Chapter 803: Paper Kingdom
Tp.
"Coach," Nadia said, without moving her lips. "Stand up straighter."
They made me a citizen of Morocco that morning. Honorary, on paper, with a seal on it, 42 days after I got off an aeroplane in a country I had never set foot in.
And what went through my head, stood on that carpet, was this.
Does this affect my tax?
That is it. That is the entire contents of Daniel Walsh at the biggest moment of his working life. A king makes him a citizen of a nation of 35 million people and his brain produces a question about HMRC.
I asked Nadia about it in a corridor 20 minutes later because I could not stop myself.
She looked at me for a long moment.
"There are men who have given 40 years to that federation who do not have what is in your hand," she said. "You have had 42 days."
"I know."
"So do not ask me about tax." Then she laughed, which she has done twice in 6 weeks, and had to turn round and face a wall.
At the reception afterwards a man got to me before I had a glass in my hand. Leather folder. Photographs of houses in it.
Behind him a car firm. Behind them a bank.
"Coach Walsh. Sea view, or the golf."
"I am on a flight tonight."
"The keys can go to London."
"Thank you. No."
The squad got offers that afternoon I am not going to repeat, and some of them took things, and every man who did was entitled to.
I said no to all of it and it was not nobility.
It was that on the 11th of August I have to stand in a technical area at Selhurst Park and ask 25 English footballers to run through a wall for me, and I am not doing that with a Moroccan house.
Jessica agreed, which frightened me more than the rest of it put together.
She had been in the country since Sunday night. Essaouira. A beach, 2 books, brown as a nut, and she had not said one word to me about being there.
"Because you have spent 2 days being sung at by a country," she said, on a terrace, in sunglasses she did not take off, "and I have got 4 telephone calls in my pocket, and a man in that condition should not be within 100 miles of an agent."
"That is the only unprofessional thing you have ever done."
"It is." She turned a page. "Take the citizenship. Take the medal. Take nothing with a number on it. Thursday, Danny."
"It is Thursday."
"It is Thursday in Morocco. It is not Thursday in London until you are stood in the building."
And in the middle of all of it, on the Wednesday I cannot otherwise account for, Marcus Reid put me in a car and drove me 40 minutes up the coast without telling me where we were going.
A gate. A track. 30 hectares of red dirt with the Atlantic on the other side of it.
Rebar. Sand piles. A site hut with a plan pinned up curling at all 4 corners. 6 pitches marked out in string and pegs, and 1 goal frame standing at the far end of the nearest one with nothing else on it anywhere.
A site manager called Rachid walked me round it in a hard hat 2 sizes too big for me.
"Here, the residence. 60 beds." He pointed at sand. "Here the medical. Here the gym. Here 2 pitches with the drainage, the English drainage, because your people were very firm about the drainage."
"That will be Marcus."
"It was a man with a can," Rachid said.
Marcus was 40 yards away, stood in the middle of a pitch that does not exist, looking at string.
I had thought Palace let me go because Steve Parish is a decent man and because a World Cup is a World Cup.
That is not why.
Crystal Palace Football Club and the Royal Moroccan Football Federation are building that place together. Palace money, Palace coaching model, Palace medical structure. Moroccan land, Moroccan federation, Moroccan players.
And what Palace get, written into it, is first look.
First look at one of the deepest pools of young talent on this earth. 35 million people, and a diaspora across Holland and Belgium and France and Spain, feeding a residence with 60 beds, with a Premier League club holding the door open.
6 weeks of me was the price. Parish paid it in May and did not tell me what he was buying.
"You knew."
"I knew in April." Marcus would not look at me. "I drew the drainage, Danny. He made me sign something."
There were 4 kids on the far pitch. No goals, no nets, no grass, playing on packed red dirt inside a string rectangle with a ball that had been repaired.
Rachid started shouting and I stopped him.
We stood and watched about 10 minutes. One of them, left foot, 11 or 12, went past 2 lads and hit it into the only goal frame on that site from 20 yards.
Donk.
Off the crossbar, because there is no net.
"Rachid. When you open this place, that one comes."
He turned and looked at me, and he was polite about it, and that made it worse.
"Coach. Forgive me." He had the hard hat in his hands. "You are going home on Thursday."
And there it was.
I had been in that country 42 days and I had 23 players and a staff and a squad list and a flight home, and I had got so used to being the man who says a thing and it happens that I had walked onto a building site and started picking a 12-year-old.
I do not run that academy. I will not be running it when it opens. I had no more right to promise that boy anything than the man selling water at the gate.
"You are right," I said. "I am sorry."
"No, no."
"No, you are right. That was not mine to say."
Rachid stood there with the hat in both hands, and then he did a thing I have thought about since.
He took a pencil out of his top pocket, turned a drawing over, and wrote something on the back of it.
"I will find out his name anyway," he said. "That is mine to do."
Which brings me back to a hotel carpet and a suitcase that would not shut.
"Move," my mother said.
She came away from that window, got down on one knee in her good coat, took the flag out from under my hand, refolded it into a third of the size in about 9 seconds, and put it back down the side.
Then she shut the case with one hand.
"You have never been able to pack," she said. "Since you were 9."
"Mum."
"Bag on the bed. Downstairs. You are going to miss an aeroplane."
The squad were in the function room off the lobby because the coaches were not there yet, and I had 25 minutes to say goodbye to 23 men.
I did it badly. I have done it badly every time.
And it was Boussoufa who asked, because Boussoufa is 33 and has been through 4 of these.
"Coach. Who is coming?"
"I do not know."
"You do not know, or you cannot say?"
"Mbark, I genuinely do not know." I had to be straight with him, because the room had gone quiet on it. "I am not on the panel. I am not consulted. Nobody has asked me for a name and nobody is going to.
"My deal is 6 weeks and it finishes when the wheels touch in London tonight."
"You could tell them something."
"I could tell them 40 things. They do not have to listen to any of it and they will not."
That is the truth of it and it is worth putting down, because people assume otherwise.