Chapter 792: In English II
I pulled the microphone 2 inches closer.
"It was my call."
You could hear it land. There is a noise 400 people make when they were expecting French.
"I sent them," I said. "Benatia, Saïss, Dirar. I stood on that line and I waved them up for a corner in the 91st minute of a World Cup final, and I left 70 yards of grass behind them with Kylian Mbappé stood in the middle of it.
"And before anybody prints that I did not see it coming. I told that dressing room at half time it would happen. Out loud. So that no man in the room could say afterwards that he had not been warned."
Somebody down the row said something in French. I did not look at him.
"A draw was worth nothing to me," I said. "I wanted to win a World Cup. So I traded that grass, and 52 seconds later it was 4-3.
"If you are looking for the reason Morocco are not champions of the world tonight, it is stood in front of you in a wet suit. It is not one of those players.
"Any of them. Not one."
He had the sense not to ask a follow-up. He sat down.
"That is your English," I said. "You have waited 6 weeks for it. There it is."
The moderator was talking. Nobody was listening to him.
And then a woman 4 rows in front of him, in an accent off a road about 3 miles from my mother’s front door, got up without being called and said: "Danny. Do you regret taking the job?"
I have thought about that question a lot since.
"I have got a silver medal round my neck that I have not been able to look at yet, and a squad in that room who cannot get up off the floor," I said. "Ask me in a year and I will give you a better answer than the one I have got now."
Fweep. A steward, somewhere behind, far too late to be any use to anybody.
Then the moderator killed it, properly, and Nadia got me off that stage.
And I will tell you what I was actually thinking on the way down those steps, because it was not noble and it was not clever.
I was thinking about Achraf Hakimi sat on wet grass with his hands on his head.
I was thinking that he is 19, that Madrid have already started writing about him, and that he has 15 years of this in front of him.
And that if the first line under his name for the rest of his career is the boy whose side it went down, then I have taken something off him that I cannot ever give back.
I could carry it. That was the whole of my thinking. I have got a job and a house and a woman and a mother and 5 trophies in 13 months.
He has got a shirt and a knee and a lot of years.
She did not say a word until we were out of that room and round a corner in the service corridor, and then she stopped, and put both hands over her face for about 2 seconds, and took them off again.
"Coach."
"I know."
"No. Coach." Her voice had gone somewhere I have not heard it in 6 weeks. "You have just handed every newspaper in the world tomorrow’s front page and you have signed it."
"It is the truth."
"It is your truth, and you are the only person on this earth telling it." She was walking again, fast, and I had to go with her.
"Nobody was going to blame you. Nobody. Not one journalist in that room had written that line. Now all of them will, and they will put your name on it, because you have handed them permission."
"Good."
"It is not good."
"Nadia. If they are writing about me tomorrow they are not writing about Achraf." I stopped in that corridor. "He is 19. He has done nothing wrong. He has spent the last hour sat on wet grass thinking it went down his side and it is his fault.
"So let them have me. I can carry it. He cannot."
She looked at me for a long time.
"You understand that they will use it," she said. "Not tomorrow. Later. Somebody will use that clip against you for the rest of your career."
"Probably."
"Not probably. Certainly."
Then she went off to find my mother, and I stood in a concrete corridor on my own for about a minute and a half.
Somewhere above me, through about 40 feet of Soviet concrete, I could still hear them.
DIMA MAGHRIB.
Still. At that hour. In that rain, for that scoreline.
I put my back against the wall and stood there listening to a country that had not gone home, and I did not have one single thing in my head that would have made any sense written down.
Emma was in the room they had put us in, on the arm of a plastic chair, with her phone in her hand and her feet up on my kit bag.
Red hair gone dark with the wet and stuck down one side of her face. Green eyes. Mascara gone at the corner of one of them, and she is not a woman who does not know.
Morocco replica shirt off a stall outside the ground, green with the star, bought that afternoon and not off her since. Jeans. Trainers that were finished.
And that 40-year-old second-hand Cartier her dad bought her for getting into Cambridge, which is the only expensive thing she owns, and which she wears to a football match in a monsoon.
She did not say hello.
She turned the phone round and showed me the screen. A live feed off some Russian channel, me at that table, leaning into a microphone.
"I watched that on a television in a corridor with 40 other people’s wives," she said. "Standing up. With your mother next to me."
"Ah."
"Do not ah me, Danny."
She was up off that chair and across the room.
"It has been out 4 minutes. Sky have run it twice. Somebody has already cut it with the Mbappé goal underneath it and put music on it.
"You have just taken the blame for a World Cup final. On camera. In English. For the first time in 6 weeks, on the record, forever."
Bzz. Bzz.