Glory Of The Football Manager System

The drums found each other again under the roar. Boom. Boom-boom. Boom. And down from the top tiers came the ululation, the women somewhere up in the dark, lilililililiii, thin and high and older than football.

Ziyech did not run to the corner. He turned and jogged back through the rain with the ball under one arm and gave it to Pitana like a man handing back a library book, and 40,000 people sang his name at him and he did not once look up at them.

I had one fist by my side, and I put it away.

"38 MINUTES!" My voice came out as rope. Bray relayed it down the line. "38! GO AGAIN!"

And France answered inside 90 seconds, because France are France.

Pogba took one touch out of the restart and hit a ball 60 yards with the outside of his boot, flat and vicious through the rain, and Mbappé was onto it past Dirar before the sound of the strike reached me.

He cut in. He opened his body, the same shape as the 2nd goal, the same shape as the nightmare.

THWACK.

PAFF.

Yassine Bounou threw himself down and to his left and got a hand behind it, a whole hand, and held it at the second grab, on the wet grass, with Griezmann arriving.

"OOOOOOH." The whole ground, both halves, one breath.

The noise the green half made was not relief. It was the sound of 40,000 people being shown the price of the ticket. Scoring had not made us safer. Scoring had woken it up.

Joy, then the cold hand.

And up at the top of the green end, where the concrete goes dark, a man in a green shirt came back down the steps.

He had never made it out of the stadium. He came down slow, holding the rail, and stood at his row, and pulled the wet shirt back on over his head.

I looked for him at every stoppage after that. He never sat down again.

55 minutes, and the best midfielder on earth stopped running.

Kanté had covered every blade of the Luzhniki for 55 minutes and there was nothing left in him, and Deschamps saw it before anybody, and the board went up. Tolisso on.

N’Golo Kanté walked off a World Cup final with his socks round his ankles, and the French end stood for him, all 38,000, and so did a fair number of ours, because football knows.

Clap-clap-clap-clap. Even the rain seemed to join in.

And the game breathed differently the moment he crossed the line.

Boussoufa felt it first. The next ball into him, he turned. Just turned, in the centre circle, in space that had not existed for 55 minutes, and 40,000 people went "OLÉÉÉ" and he was away into grass with his head up.

33 years old. Playing in a league the cameras skip. Running a World Cup final.

We came in waves after that. Wooooo went the green end every time we crossed halfway, the swell of it rising and falling like something tidal.

Ziyech bent one a yard over. Nordin got to the byline and Umtiti put it behind. From the corner, Saïss rose at the near post and Lloris beat it away with 2 fists, pomf, and the rebound would not sit for anybody.

And through all of it, everywhere, the number 2.

Hakimi overlapped. Hakimi underlapped. Hakimi took a throw, gave it, got it back 40 yards higher. Hakimi lost Griezmann on the halfway line and then won the ball back off him 80 yards from where I had last seen him, and I honestly could not tell you how he had got there.

Bray had stopped using his name.

"He is everywhere," he said, to nobody, watching him go again. "He is everywhere."

Dirar won a ball off Mbappé, clean, shoulder and boot, and the crowd gave him a roar all of his own, because everybody in the ground knew what the first half had cost him, and football knows that too.

Sofyan caught Griezmann late, tired legs, and the free kick was 25 yards out, dead centre, and the whole of Morocco held its breath while Griezmann stood over it doing nothing with his face.

He clipped it over the wall and Bounou was already there, reading it all the way, taking it into his chest like a man catching his own child.

Thump. Held.

I peeled my jacket off and dropped it behind me and nobody picked it up.

68 minutes. 69. The rain came sideways through the lights. My shirt had gone see-through. I had stopped being able to shout at all. I conducted with my arms like a man bringing a plane in.

71 minutes.

El Ahmadi won it and fed Boussoufa, and Boussoufa saw Hakimi go before Hakimi went, and put it into the channel with the exact weight, and Achraf Hakimi hit that ball first time, on the half-turn, at a dead sprint, without one touch to set himself.

I have watched full-backs my whole life. Nobody hits that cross. It came off his boot already whipped, already rising, and it went over Umtiti and over Varane and it was too high for every head in the box and behind all of them.

Too high and behind for everybody except a man willing to fall over backwards.

Youssef En-Nesyri had an hour in that leg and the hour was spent. He could not turn off the bad side. Turning was the one thing left on earth he could not do.

So he did not turn.

He watched it come over his shoulder, and he planted the good leg, and he threw himself up and backwards into the rain, both feet over his own head, 20 years old, upside down in the lights of a World Cup final.

CRACK.

Laces. It hit the underside of the bar, tink, and went down over the line and into the roof of the net, fssst, while he was still in the air.

And he landed on the bad side, and did not get up.

For one full second the Luzhniki made no sound at all. 78,000 people and the rain.

Then it came, and it had no shape. Not a roar. Every noise at once, screaming and laughing and howling and 1,000 people just saying no, no, no, because nobody in that stadium could agree on what they had seen, and the drums lost the beat and just banged.

2-3. 71 minutes.

BWAAAAP. BWAAAP. The horns. The drums with no beat. And under all of it the ululation again, wilder now, coming down from everywhere at once.

And in the goalmouth a man lay flat on his back in the rain with both hands over his face, and he was not celebrating.

Benatia reached him first. My captain, who cannot run, ran again. In the quarter-final it was Bounou who lifted a face out of the mud. This time Benatia knelt in the 6-yard box and got both arms under his striker and held him, and En-Nesyri’s mouth was moving and I do not want to know what it was saying.

Rebecca was already on the pitch. She did not wait to be waved.

I had the board in my hands before she got there. Harit had his top off, standing beside me, bouncing.

They got Youssef up. He put no weight through the leg at all. And 30 yards away he looked across all that rain at me, and at the board with his number on it.

Saturday, in a hotel room, he shook on it. When you take me off, I come off.

He came off.

One arm over Rebecca, hopping, in the 72nd minute of a World Cup final that he had just dragged back within one goal, and the whole stadium stood, both halves, blue and green, all of it, and clapped a 20-year-old from Málaga off the pitch.

He stopped in front of me for half a second. He did not say anything. He put his forehead against mine, the way Bounou goes forehead to forehead, 10 seconds a man, and then he hopped on to the bench.

Hugo Lloris stood on the edge of his box and clapped him the whole way. So did Varane. Whatever else that night was, the men in blue knew what they had just seen, and what it had cost.

It was Munir who got up for him. Munir, who told me on Friday I was wrong, took off his own coat and put it round En-Nesyri’s shoulders and knelt down and took his boots off for him, and I had to look away and put Harit on.

I grabbed 2 fistfuls of Harit’s shirt.

"Go and be 21."

He nodded, chin up.

"Whatever happens now, coach. Nobody can unhappen it."

And Amine Harit ran into a World Cup final.

***

Thank you for 300 Power Stones.