Glory Of The Football Manager System

Wilfried Zaha rolled it sideways to Christian Benteke and Christian Benteke put it back to Rúben Neves, and 84,617 people made a noise that went up into the roof and stayed there.

RRRRAAAAAA.

And I sat down next to a woman who had just told me how we were going to concede.

That is the thing about the sentence Sarah said with 40 seconds left on that clock. She did not say City would score.

She said Pep Guardiola had put Phil Foden on that left hand side on purpose, and that Foden does not stay on it.

He starts wide and he comes inside. Every time. And the man he is coming inside off is Aaron Wan-Bissaka.

So there is 1 question in this football match and the rest of it is decoration. The trophy, the drum, the 3 plinths and the empty 4th one, 84,617 people and a stadium we are calling home for the first time.

When Foden goes inside, does Aaron go with him?

Go with him and Benjamin Mendy has 40 yards of touchline and nobody in it.

Stay, and an 18-year-old gets the ball in the pocket in front of the back 4 with his head up.

There is no right answer. There has never been a right answer, and every manager who has ever set a team up against Manchester City has had to pick 1 and live with it.

I picked. On Thursday, on pitch 2, in front of everybody.

I told Aaron Wan-Bissaka to make the call himself, in the moment, every time, because he is the best 1 against 1 defender I have ever coached and because a man who is told what to do at 20 is still being told what to do at 27.

That is a decision. It is mine and I made it on purpose and I would make it again in October.

It cost us a goal in 13 minutes.

Tk. Tk. Tk-tk.

They had it for 4 minutes and did nothing with it, and the noise about that got shorter and flatter every time it went backwards.

Hoooo.

Bray was up by minute 3.

”They have not gone forward once.”

”No.”

”Danny, they are taking the mick.”

”They are counting.” I had my hands in my pockets. ”Sit down.”

Christian Benteke went nowhere for 4 minutes.

Fernandinho had the ball 14 times in those 4 minutes and every single time there was a 27-year-old centre-forward stood 3 yards off his shoulder, breathing, saying nothing.

[FERNANDINHO. POSITIONING 17. DECISIONS 17.]

He worked it out at about minute 5. I watched him do it from 60 yards. He stopped coming to get the ball and started standing still 10 yards deeper, and it put Christian Benteke in front of a choice, and Benteke made the right one and did not follow him.

”Good,” Sarah said. ”Christian. Good.”

Then she said the other half of it.

”He is going to leave him there all afternoon. And now there is a hole where Christian used to stand and Pierre has got to eat it, and Pierre does not know that yet.”

We got out on 7 minutes and it took 4 passes.

Nick Pope rolled it to Mamadou Sakho, and Sakho is 28 and has 29 France caps and has been booed by his own supporters at 2 different clubs, and he carried it 20 yards out of that back 4 the way he has carried it since he was a boy in La Goutte d’Or.

Shhk.

Nobody came. Fernandinho held. Bernardo Silva held.

So he kept going.

30 yards. 35. And when John Stones finally stepped, Sakho played it round him into Rúben Neves, and Neves had turned before the ball got to him.

Tk.

40 yards, first time, outside of the boot, into the run of Jarrod Bowen.

RRRAAAA.

84,617 people came off their seats at once, because Jarrod Bowen was 3 yards behind Benjamin Mendy and running at a goalkeeper.

He got there. He got there and he went too early.

Claudio Bravo came 8 yards and spread, and Bowen tried to lift it over him from 12 yards out with the outside of his right foot, and it went 2 feet over the bar and into the bottom tier.

Uuuggh.

Jarrod Bowen is 21. He came from Hull City in January for 8 million pounds and he scored 9 in half a season and every single one of them was a tap in or a header, and he has 1 finish in his locker and it is not that one.

He stood there with both hands on his head.

In Block 122, 8 rows up, a man called Terry Dolan was on his feet for the 4th time in 6 minutes.

He is 58. He has had that seat since 1979. He has watched this football club from the third tier and he has watched it from 14th, and he had a nephew move me off a mark on a film set on Friday and has not stopped telling people about it since.

He was not going to sit down all afternoon. Not once.

12 minutes went and nothing happened, and I had about 4 seconds of thinking she was wrong.

13 minutes.

Aymeric Laporte had the ball 40 yards out for 3 seconds and nobody went near him.

”MENDY. WATCH MENDY.”

I had it. I want that on the record because of what comes after it.

I had seen Benjamin Mendy start his run 2 seconds before the ball left Laporte’s foot and I was already shouting about the wrong man, because the wrong man is what Guardiola sells you.

And Phil Foden came inside off Aaron Wan-Bissaka.

Aaron went with him. 2 steps. He got 2 steps into the middle of that pitch and then he stopped, because Benjamin Mendy had started running down the outside of him and there was 40 yards of Wembley and nobody in it.

2 steps and a stop.

That is the whole goal. That is the entire thing.

Because Foden was gone by then, into the pocket in front of James Tarkowski, and Tarkowski could not come out to him because Sergio Agüero was stood on his foot, and McArthur was 15 yards the wrong side of it chasing Bernardo Silva.

3 strides. Foden did not look up once.

”NO. NO. AARON, NO.”

He slid it.

Deep breath.

And everything went slow.

Agüero took 1 touch. He is 30 years old and he has scored 199 goals for that football club and he has been doing it since he was 15 in Argentina, and that touch put the ball exactly where his left foot was going to be before his left foot knew.

I saw Nick Pope come 2 feet off his line. I saw Agüero’s shoulders drop half an inch. I saw 18 inches of grass between Pope’s glove and the post and I knew he had seen it first.

fsst.

The net took it.

RRRAAAAAAA.

7,000 in the north east corner came up all at once and it sounded like a door being kicked in.

And 61,400 people who had been singing since 20 past 1 went out like a light, one section at a time, all the way round that bowl, and you could watch it travel.

In Block 122 a man of 58 sat down for the first time since the whistle.

He did not put his head in his hands. He sat with both hands flat on his own knees and looked at the grass, and the lad next to him said something and Terry Dolan did not answer him.

I knew what it was before Marcus opened the laptop, and I want that down as well, because a manager who only knows things after his analyst tells him is not a manager.

Foden had not beaten Aaron. Foden had made Aaron choose, and the choosing was the goal.

”Marcus.”

”I am on it.”

”Where is he getting it.”

”90 seconds,” he said, and 90 seconds later he had it, because that is what he is for.

”He has had it 9 times.” He had the laptop turned so I could not see it, because he does not show me the working until he has finished. ”Foden. 9 touches. 7 of them are in the same 12 square yards.”

”Show me.”

He turned it round.

A pitch, greyed out, and a red box on it about the size of a penalty area, sat between our right back and our centre-half.

”7 out of 9 in there,” Marcus said. ”And he has been in there 14 times. So 5 of those he did not get it, and 3 of the 5 were because Aaron went with him and Mendy went outside and City chose Mendy.”

”So it is working when Aaron goes.”

”No.” He shut the laptop. ”It is working when Aaron goes and Mendy gets the ball, because Mendy has crossed 3 and none of them were any good. You are not stopping it. You are picking which one of them hurts you.

”And 9 minutes ago you picked wrong.”

At the other end of that touchline, Pep Guardiola did not celebrate.

He took 3 steps towards his own bench, said 4 words to a man with a laptop, and turned round and looked at our right hand side.

Not at Foden. At the space Foden had run into.

Then he folded his arms and did not move for 20 minutes.

Aaron Wan-Bissaka is 20 years old.

He makes more tackles than any defender in this country. He has not been beaten 1 against 1 in a Premier League match since the 2nd of December. He came off a Sunday league pitch in Croydon and cost this football club nothing at all and 6 days ago somebody offered 55 million pounds for him.

That is the weapon.

The wound is that everything he has ever been good at happens on a touchline. He has spent 96 matches learning to show a man the outside and take it off him, and he is the best in England at it, and none of it is any use to him when the man goes the other way and there is a left back sprinting past his shoulder.

Every good habit he has got says stay.

Every eye in that stadium says go.

He got up off the turf after that goal and he did not look at the bench and he did not look at Tarkowski.

He looked at the 2 yards he had stepped into and then stepped back out of.

So I went to the edge of that technical area and I shouted 1 thing at him, and it was not about football.

”AARON.”

He turned round.

”THAT WAS ME. THAT WAS MINE.”

He looked at me for about a second and a half with 84,617 people making noise, and then he nodded once and went and got in his line for the restart, and he did not put his head down again for the rest of the afternoon.

I have been doing this job 15 months. That is the most useful thing I did all half.

And then we had 15 minutes where I could not sit down.

We went at them. That is the thing nobody in a newspaper wrote afterwards, because they lost and we won and everybody wanted the second half. We went at Manchester City for a quarter of an hour at 1-0 down at Wembley and they did not like it.