At a set of lights near Sportivnaya a woman of about 60 in a green headscarf came off the pavement and put both hands flat on the glass by Benatia’s window and said something none of us could hear.

Benatia put his hand up on the inside of the glass against hers. The bus moved. That was the whole thing, 4 seconds, and my captain sat back down and did not speak for the rest of the journey.

Nobody on that bus said a word for 40 minutes.

Nordin Amrabat had his headphones on with his hood up. Hakimi filmed the whole thing on his phone, the way he has filmed everything since the airport. Boussoufa read a book. An actual book, a paperback, held open with his thumb, for 70 minutes, and I have no idea what it was.

Benatia sat at the front on his own across the aisle from me with his elbows on his knees, looking straight down the middle of the road at nothing.

Then we came round the last bend and the Luzhniki was there.

You have seen it on television and it does not translate. The thing is a wall. Grey and enormous and lit up in the flat evening light with 78,000 people already trying to get into it and a ring of steel 400 yards out in every direction.

The bus came under the stand and the noise stopped dead the way it does, and the doors opened, pssshh, and we were in the concrete.

You can hear a stadium from inside its own belly. Not the words of it. The size. A low hnnnnnnn through 3 feet of wall, going up and down like something breathing in its sleep.

They had the closing ceremony out on the pitch. Stage sections coming off on trolleys, 60 people in orange bibs dismantling a pop concert in a hurry, and a man walking backwards in front of a forklift waving his arms.

I walked out to look at the grass at 5 past 5 with Marcus and Bray, hands in pockets, the 3 of us, the way I have done at every ground I have ever worked at.

It was already loud and there were maybe 20,000 in.

Down the tunnel on the way back, on the left, past the doping room and the referee’s door, 4 men were assembling the podium.

Blue carpet on a wheeled frame. The steps. The rail the winners lean on. Somebody had left the plinth for the trophy lying on its side against the wall with a blanket over it.

Every man in my squad walked past that on the way to the dressing room and every man looked at it.

**

Thank you for 200 Power Stones.