Glory Of The Football Manager System

So I put my hand up.

And that road came off its hinges.

It went up in a way it had not gone up all afternoon, not for Bounou and not for Hakimi, a noise that started where I was looking and went both ways down that boulevard until I could hear it coming back at me off buildings 400 metres behind the bus.

A man on a barrier below me had both fists in the air and his eyes shut.

2 lads got a third one up on their shoulders so he could see over, and he was pointing at me with both hands and shouting something I will never know the words to.

A woman on a balcony 3 floors up took the flag off her own railing and threw it, and it did not reach the bus and she did not care, and she stood there with nothing to wave and waved anyway.

”DAN-NY WALSH! DAN-NY WALSH!”

I kept the arm up for the next 40 minutes. I could not have told you why. Every time it came down that noise came looking for it.

The flowers started in the 2nd hour.

I did not see the first one. It came over my shoulder and landed on the deck by Boussoufa’s foot, a single red carnation with the stem cut short, and he picked it up and looked at it like a man who has been handed a passport that is not his.

Another one came over. Then 20 of them.

They came up off the barriers underarm, in ones and in handfuls, and after a while there were people out in front of that crowd with buckets of them.

The deck of that bus went red and white and yellow under our shoes.

Somebody threw a whole bunch, tied with string, and it hit Saïss in the chest and he caught it against himself with both arms like a man catching a baby.

RRRAAAAAAAA.

A woman at a barrier held one up on the flat of her hand rather than throwing it, and held it there, and would not throw it, so Hakimi went down on his knees on the deck and reached over the rail and took it off her.

By the palace the top of that bus was ankle deep at the front.

Mustapha went round that deck on his knees with a kit bag, collecting every one he could reach, and nobody asked him to and nobody stopped him.

The water came up out of the crowd the same way.

Somebody handed a bottle up out of the crowd. Then 6 more. Then it did not stop, and by half 3 Marcus Reid, a lead analyst from Croydon, was running a relay along the top deck of a bus in Rabat passing warm bottles from strangers to a World Cup squad.

”There is a woman down there,” he shouted at me, ”who has handed up 9. 9, Danny. She has bought them. She is just buying them and handing them up.”

Saïss took his jacket off at about 20 to 4 and got such a roar for it that 8 of them had theirs off inside a minute.

That is the photograph on every front page in that country the next morning. 9 men in shirtsleeves with their ties pulled down and their arms in the air, and Mustapha behind them holding all 9 jackets like a cloakroom.

By the 3rd hour my face ached from doing the same thing with it.

Saïss was flexing his shoulder and swapping arms. Boussoufa had gone quiet an hour before and had not started again. Bray was sat on the bench with his back against the rail, out of it.

And it stopped being a crowd.

I do not know how else to put it. At some point you cannot look at all of it any more, so you look at 1 person. And then 1 more. And then 1 more.

A man on the roof of a bus shelter, about 60, in a shirt and good trousers like he had come off a shift. Not shouting. Not filming. Both hands held up flat, the way you do when a funeral goes past, and he held them there the whole time.

A lad of about 12 running level with the bus on the pavement, flat out, not shouting anything. He went over a bollard and got up and carried on.

A lad of about 20 on somebody’s shoulders in a Ziyech shirt with his arm in a plaster cast, hammering that cast on a road sign in time with the drums until it split down one side.

A nurse in scrubs on a barrier with her lanyard still round her neck.

A grandmother in the middle of 3 generations, being held upright by the other 2 so she could see over.

A bloke about my age at the front with a small boy on his shoulders, not looking at the bus at all. He had turned himself round so the child could see, and he was watching the child’s face.

”BOSS.” Harit again. Harit did not stop all day. ”Boss, that sign. That one. Read it.”

Somebody had it up on a broom handle, high, out over the barrier at head height so the bus would get it.

THANK YOU FOR SEEING US.

Clap clap. Clap clap clap.

In English. On a road in Rabat, held up by a woman I never found again afterwards, no matter how long I looked.

And I read it twice, and the second time I got it.

Because I had been up there for 2 hours doing arithmetic that did not apply. Counting a trophy that was not on the bus. Totting up what we owed and coming up short every time, because I was counting the only thing I know how to count.

They were not out there for the result. There was no result on that road.

I went and found El Ahmadi 20 minutes later and got my mouth by his ear.

”Karim.”

”Yes, coach.”

”I have got it.”

He did not turn round. He put his hand out flat at the whole of it and left it there.

”I know,” he said. ”I watched you get it. Your face went.”

We lost.

I keep having to put it in the middle of a sentence about that afternoon because nothing on that road acknowledged it. Not one thing. There was no version of that noise with a defeat inside it.

And 2 days before, I had stood at a table in Moscow and told the world it was my fault.

That is what was going round in my head up there.

They are cheering, and I am the reason there is nothing on this bus.

Hakimi filmed the entire afternoon.

I do not mean he took some clips. I mean the phone did not go down. He walked that rail backwards with it held out at arm’s length, narrating, for 5 hours, to whoever was watching.

”On my left, Rabat. On my right, Rabat. Everywhere, Rabat.”

He put the camera on Benatia, who put a hand over the lens. He put it on Bounou, who told him where to go. He put it on Mustapha, who did the flags-over-the-pegs thing with his hands, and got a whole street cheering a kit man who could not see one of them.

He walked backwards into a stanchion at one point, hard, in front of everybody, and Boussoufa laughed so much he had to sit down.

”He did the same thing on the tarmac in Russia,” Bray shouted at me. ”Twice. Into 2 skips.”

”He is 19.”

”He is doing it live, Danny.”

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus and Kostas_Gounakis for the support.