Glory Of The Football Manager System

[Luzhniki Stadium, Moscow. Sunday 15 July 2018.]

”Danny. Daniel. Look at me.”

Nobody has called me Daniel since a parents’ evening in 1999.

My ears had been gone since the 92nd minute. Everything came through water, my own voice included. But that got through, because that voice has been getting through since I was 4.

It was gone 25 past 11 at night. The whistle had gone at 20 to 11, and everything in between had happened to me on a podium in front of 78,000 people, and I could not have told you one reliable thing about any of it.

I was 4 steps inside the mouth of that tunnel with my back to the pitch, and the back was on purpose.

Out there, France were on their lap. They had the trophy off the plinth and Lloris had given it away 3 players ago and somebody had carried a speaker out onto the grass, and every 40 seconds the whole thing went up again.

RRRAAAA. Allez! Allez! Allez!

And coming the other way, into the dark of that tunnel, my players.

Clk. Clk. Clk-clk.

They came off in ones. Not one man in green walked off that pitch alongside another one.

Ziyech with his shirt pulled over his head. Saïss with his balled up in a fist. Harit being steered along by Boussoufa like a lad walked home from a wake. En-Nesyri on a crutch with a doctor either side of him and Munir carrying his boots.

Banoun stopped at the mouth of it and looked back out at the pitch for a second before he came in, and he is the only one of that squad who has never left home to play, and I have often wondered what he was doing in that second.

Bounou came last. 40 yards behind the rest of them, still in his gloves.

And above all of it, the green half of the Luzhniki had not moved an inch.

They had been on their feet since the whistle. They had stood through the medals, and through another country lifting a World Cup 40 yards in front of them, and they were still stood there now, 45 minutes later, in a monsoon, singing at a team that had lost.

DIMA MAGHRIB. DIMA MAGHRIB.

I have been told since that the stewards did not get that end cleared until 20 past midnight, and that they gave up trying at about half 11 and let them have it.

Not one of my players looked up at the family barrier on the way past. Every single one of them had somebody stood on it.

Mine was the woman in the green scarf, in a coat she has owned since I was at school, with her hair flat to her head because she had been stood in that rain for 40 minutes and had not asked one person where she was supposed to be.

”Come here,” she said. ”Come here, our kid.”

My mother has been to 2 football matches in my life.

She watched the Youth Cup final on a laptop in her kitchen because she was on a shift. She watched Lyon in a pub on Claremont Road with Margaret from number 46, who is a City fan and takes her own chair to things, and she has never told me which pub.

She has never once asked me for a ticket.

And she got herself to Moscow at 61, on her own, for the one I lost.

She had to apply for a passport to do it. Then a Fan ID, which is the card the Russians made every single person at that tournament carry on a lanyard, and which she rang me about twice in June because the website would not take the photograph.

They had her behind the barrier at the mouth of the tunnel, in the bit they keep for family, with a steward on the end of the row who had been told to hold that line and had clearly decided my mother was not his problem.

I went to the rail and she got both hands round the back of my head and pulled it onto her shoulder, and the medal swung off my chest and cracked against the barrier.

Tk.

”You’re soaked through.”

”It’s been raining, Mum.”

”I know it’s been raining. I’ve been stood in it, haven’t I.”

Clackclackclack.

A photographer worked out who she was. She never turned round. She has not turned round for a camera in her life.

Elena Vasquez was 6 feet away with Tomás behind her, camera up on his shoulder, and Ruth holding a boom over the top of the pair of us.

11 months that crew has been in my building. They filmed a Youth Cup and 5 matches that kept a club up and a European final in Lyon, and every single one of those nights ended with me being thrown in the air by somebody.

”Elena.”

”I know.”

She did not put a hand up and she did not tell Tomás to lower it.

”Danny, this is the last episode of the last series. I have been embedded since August. I am not switching off in a tunnel.”

”That is my mother stood there.”

”Then I do not use your mother.” She still did not move. ”Everything else, I use.”

My mother, who had not let go of my head, said, without opening her eyes, ”It’s alright, love, let her film. Our Danny’s been showing off since he was 6.”

Ruth put her hand over her own mouth. Tomás kept rolling.

The players go through the mixed zone. That is the corridor with the barriers, where a lad who has just lost a World Cup final gets 200 phones held out at him on the ends of 200 arms.

The manager does not. The manager gets taken somewhere worse.

They walked me down 2 flights and along a service corridor into the media auditorium, which is a theatre. Raked seating. A long table on a stage under a wall of sponsor boards. Headsets on every chair for the translation. A FIFA moderator in a blazer with a running order in front of him and an earpiece in.

400 seats and every one of them full, and a live feed going out of the back of the room to every country on earth.

Rhubarb-rhubarb-rhubarb. 6 languages at once, and every one of them with my name in the middle of a sentence I could not follow.

I have sat at that table 6 times in this tournament and I have not given the English press one word of English at any of them.

That started as a joke in May. A pundit bet on live television that I would need a translator for the Morocco job, so I did the whole squad announcement in French and let him sit there. Then Nadia read me the English back pages the next morning and it stopped being a joke.

Traitor. Mercenary. A lad from Manchester who would rather manage Africa than answer a question at home.

6 weeks of that. So: French to the French, French to the Moroccans, French to a Russian bloke who did not speak French, and nothing at all to the men from London.

The moderator opened it in English and I answered in French. He took it in his stride, because he has done 6 of these with me now and he knows exactly how the next 12 minutes are going to go.

An agency question about the shape. French.

A man from Casablanca who I gave a full 3 minutes to, in French, because he has followed this squad since Voronezh on a budget that would not cover his own flights.

Somebody from Sky, 3 rows back, who did not even bother standing up. I looked straight past him.

And then, from the back of the room, on a hand the moderator had already skipped twice, a voice I knew.

”Danny.”

The moderator said, in English, that we would take 2 more and both of them would be in French.

”Danny. In English. Just once, before you go home.”

Nadia was stood against the wall at the side of that stage and I saw her head come up.

”Was it your call?”

The moderator had his hand halfway to his microphone.

”Leave it,” I said, to him, in English.

I want to be honest about why I did not let the moderator kill it.

It was that he had asked the only true question anybody put to me that night. He had waited 6 weeks and 2 skipped hands to ask it, in a room with 400 people in it and a world feed running, and he knew exactly what he was doing.

So did I.

”Say that again,” I said.

That room went quiet. Not the polite kind. The kind where 400 professionals work out at the same moment that something is about to happen.

Shff. The sound of a room lifting its phones together.

He was about 40, stood at the back in a coat that had not dried out, and to his credit he did not flinch.

”The corner. 91 minutes,” he said. ”Both centre-halves up. Your left-back up. Was that your call, or did they go on their own?”

Nadia, against the wall, said ”Coach” under her breath, and it meant do not.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus and Kostas_Gounakis for the support.