Glory Of The Football Manager System

He thanked me. Not for the match. He did not mention the match at all. He thanked me for what had been done for the federation, and he named 2 of my players while he was saying it, and then he gave me the one line from that podium I can still hear.

”You have given them something they will not put down.”

I said something back. I hope it was thank you.

Somebody put a medal on me. Clk. The clasp at the back of my neck.

I did not feel it go on.

That is not a turn of phrase. I have gone back over it and there is a gap in it. There is a hand coming toward my chest, and then there is me on the grass at the bottom of the steps with a cold thing against my sternum and a wet ribbon stuck to my neck.

And then the Prince came down after me, and he did not go where the cameras were. He went to the ones nobody was pointing anything at.

Shp. Shp. Shp. Handmade shoes going through standing water, and he did not once look down at them.

He took Bounou by both shoulders and would not let go until my goalkeeper looked at him. He got both arms round En-Nesyri and the strapped leg. He went down the whole line of them in a suit that was already finished, and he did not miss a man.

Clackclack. Clack.

Somebody photographed him doing it. That picture went round the world by morning, and there is not one bit of me anywhere in it, and it is the best thing that happened to Morocco all night.

And while he was doing that, I stood on the grass and did the thing not one of my players would do.

I picked my medal up off my chest and looked at it.

Silver, and heavier than it has any business being. A globe on the face of it, and the lettering round the rim, and my thumb went over the lettering without me telling it to.

I am 29 years old.

2 years ago I was in the county league. Crystal Palace gave me their under 18s, and we won the FA Youth Cup with them, and the national title.

On the 23rd of April 2017 they handed me the senior side because Pardew was gone and the club sat 5 points off relegation with 5 matches to play. Interim. A caretaker. A lad they had found downstairs.

We won all 5. We finished in a Europa League play-off place.

And then in one season, my first full season in senior football, we won the Europa League, and the FA Cup, and the Carabao Cup, and we came 2nd in the Premier League.

15 months. That is the whole of my senior career. 3 trophies, not one final lost, and people had started putting my name in the same sentence as the word history, and I had begun, quietly, to believe them.

There are men 20 years older than me who would give an arm at the shoulder for the thing hanging round my neck in that rain.

A silver World Cup medal. For a Crystal Palace manager they loaned to Morocco for 6 weeks to keep the seat warm.

I had been sent to steady a ship.

I put it back down against my shirt and I left it there.

Then we had to stand there.

That is the part they build into it. The beaten go up first, so that the beaten are already in position, in a line, at the front, when the other lot get theirs. A carpet, a photographers’ pit, 78,000 people, and you stand on your mark in the rain and you wait.

And down at our end the line started to come apart.

Harit had turned himself half away toward the tunnel. Somebody had his shirt pulled up over his eyes. 2 of them had found something on the grass by their boots that badly needed looking at.

So I went along the front of that line.

”Heads up.”

”Boss, I can’t.”

”Heads up, Amine. All of you. Turn round and face it.”

They turned round. Shhk. 23 sets of studs coming round in the wet at once.

”Now watch it,” I said. ”Every second of it. Watch how they do it. Watch who is holding who, and what their faces look like, and how it goes up.

”Because you are coming back here. Some of you twice. And when it is your turn to be stood where they are stood, I am not having one man in this line wondering what it looks like.

”You are going to know. Because you stood in the rain in Moscow and you learned it off the men who took it off you.”

Not one of them said a word.

And 20 yards in front of them France went up those steps in a stream, laughing, dragging each other by the shirt, a bench full of men who had been substitutes an hour ago and were world champions now.

RRRAAAAA. Allez! Allez! Allez!

And 23 beaten men in a straight line, and every one of my staff behind them, soaked through, silver round every neck, stood at the front of that carpet and watched France win the World Cup.

I have asked plenty of players for plenty of things. I have never asked anybody for anything harder than that.

Whummmp.

Gold going up out of the tunnel roof again.

20 yards to my right there was a shape on a podium and a great deal of noise, and a small dark thing went up over the top of it into the floodlights.

Clackclackclackclackclack. The whole photographers’ pit went off at once, a wall of white light through the rain.

And the whole world made a sound I have never heard a crowd make before.

I made myself watch it.

I want that on the record, because it was the last honest thing I had left and it cost more than the rest of the night put together. They earned it by a yard of grass, and looking away would have been the one lie I told.

So I watched. All of it. Every second.

And here is the thing nobody warns you about.

It is beautiful.

I have seen it 1,000 times on a screen and never once looked at it. 20 yards away, in the rain, with the floodlights full on it, it is beautiful.

It is smaller than a man expects. That is the first thing. And it is not a cup at all, it is 2 people holding the world up over their heads, and under those lights the gold of it goes orange.

Hugo Lloris got both hands under it and put it up.

WHRRRAAAAAAAAAAA.

And every drop of rain between him and the lights turned gold on the way down.

I stood in a line of beaten men with my own boys either side of me, looking at the most beautiful object in sport, and I could not take my eyes off it.

And I have never in my life wanted anything the way I wanted that.

They walked us off past it.

There is only the one way off that pitch and it goes by the podium, so my players and my staff went along the front of it in single file, close enough that I could have put a hand out and touched the thing.

I did not know then what I know now, which is that I could not have. There is a rule about it. Heads of state. FIFA men. The players who have won it, and the managers who have won it.

Nobody else puts bare hands on that trophy. Ever.

So Didier Deschamps could put both of his on it, twice over, as a player and now as a manager. And I could not have laid one finger on it if I had stood there all night, and neither could any man in green walking past it beside me.

We did not know that at the time.

We just walked past it in a line, soaked through, silver on every chest, close enough to touch a thing not one of us was allowed to touch.

And at the mouth of the tunnel a woman in a green scarf was leaning over the rail with both arms out, and she was not shouting for a player.

”Danny,” she said. ”Danny. Danny, look at me.”