Glory Of The Football Manager System

"Wind it back," I said. "Count the white shirts behind the ball."

Marcus nudged it back a frame at a time. Belgium had lost it with 6 men committed, the way you do when you are chasing a game against a side that will not come out. France went box to box in 4 passes and 9 seconds.

I counted the shirts left behind the ball and there were 3, and one was Mbappé, and he had not run back one step, because running back is not his job. Standing in your grass, waiting, is his job.

"That’s it," I said, and I was not talking to Marcus, I was talking to the dark. "That is the whole thing. They want you to come.

"They sit, and they let you have it, and they wait for you to commit men, and then they put it behind you to the quickest thing on earth and they kill you in the space you left."

I heard myself laugh, and there was nothing in it.

"It is what we did to England. They just do it better than anybody who has ever done it."

And there was the door I had come to find, except it was not a door. It was a mirror.

Everything my Morocco is, is a loaded gun pointed at my own head against France. We win it and we run. We go in straight fast lines down the motorway.

We pour forward, all of us, because that is who we are and it is why 40,000 people painted my face on a wall in Casablanca. And if we do that against France, we hand that boy the one thing he wants, which is grass, behind us, to run into.

I said the thing out loud that I had said to England on Wednesday, and it came out of me like a bad joke told at a funeral.

You cannot do that to us. You cannot give us the ball and ask us to be patient. Patient is the one thing my Morocco has never had to be.

Well.

Now it was the only thing that could save us.

And then France showed me the other way they kill you, the one I had not been frightened of yet, and should have been.

A corner. Their corner, on 51 minutes. And you do not think of a side that lives on the counter as a set-piece team, so it caught me the way it caught Belgium.

Griezmann stood it up to the back post, hung it there, and Umtiti came from deep with a run I did not see start.

He climbed over Fellaini, who is 6 foot 4 and no mug in the air, and got up so far above him that for a second there was daylight between the top of the big Belgian’s head and the sole of Umtiti’s boot, and he nodded it down and across Courtois before the keeper had picked it up.

The roar came out of the speaker a beat before the ball hit the net, the way it does, the French end seeing it early. [RRRAA.]

1-0. And not a counter at all.

A header, from a corner, from the meanest defence in the tournament, who now had the one thing on earth they wanted more than the ball, which was a lead to sit on. I felt it go through me.

Because a team that lethal on the break AND that good from a set-piece does not give you one way to lose to them. It gives you 2, and it makes you choose.

And I knew Belgium were finished, because you do not come back against a side that is happy to let you have the ball and happier still to watch you break your heart on their wall.

They did not come back. They threw Mertens and Carrasco on, they piled men forward, and every time they overcommitted, France nearly killed them again on the break, Mbappé away twice more, Lloris barely troubled all night.

France won 1-0 without ever looking like they might lose, and at the whistle their players did not go mad. They jogged in and shook hands and looked, if anything, mildly bored, a team that had known for a month exactly how good it was.

And Deschamps stood on the touchline with his hands in his pockets, and I looked at him and thought, you have not been frightened once in this whole tournament, have you.

The screen cut to a graphic before I could close the lid.

2 flags. A date. My country was not on either of them, and I had never wanted less to do with the one that was.

FRANCE. MOROCCO. THE FINAL.

France. Not Belgium and their gold. France, and their block, and their sleeping boy with the 197 in him, and their manager with his hands in his pockets.

"They are better than us," I said to Marcus, and I closed the laptop.

The sound went with it. One second the room was full of 60,000 Russians, and the next it was the 2 of us and the radiator ticking and a plate of cold food under a lid, and the quiet had a weight of its own.

"Man for man it is not close," Marcus said, gently, because he is my friend. "On paper we do not get near them."

"I know."

I did not tell him the rest. I have never told anybody the rest, not Emma, not Bray, not in 12 months of it turning up in the corner of my eye whether I want it or not.

There is a thing I can see that nobody else can, and I have learned to keep it behind my teeth, because a manager who starts talking about numbers only he can read is a manager who gets a doctor sent round.

So I kept Mbappé’s 197 to myself, the way I keep all of it, and I let Marcus think it was just a good pair of eyes and a lot of tape.

I sat in the dark of that room and I did the sums the way I always do, and the sums said we lose, and they did not say it close.

And then I thought about a keeper who waited a month. A boy called Harit who went the colour of a tunnel wall and then rolled the ball into an empty net. A striker who put one on the roof and had the ice to bury the next.

A captain who could not run and coached my back line from a bib with the voice going out of him.

A squad of men who got on a plane because everybody they had ever met had told them no.

The sums said we would lose to the group of death. And to the hosts. And to the best midfield on earth over 120 minutes and a shootout. And to England and 38,000 of my own, 5 days ago.

The sums have been wrong every round of this tournament, because the sums cannot hold what these men are. That is the one thing the machine has never once been able to read.

"Here is the other thing, though," I said, and Marcus looked up, because he knows my voice when a plan is starting to move. "Everybody has spent 5 days going on about my rejects. The keeper who waited. The kid off the bench. And they have forgotten what I did against England."

"Which was?"

"I sat my best players down." I could feel it coming together now, the way it does. "Ziyech did not kick a ball against them. Boussoufa did not. El Ahmadi did not. Half the England side I beat was fringe men and boys, and my actual first team sat in the stand in tracksuits and watched them do it."

Marcus went still, because he had got there the same second I had.

"They’re fresh," he said.

"They have had a week’s rest while France ran 120 minutes against Uruguay and then a war against that lot tonight." I tapped the folder. "Ziyech’s legs are fresh. His set-pieces are the best in this tournament, and I have just watched France concede to a corner.

"Boussoufa can keep a ball in a phone box, and the one thing that beats France is keeping the ball. I have been building the wrong story in my own head. I have not got a squad of tired rejects. I have got my best 11, rested, and a plan that finally fits them."

"En-Nesyri?"

And there it was. The one that could still sink me.

"That," I said, "we keep between us and Rebecca."

Because my top scorer had 5 goals in this tournament and an adductor that only 2 people in the building knew about, and whether he could stand up for 90 minutes against Varane was the question I did not have an answer to yet, and I was not going to hand it to anybody with a microphone.

I got up and put the folder under my arm.

"Get everyone in the team meeting room for 10 tomorrow. The real 11, not the England 11. I want them fresh, I want them fed, and I want them in that room before a single reporter has told them they cannot win this."

"And what do you tell them?"

I thought about a boy asleep in a field with a 197 in his legs. I thought about Ziyech’s left foot and Boussoufa’s feet and a whole rested team that nobody was talking about.

"I have not decided yet," I said. And that was a lie, and Marcus knew it was a lie, and he let me have it.

I opened the door. Down the hall, faint through the wall, my boys were still singing, and one of them was going to play France in 4 days, and did not know it yet.

I had a mountain to climb.

But I had just spotted the one path up it that nobody else could see, and that is the only part of this job I have ever been any good at.

***

Thank you for 100 Power Stones.