Glory Of The Football Manager System

87 minutes. 88.

Bray’s watch was in his hand. The fourth official was fiddling with the board. My whole technical area stood in a line on the touchline like men at a rail, 30 of us shoulder to shoulder with our fists on the advertising hoardings, and I could feel the wood juddering under all our hands at once.

France cleared one long and won 20 seconds of breathing and the clock ate them.

Then the board went up, and the light on it burned through the rain.

4 minutes.

WHRRROOOOAAAR. The ground found another gear that should not have existed.

And down on the running track, in front of the tunnel, they had started to build it.

I caught it between waves. 2 men in FIFA bibs wheeling a low black podium into place. A woman behind them with a flight case of medals held under a sheet of clear plastic against the rain. On the gantry above the tunnel 4 confetti cannons stood angled up into the black, loaded, waiting.

They were building the coronation, 4 minutes early, in a monsoon. Setting the stage for somebody’s best night on earth. And I knew whose, and it was not going to be mine.

El Ahmadi cut out Tolisso’s pass, and gave it simple, and Boussoufa put Hakimi away down the outside one more time.

He had been to that byline 11 times in 45 minutes. N’Zonzi was waiting for him, set, huge, and 19 years old went at 30 years old and threw a drop of the shoulder in a monsoon, studs ripping the wet turf, shhk, and was past him, gone, byline, and cut it back low and hard across the 6-yard box.

Umtiti got there. Umtiti had to get there, and he cut it out, and the clearance came off him like a shanked drive, up and out of the box, spinning in the rain.

It came down 25 yards out.

It came down to Sofyan Amrabat.

The boy who forced one pass at 0-2 and carried it since. The boy who asked for the 1st penalty against Croatia and was handed the 5th, and the 5th never came. The boy who has been telling this squad for 6 weeks that one day they would all have to say his name.

He did not take a touch. He did not do the thing that ruined him in the first half, and he did not do the safe thing either. He did the thing he was born for, first time, laces through the middle of a falling wet ball.

THOOM.

The roar started while it was still in the air.

The ball left his boot bending, a yard outside the post and coming back, and the stadium could see the curve, and the noise began before the net moved, rising to meet the ball on its way in.

Lloris was full stretch in the top corner. His fingertips and the ball arrived in the same postcode at the same time.

The fingertips lost.

Fwip. Top corner. The net snapped sideways.

WHRRRRRRRROOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAARRRR.

3-3. 90 minutes.

No side in 88 years had come from 3 behind in this match. Not one, not ever, and a squad that Holland let go and Spain sent home and Málaga could not keep up had just done it in the rain against France with 78,000 people coming off the earth.

BWAAAAP-BWAAAAP-BWAAAAP. Boom-boom-boom-boom. Lilililililiiii.

It stopped being a noise. Noise is a thing you hear. This came up through the floor of the technical area and moved my ribs, and the rain fell through the floodlights in silver sheets, into my open mouth and down the back of my collar.

I could not hear my own voice. I knew I was screaming only because my throat was raw with it.

And it was not one sound. 78,000 people do not make one sound. It was men bent double roaring with nothing left in them, and the drums that had lost the beat, and the horns.

And over the top of all of it, the women in the high tiers, that note a country only makes when it lets go of 30 years all at once.

The stand was moving under me. I felt it come up through the studs, the whole east side of the Luzhniki going down and up in the rain like a thing breathing, and a bottle fell out of the dark end and turned over once in the floodlight and was gone in the bodies before it hit anything.

Behind that goal a boy in gloves 4 sizes too big had dived the same way Lloris dived, and lay on the concrete steps with his arms still out, being piled on by strangers.

The old man had his cap off. 6 weeks against his chest, 32 years in his hands, and now it was up over his head in one fist in the rain and he was roaring something at the sky.

20 rows up behind our tunnel, a woman who cleans 3 houses a day in Huizen had both hands flat on her chest and her eyes shut. Her boy was at the corner flag with the cords standing out of his neck, screaming his own name at 78,000 people.

And they said it back. ”SO-FYAN! SO-FYAN! SO-FYAN!”

Sofyan got 5 yards toward the corner and his legs gave out. He went down through the standing water on both knees with his arms flung wide and his face turned straight up into the rain, screaming something at the black sky that I could not hear and did not need to.

Then they buried him. Ziyech first, then Boussoufa, then all of them, a heap of green bodies in the corner heaving up and down, and out of the bottom of it a single fist came up into the floodlights and shook, and I never found out whose.

And Achraf Hakimi, who had made the byline 12 times, whose burst won the free kick and whose boot hit the cross and whose cutback made the equaliser, ran the full length of the pitch and threw himself onto the top of the pile, arms spread like wings, screaming, 19 years old and everywhere, everywhere.

My whole bench was on its feet as one screaming thing at the edge of the technical area. Munir had En-Nesyri up off the broken leg, the coat gone, the pair of them howling into each other’s faces.

Steeley stood with both hands flat on top of his head and his eyes shut, saying something over and over that nobody would ever hear.

And I did not celebrate.

I could not. My arms would not do it. I stood in all that falling gold with my fists shut and my heart going like a fire alarm, and I looked at the halfway line.

He was stood on the centre spot, alone, a boy in blue in the rain, hands on his hips, water running off him.

He was not looking at the celebration.

He was looking at the space.

France kicked off. We took it off them in 6 seconds, because we could not stop, because you cannot ask men who have just done that to stop, and we went again, and 78,000 people went with us, and Harit won a corner off Varane’s knee.