Glory Of The Football Manager System

The France game kicked off at 8.

Marcus came to my room with the laptop and a folder 2 inches thick, and this time it was a proper feed, not a lad’s phone.

The full weight of it came out of the speaker, 60,000 in Saint Petersburg, a commentator with the big-night voice on, the low roll of a crowd that knew what it was watching. [Rrrrrmmm.] I turned it up until the little speaker buzzed.

I wanted Belgium. I will say that plainly, because a book like this is worth nothing if I lie in it.

Belgium were a golden generation, and I do not use that as a soft word. Courtois in goal, the best keeper in the world. Alderweireld and Vertonghen and Kompany across the back. Witsel and De Bruyne and Fellaini in the middle.

And in front, Hazard and Lukaku, the most talent one small country has ever put on a pitch at one time, a group who had spent 10 years being told they would win something and had not won it yet.

And I fancied us against them. Because talent you can out-run. Talent you can out-fight. I had just out-fought England’s with a keeper who had waited a month and a boy having his first game.

France were the other thing.

Deschamps I knew about. Every manager does. The water carrier, they called him when he played, the one who did the running so the artists did not have to, and he coaches the way he played.

He was forged in Italy in the 90s, when a clean sheet was a religion, and it never left him. His teams are not made to be watched. They are made to win.

They had the most gifted squad in Russia and he had turned them into the meanest defence in it, and when the papers called it boring he said the thing he always says. We win. That is the most important. The day we stop winning, we can talk.

I have a lot of time for a man like that, if I am honest. He does not care what you think of the football. He cares what the scoreboard says. So do I.

They lined up the way Deschamps always lines them up. Lloris in goal. Pavard and Lucas Hernández at full-back, Varane and Umtiti in the middle, the best defence in the tournament, 4 clean sheets in 6 games. Kanté and Pogba in front of them.

Matuidi tucking in off the left to make it a 3 in the middle when they needed it. And up top, Giroud to hold it, Griezmann to find the gaps, and Mbappé.

Kick-off. And the number came up in the corner of my eye before a pass had been made, whether I went looking for it or not.

I looked at Pavard first, their right-back, the young lad from Stuttgart, a converted centre-half and the one seam I had circled in the whole side.

[BENJAMIN PAVARD. CA 158.]

Higher than any Croatian I had read all tournament. Higher than Modrić. A number I had seen twice in my life, and it belonged to what I had marked down as the weakest man in the team.

I sat forward on that bed and felt something cold go down the back of my neck. Because if the seam read 158, the rest of them were going to be worse.

I made myself look at the middle of the pitch.

[N’GOLO KANTÉ. CA 181.]

[PAUL POGBA. CA 179.]

The 2 of them.

Sat in front of the back 4, one to win it and one to launch it, and between them 360 of ability I could not touch. And I thought about Fajr and Aït Bennasser, my 2 who had strangled Henderson, the one link.

You cannot strangle a link when there are 3 of them and one of them is Kanté. Kanté does not have a link. Kanté eats the men you send to press him and gives it to the man who kills you.

And then, because the System is a cruelty and not a kindness, it showed me the man it had been saving.

He was not even in the game yet.

He was standing on the halfway line with his hands on his hips, doing nothing, a fox asleep in the sun at the edge of a field full of rabbits, and 2 numbers came up over him, and it was the second one that stopped my heart.

[KYLIAN MBAPPÉ. CA 147. PA 197.]

147 now. 197 to come.

Read that again. His right-back was 158. Mbappé, today, at 19, was a 147, below 3 of his own team-mates, a boy still with the rough edges on him.

And his ceiling was 197. 197 out of 200. I have read players on grey mornings my whole life and I have never seen a gap like it, 50 points of it, the distance between the frightening thing he already is and the monster he is going to become.

He is not even finished. That was the part that put the cold in me. He is a 147 who can already do what I had just watched, and the machine says he is only halfway up his own mountain.

The fire again. Always the fire, and never the water. The gift that had shown me every door in this tournament, that had told me where Ashley Young’s legs were and where England’s fear lived, had just looked at France and shown me a wall with no door in it at all.

"Marcus."

"I know."

"Tell me you see a way through that."

He did not answer, which is Marcus for no.

And then the game started to happen, and it was worse than the numbers.

France did not want the ball.

That was the thing that turned my stomach, because it was me. It was us.

They let Belgium have it, all that gold, knocking it side to side in front of a French block that sat and watched them do it.

And do not think Belgium were not good. They were frightening.

Hazard got the ball on the half-turn on 12 minutes and went at Pavard. I have seen a lot of players run at a lot of full-backs and this was something else, a low centre of gravity and the ball on a string.

He beat him and cut it back for Lukaku, and Varane threw a leg across it a foot from the line.

On another night that is 1-0 Belgium, and the whole thing looks different.

De Bruyne was orchestrating it, dropping deep, spraying it 40 yards onto a toe. Witsel breaking it up. Hazard and Lukaku pulling the French back 4 into shapes it did not want to make. The Belgian end lifted every time De Bruyne got on it, a rising [oooh] that climbed and climbed.

And every time, it hit the wall. Varane and Umtiti in the middle, the best 2 defenders in the tournament, reading it before it happened, and Kanté in front of them mopping up anything that slipped the net.

Belgium’s gold kept coming and the wall kept holding, and you could hear 30,000 people slowly working out that their best players, the best group their country has ever made, were not going to get through.

And then De Bruyne, the best passer alive, tried to force the thing that would not come, a ball into Lukaku 30 yards out, and 3 French shirts closed the gap before the big man had turned.

[skhh.]

Gone. And not just gone. Already going the other way, and the fox on the halfway line was not on the halfway line any more.

[whoosh.]

One touch to kill it, one to knock it into the space, and Mbappé was gone.

I have watched football my whole life and I have never seen acceleration like it on a screen.

He did not build up to top speed, he was just at it, from nothing, 5 yards into 40 in the time it takes to say it, and 2 Belgian defenders who had a head start turned to chase him and he pulled away from them standing still, like they were wading and he was on ice.

And the whole ground caught its breath at once, [AAAH], that noise a crowd makes when it sees the danger a half-second before it lands, 60,000 people’s fear pouring out of my laptop into a hotel room in Moscow.

He squared it across the 6-yard box a fraction too hard and Giroud could not quite reach it, and the danger died. He did not even score.

He did not need to score. Not for me. I had seen everything I was ever going to need to see about what happens if you give that boy grass to run into, and I felt it in my stomach like something cold I had swallowed.

"Wind it back," I said. "Count the white shirts behind the ball."