Glory Of The Football Manager System

The whistle went, and the world split in half.

Prrrrp.

France ran. The whole of them tore away to my right toward one corner, players and substitutes and doctors folding into a single shape, and behind that goal 3 tiers of blue came up at once.

RRRRAAAAAAAA.

The cannons on the tunnel roof fired again and filled the black with paper.

Whump. Whump.

"Allez les Bleus! Allez les Bleus!"

And in front of me, on the grass I had ordered them out onto, 11 men in green went down where they stood, and stayed down.

I moved.

I had already half turned toward my own bench, because that is what I do at the end of a final. I turn and I find Bray and I take his head in both hands and I say something stupid in his ear. My body had started doing it before the rest of me had been told.

He was on the lip of the dugout with his hands over the back of his neck and the rain coming off his elbows, and he did not look up.

"Give me a minute, Danny," he said, before I got a word out.

So I left him. Rebecca came past me with the bag and said, "Go on. Go to them."

So I went.

I did not run. There was no run left in me, and there was something coming up the back of my throat I could not have run from anyway. I swallowed it down and kept walking, because the walking was the only thing keeping it there.

I have won finals. More than my share of them. And every time, at the whistle, I have been running, both arms up, going the wrong way across a pitch to find whichever of my staff wanted holding.

I had never once in my life walked out slow after a final. I did not know the walk was even there until my legs were doing it.

I went out through the rain, past the ball sitting dead in the centre circle where nobody had wanted to touch it.

And I looked at what was left of them.

They had not just lost. They had come apart. 45 minutes earlier these men had started dragging a World Cup final back from 3 goals down in a monsoon, a thing the body is not built to do, and the whistle was the second the last of them was allowed to stop.

They stopped all at once. Legs cramping and locking under men who could not have got up if the stand had caught fire. Chests heaving at the black sky and pulling nothing down out of it. One of them near the centre spot on his hands and knees, being sick into the grass.

They had left every last thing they had out here, and now they had to lie in it, because there was nothing left in them to stand up with.

Behind the far goal the French had the low song going now, the one that comes up through your feet.

"On est les champions! On est les champions!"

Sofyan was face down on the halfway line with both arms locked over the back of his head.

I got down on my haunches beside him and put a hand flat between his shoulder blades and left it there.

"Sofyan. Up. Come on."

Hnn.

"I had it, boss." His voice came out of the grass, wrecked. "The winner. After. It was right there."

"I know."

"It was there."

"You were 3 goals down at the hour and you made it 3-3 with your left foot in the 90th minute of a World Cup final. Now get up off this grass, because the whole world is watching, and I am not having them see you lie down in it."

I did not feel like the man saying it. My own chest was full of the same thing that had put him face down in the grass, and I held it shut and said the lines anyway, because the players cannot, and that is the job when the job, and the man doing it, have nothing left.

"Don’t let go of me yet, boss."

"I’m not going anywhere."

His hand came out and found my forearm and closed on it, hard enough that I still had the marks in the morning.

And then he pulled, and I took the whole dead weight of him up through my shoulder, a grown man with nothing left in his legs, shaking with the cold and the effort of it.

He came onto his knees, and then his feet, and he stood on legs that did not want to hold him, and he did not wipe his face.

And then Nordin got to him, and I stepped back, because there is a point where a manager is in the way.

His brother took the back of his head in both hands and put their foreheads together and held him up, because Sofyan could not have stood on his own, and neither of them said a word, and the pair of them stood in the middle of that pitch like a single object.

Both of them out of Huizen. Both of them out of the same front room. Their mother had been in the same seat behind our tunnel for all 7 matches in the same scarf, and she had 2 sons on that grass, and she was going to have to choose which one to reach first.

By then my staff were out on the pitch. I had not called them. Rebecca had a green shirt’s arm hooked over her shoulder and was holding him up on his feet, going nowhere, just keeping him standing. Somebody had Boussoufa under both arms from behind.

They were lifting because somebody had to, and there was nobody left to tell them to.

Benatia was already up. My captain, who cannot run, who has not run since the 3rd match of this tournament, was going body to body ahead of the lot of us. Hauling men off the floor by the shirt.

Saying the same 3 or 4 words to each one in Arabic, low, mouth to ear, over and over. I never asked what they were. I did not need to.

Ziyech was on his back on the edge of the box with his arms out wide, staring straight up into the rain with his eyes open.

"Get up, Hakim."

"In a minute, boss."

"You made 2 of the 3."

"And I didn’t make the 4th."

"Nobody made the 4th. That is the point of the 4th."

He turned his head sideways in the grass and looked at me.

"Do you know what I was thinking about, at 3-3," he said. "The Amsterdam Arena. And who was in it, watching."

"They were watching."

"Yeah."

"Get up."

He got up.

I went the long way round after that, and I know exactly what I did.

Bounou was still in his own goal, sitting against the inside of the net with his knees up and his gloves on and his back to all 78,000 of them, as far from another living soul as a man can get on a football pitch.

Folded up on his own line where nobody could see his face. I had a clear path to him, and I turned the other way.

I did not have it in me yet, whatever it is you say to a goalkeeper who ran 100 yards up the pitch for the last ball of the World Cup and headed it off the post. That one I would have to find later.

***

Thank you for 100 Power Stones.