Chapter 787: The Standing II
I passed En-Nesyri instead, 2 doctors already on him and the leg strapped, and he did not need me, and I put a hand on the top of his head and kept walking.
I went to Hakimi last, on purpose, because I did not have the words for him and I wanted the walk to find them.
He was where the counter had left him. Sitting, knees up, both arms hanging off them, staring at the strip of grass down the left where it had all died.
The best 45 minutes any full-back has played in my lifetime, and the same 45 minutes had opened the door that killed us, and he knew it, and there is no medal on earth that mends that.
I sat down next to him in the wet.
Boom.
Thunder somewhere over the roof, a long way off, late to a thing it had missed.
"It went down my side," he said.
"It went down the side I ordered you to leave. That was me. Not you. Are you hearing me. That one was mine."
"Boss, don’t."
"Say it back to me."
He looked at me. He is 19. Sitting there with his socks round his ankles he looked about 14.
"It was yours," he said.
"Good. Now get up. There are 78,000 people out here who need to see your face, and one of them flew in from Madrid this morning and does not care what the scoreboard says."
He put a hand down in the mud and pushed.
And that was when it started.
I did not catch the first of it. My ears had gone strange somewhere around the 92nd minute and had not come back. It was Rebecca who heard it, stopping dead with a bottle in her hand and turning all the way round on the spot like somebody had said her name.
"Danny," she said. "Look."
The green had come up.
Not to leave. Not the terrible kindness of half-time. Every one of them, on his feet in the rain.
And they were not up because they were happy. You could see that from the middle of the pitch. Faces running with the rain and with the other thing that was not rain. Grown men with their scarves pulled up over their mouths.
A little lad up on his father’s shoulders, maybe 8 years old, tears coming down his face and his small hands going anyway, clap, clap, clap, not understanding why he was crying and doing it because his dad was.
They were heartbroken. Every last one of them. Their team had gone further than any team of theirs had ever gone in the history of the thing, and had lost it at the death, and it was written on all of them.
And they had got to their feet through it. And they were giving us the only thing they had left, which was to stand in a monsoon and refuse to let us feel small.
I knew their story, because it was ours as well.
6 weeks earlier not one of these people had a ticket past the group, because nobody outside their own country had given this squad a prayer of getting out of it. The rejects. The ones Holland let go and Spain sent home and half of Europe would not take a second look at.
Then we beat Iran, and they came. We got robbed blind by Portugal in the Kaliningrad rain, a good goal wiped off a screen, the kind of thing that should have broken us and sent every one of them home, and they did not go home, they got angry and they stayed.
We beat Spain and climbed out of the group nobody thought we could climb out of. We put the hosts out of their own tournament in front of their own president. Bounou stood on his line against Croatia and saved 2 in the shootout and dropped to his knees in the mud, and they were still there.
We beat England in the semi, my England, and I did not know where to put my face, and they sang my name at me anyway.
City by city, on aeroplanes their own government put in the sky, they had followed a team nobody wanted all the way to the last match there is.
And now that team had lost it, and every one of them was on his feet in the rain, and they were clapping.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
Not cheering. Clapping. Slow. Flat and heavy and together, the way you do when there is nothing to celebrate and you are going to do it anyway.
Then one voice went up out of the middle of it. No microphone.
"LA ILAHA ILLA ALLAH."
Clap clap.
And thousands came back at him.
"MUHAMMAD RASUL ALLAH."
Clap clap.
Half of them calling and half of them answering, round and round, in a Moscow monsoon, 3 minutes after losing a World Cup final.
I have never heard a football ground make that sound. I do not think I will again.
Then the rest of the stadium went.
That is the part I did not expect and the part I will not forget. Every neutral in the building. Every corporate seat and every box and every Russian who had bought a ticket for a coronation and got this instead. Tens of thousands of people with no flag in it and no cousin in either squad.
They stood up.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
It went round 3 sides of the ground and found itself and turned into one sound.
And then the French end joined in.
38,000 of them. Champions of the world for 4 minutes. Every right in the game to sing at us until dawn.
They turned round and clapped the team that had just lost to them. People who had gone 3 up and watched all of it burn in 31 minutes. Who had had their own hearts stopped twice.
Who had come out the far side of it as champions of the world and knew in their bodies that they had just been part of the greatest match anyone in that stadium will ever see.
Their players came across the grass. Lloris first. Then Griezmann, going down the line of green shirts, taking heads in his hands. Their staff crossed the halfway line looking for ours and got hold of them.
And out in the middle of it my beaten team was on its feet. Every one of them up now.
Not standing so much as being held up, by me, by Benatia, by their brothers, by a physio with a bag she never opened, by 78,000 strangers in the rain who had decided they would not be allowed to lie down.
There was not a man in green left on the grass, because the whole of that stadium had made up its mind that there would not be.
Up on the rail by our tunnel the old man had his cap off, and then back on, and both hands going over the top of it, and his mouth was moving the whole time, and he was not saying it to anybody.
I got close enough to hear it once.
"Shukran. Shukran. Shukran."
Over and over. At nobody. Into the rain.
78,000 people. The winners and the beaten and every neutral who had come for a coronation, standing in a monsoon to clap for a team that had lost 4-3.
That sound came down on me like a weight. I stood in the middle of my players with the rain running off my chin and felt it hit me in the chest, wave on wave.
And the thing I had been holding shut since the whistle came all the way up and stopped behind my teeth, and it took everything I had left not to go down in the grass with my boys and let it out where the cameras could have it.
Because I understood it now, the thing I had chased for 6 weeks and never once said out loud.
Not one of them was clapping because we had won. We had not won. They were on their feet because they had seen us. A team nobody on the earth had wanted, seen by the whole of it at last, and told to its face, in a monsoon, that it would never be forgotten.
That is the sweetest thing I have ever been handed on a football pitch. And I did not win a single thing to get it.
I have managed a long time. I had never seen it.
And I was in the middle of it with my mouth open like a fool when Bray finally came out, and put his hand on my shoulder from behind, and said the only thing anybody said to me all night that was any use at all.
"Danny. You’ve never lost one before, have you."
***
Thank you to Sir nameyelus and Kostas_Gounakis for the support.