Chapter 820: Heinz Field
[Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Tuesday 24 July 2018. 21:40.]
The boxes came up to the fourth floor at twenty to ten at night and Deano would not let anybody touch them until he had counted.
Shhk. Shhk.
Heavy cardboard dragging on carpet.
Thirty shirts. Names on the back. First time Adidas have made anything with a Crystal Palace badge on it since before I was born.
"Nobody opens a box," Deano barked.
"Deano, come on."
"Nobody opens a box until I have got thirty." He was on his knees in a hotel corridor with a plastic clipboard. "Last thing I want is Sky Sports getting a photograph of it leaked off a seventeen-year-old’s Samsung."
James Tomkins ignored him, picked one up, and held it at arm’s length.
Red and blue, but the stripes are wider than last year and the sash across the front is gone. There is a new collar. Adidas have put their three stripes down the sleeves and made the eagle bigger.
"It is alright," Tomkins said. Out of a twenty-nine-year-old centre-half, that is a standing ovation.
"It is alright?"
"Scott. It is a shirt."
Scott Dann had his out of the plastic already. Riiip. "I have played four hundred games in this country and I have never once had a shirt somebody actually wants."
Andros Townsend was staring at his screen. "There are eleven thousand people on the club site right now and it does not even go on sale until Friday."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I have been watching the traffic number since nine o’clock, Scott, like a normal person."
I stood at the end of that corridor and watched thirty professional footballers pretend not to care about a piece of fabric.
Eight of them were mine before they were anybody’s.
In the season before I got the first team, I had the under 18s at this football club. We won the FA Youth Cup and the national title in the same eight weeks. My mother watched the final on a laptop in her kitchen because she could not get her shift covered.
Tyrick Mitchell played left back in that team. Nya Kirby sat in front of the centre-halves and did the running for everybody. He was sixteen and he did it better than men four years older.
Eberechi Eze played in front of him and scored in the semi-final and the final.
Connor Blake, Reece Hannam, and Jake Morrison were all in it.
Ellis Cartwright was on the bench for the final at sixteen and did not get on. I have never once told him that I nearly put him on.
And Michael Olise. He was fifteen that season and about four stone lighter. He played forty minutes of a quarter-final at Stamford Bridge, got kicked from one end of the grass to the other, and never once asked to come off.
He is sixteen now. He had a shirt with OLISE on the back of it in his hands. He did not open the packet. He held it, looked at it through the plastic, and took it to his room just like that.
Antoine Semenyo had his on over his training top before Deano had even finished counting.
Semenyo is the one of the seven who was never mine. He had an eight-week trial at this club at fifteen, eighteen months before I walked in, and somebody let him go at the end of it.
He came back through that door at seventeen the long way round, off a college pitch in Gloucestershire. Sarah is the only reason anybody looked at him twice.
He wore the shirt to breakfast.
---
[Heinz Field. Wednesday 25 July 2018. 10:15.]
You cannot train properly on a match pitch the morning of a game. So, we walked it.
Forty-five minutes. No ball. At walking pace. In front of two hundred people who had got in early and could not work out what they were watching.
Shk. Shk. Shk. Twenty-two pairs of boots scraping on dry grass and absolutely nothing else.
That is the least glamorous thing in this sport and it is the most useful. I have never once had a player tell me he enjoyed it.
"Again. From the goalkeeper."
Pierre-Emile Højbjerg stood on the halfway line with his hands planted on his hips.
"Coach, we have done this six times."
"We have done it six times and you have been in the right place exactly four times. Again."
The problem is the exact same one that has been on a whiteboard in Beckenham since Friday. Rúben Neves goes forward. Somebody has to be where Rúben Neves was. It is not complicated and it is not automatic. It will lose us a Community Shield in eleven days if it is still not automatic.
We walked it nine times.
On the ninth one, Højbjerg moved before Neves did. A seamless, unspoken rotation. That is the whole thing.
I did not say a word about it. A twenty-two-year-old does not need telling when he has just felt the rhythm click himself.
It was twenty-nine degrees at half ten in the morning with the air sat on top of us like a heavy wet coat. The sky over the river had gone the bruised purple colour it goes about forty minutes before a storm. Marcus had three men on fluid checks before we had even finished the walk.
Heinz Field is laid over a surface built for a different sport. It plays fast and dead at the exact same time. The ball zips off it quicker than you expect and then just stops when it should run.
I spent twenty minutes of that walkthrough on two men and nothing else.
James Tarkowski is twenty-five and has played ninety matches at this level. Ibrahima Konaté is nineteen and has played eleven. They have trained together exactly three times in their entire lives. Tonight, they are a centre-half pairing against a club that has scored in thirty-four consecutive European home matches.
"Ibrahima. When the striker drops off you, who goes with him?"
"I go."
"No."
"Coach, if I do not go, he turns with the ball."
"If you go, James is left on his own with their second striker and forty yards of open grass." I walked them both back five paces. "You hold the line. James talks. Again."
We did that eleven times and it was right eight of them. Eight out of eleven in July is a back four I can work with.
Dnk. The ball hit a dead patch of turf.
Ibrahima Konaté found that out twice in ten minutes and swore at the grass both times.
"Ibrahima."
"Coach, this pitch is broken."
"This pitch is what we have got, and Benfica have got it as well, and they landed two days before us."
"That is not an answer."
"No," I said. "Play five yards further back and it becomes one."
---
[Heinz Field Media Room. 13:00.]
There were forty of them in that room and nine of them were English.
The other thirty-one were American, and American sports journalists have not been trained to be polite to a football manager. I had forgotten what that is like.
"Coach, you took Morocco to a World Cup final ten days ago. How does a guy go from that to a preseason friendly in Pittsburgh?"
"By getting on an aeroplane."
Chuckles rippled through the room.
"Follow up. Do you feel like the same guy?"
I looked at him for a second. It is a better question than any of the nine English lads asked me and he did not even know it.
"No," I said, and moved on.
Somebody from a Pittsburgh paper asked me what the Holmesdale was. Somebody from a website asked whether Manchester United had been in touch. Somebody asked me to explain relegation and I did it for ninety seconds, and actually enjoyed it.
And then a woman at the back stood up, holding a recorder.
"You have got a nineteen-year-old on forty thousand posters in this city who has not kicked a ball for your club. Is that a football decision or a marketing decision?"
"It is a marketing decision."
The room went dead quiet. Nobody expects that answer.
"He is not playing tonight and he is not playing on Sunday. My medical staff have told me he does not touch a football for nine days, and I am not going over their heads just to sell tickets."
I picked up my water bottle.
"You will all see him in September. Tonight you are getting Christian Benteke, who has scored fifteen goals in a Premier League season, and I would put a poster of him on absolutely anything."
Christian Benteke found out about that quote in the tunnel six hours later because somebody showed him a clip on a screen.
He did not say anything to me about it. He just put his massive hand on the back of my neck on the way out to the pitch and squeezed once. Out of Benteke, that is a full speech.