Chapter 774: The Work
Over on the far goal, Steeley had both keepers working, and it was Munir putting the crosses in.
40 of them, high and hanging and nasty, into the exact spot France put them, over and over, so that Yassine Bounou could come and claim them.
The man who lost the shirt on Friday morning, standing on the edge of a box at 3 in the afternoon, making the man who took it better at the one thing Sunday will ask of him.
Neither of them said much about it. They did not need to. I watched it for a minute from 60 yards away and then I made myself stop watching it, because I had a job to do and there is only so much of that a man can take in an afternoon.
Here is what I asked them to do. 11 men in a box 40 yards square, keep the ball off 7 pressers, and every time we lost it the whole thing stopped and reset and started again.
That is it. That is the whole session. It is the most boring drill in football and it was the only thing that mattered in my life that afternoon.
Thwack. Thwack. Boots on a dry pitch and the ball going flat and fast between them, and 22 men breathing.
Boussoufa took the first one off Fajr’s foot and moved it before he had properly received it, one touch, gone, and made it look like something he had been doing since he was 6, which he had.
Then it went wrong for 20 minutes.
Sofyan lost it 3 times in 4 minutes. Not through carelessness. Through instinct. Every time the ball came to him his head came up and he looked for the forward pass, the killer, the thing that has won us 4 matches in this tournament, and there was nothing on and he tried it anyway.
Tweet. I stopped it. Reset.
Tweet. Stopped it again.
The 3rd time I did not blow the whistle. I walked out into the middle of them and I did not say a word to him. I just pointed at the grass behind our own back 4. The empty 40 yards.
"That," I said. "That is where the quickest man alive lives. Every time you force that pass and it goes, that grass is where the ball ends up, and he is already in it."
Sofyan stood with his hands on his hips and his chest going.
He looked at the grass a long moment. Then he blew his cheeks out.
"It is against everything in me, coach."
"I know it is. That is why I asked you and not somebody else."
He wiped his face with his shirt, and he went back in, and he did not force another one all afternoon.
En-Nesyri did the session.
He was not meant to.
Rebecca had him marked for ball work and shooting, nothing lateral, and he came out with the group in his boots with his jaw set and looked at me, and I let him, because there are men you cannot say no to in front of 22 others without taking something off them you cannot give back.
He was fine in the box work. Fine in the shooting. Thump. Thump. Bottom corner, bottom corner, an easy 15 yards of run-up and a leg that has put 5 goals into this tournament.
And then Ziyech curled one in behind him from the left and he had to spin on it.
Off the left side. Full pelt.
He got to the ball. He scored, actually, tucked it in with the outside of his foot like it was a Tuesday. And then he stayed down for a second and a half with his hand flat on the grass.
One and a half seconds. Nothing. A man taking a breath.
I looked at Rebecca on the touchline and Rebecca was already looking at me and neither of us moved a muscle in our faces.
And 10 yards away, Benatia had stopped walking.
My captain stood in the middle of that pitch with a ball under his arm and watched Youssef En-Nesyri get up off the grass, and then he looked over at me.
He knows. I saw it go across his face and I saw him decide what to do with it inside about a second and a half of his own.
He picked the ball up off the deck and shouted something down the pitch about the next drill, loud, in Arabic, and 22 heads turned to him and away from a striker brushing grass off his shorts.
That is what a captain is for. Nobody had to ask him and nobody had to tell him, and by the time the group looked back, there was nothing to look at.
He came past me at the end of the session with his boots in his hand and did not break stride.
"Whatever you decide about him," he said, quiet, straight ahead, "the room will be behind it. I will make sure of it."
And then he was gone up the steps of the coach, and that was the whole conversation, and it was the most useful 11 words anybody said to me all week.
We finished at half 5. The 40 at the fence sang the whole way through and were still singing when the coach pulled out, and the bloke with the suitcase had sold every flag in it.
The coach doors shut with that hydraulic sigh they do, pssshh, and the singing at the fence carried on going through the glass, thinner and thinner as we pulled away.
I got my phone out on the bus, which I had not done all day, and that was a mistake.
Because you cannot look at it for 5 minutes. There is no such thing as looking at it for 5 minutes. You look at it and the world comes in through the hole.
The first thing was a school in Lagos.
Somebody had filmed it on a phone in a yard with a corrugated roof, 200-odd kids in green, and they were singing something I did not understand and stamping in time, stomp, stomp, stomp-stomp-stomp, and a teacher in the corner of the shot with her hands over her mouth laughing at them.
You could hear it coming out of my hand in a quiet coach, tinny and far away and 200 kids strong.
The caption said Nigeria is Morocco this Sunday. It had 6 million views.
I watched it twice and had to put the phone against my chest for a second.
Then a street in Marseille, at night, and they had closed the road, and there were 2,000 people in it with flares going and half of them in Moroccan shirts and half of them French and the whole thing was one enormous party with no fight in it anywhere. Hsss. Orange smoke rolling between the buildings.
Marseille is in France. I do not know what to do with Marseille. Nobody does.
Drogba had posted. Eto’o had posted, again. Anthony Joshua had posted, a photograph of himself in a green shirt with 4 words under it. An American rapper I had genuinely never heard of had put something up that had gone to 9 million people, and Marcus had to explain to me who he was and I still did not know.
There was a bar in Kingston at 6 in the morning, packed, everybody in green.
And then there was England.
Because it had not gone away, and it was never going to. A man had made a video of himself burning a Morocco flag in a garden in what looked like Essex, and it had done well, and underneath it a lot of people I would not want to meet were agreeing with him.
And under that, an England fan account with 400,000 followers had posted a picture of me in a Palace tracksuit and 3 words. Come on Danny.
And the argument under THAT went on for 9,000 replies, and I read about 20 of them before I put the phone in my pocket and looked out of the window at Moscow going past.
Both. Always both. It is never going to be one or the other again as long as I live.
[Click-click-click-click.] Shutters, going like rain, the second the coach doors opened at the hotel. 40 photographers on a rope for a man walking 20 feet across a pavement.
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Thank you to Sir nameyelus and Kostas_Gounakis for the support.