Chapter 789: Player of the Tournament
Hakimi came down the steps and did not look up once.
And then I finally did the thing I had spent 20 minutes walking round.
Bounou had not moved.
Every man in green was up somewhere on that pitch, and my goalkeeper was still sitting against the inside of his own net with his back to all of it. Gloves on. Laces done up. Exactly as he had been when the whistle went.
Shhp. Shhp. Shhp.
I went down the pitch to him and the water came over the welt of my shoes, and I got there, and I got down on my knees in it.
He would not turn his head.
"Yassine."
Nothing.
"Yassine. It’s me."
"Don’t."
"Alright."
"Boss, don’t. Please. Don’t say it."
The 92nd minute goes over his left shoulder. He comes off his line and spreads himself the way he has done for 6 weeks, and it is not the wrong call, it is the right call.
And a 19-year-old lifts it over him soft as a man hanging a coat on a hook, and everybody in that stadium including him watches it drop in.
Every other man on that grass I had a line for.
I had told Sofyan he made it 3-3, and that was true. I had told Achraf it went down the side I ordered him to leave, and that was true. I had told Hakim that nobody made the 4th, and that was true too.
I got down in front of my goalkeeper and I had nothing.
There is no sentence. There is no version of the last goal of that football match where the keeper is not the last man in it. He was the last man in it. He will be the last man in it when he is 60.
I opened my mouth twice. Nothing came out either time.
So I stayed there. On my knees in the water in front of him. Saying nothing, going nowhere, until his shoulders started going.
Then I put my forehead against the side of his head and held it there, and I still did not say anything, because there was nothing, and because a lie would have been worse.
Hnnnh.
He got a fistful of the front of my shirt.
"Boss."
"I know."
"Boss."
"I know. I know. I’ve got you."
That is the whole of what I had.
We were down there a while. I got him up in the end, and most of that was not me. It was Benatia, who had come the length of the pitch on a leg that could not do it, and got under his other arm without being asked.
"Yallah," he said. "Yallah. Up. Up."
"I can’t, Mehdi."
"You can. Up."
The 3 of us walked back up the middle together, and my goalkeeper had his head on my captain’s shoulder the whole way, and nobody in 78,000 said one word about it.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
After that it goes again.
I know we were lined up. I know somebody put us in an order, and I know I was at the end of it, because they always put the manager at the end.
Beaten team first. That is how it is done.
Mazraoui was in front of me in the line. 20 years old, uncapped in May, a name on a stand-by list until I pulled him off it, going up 4 wet steps to collect a World Cup medal in the 9th week of his international career.
He turned round before he went up.
"Boss, do I shake their hands or not?"
"Shake their hands."
"All of them?"
"All of them. Chin up. Go on."
I went up 4 steps with water sitting on every one of them. Splsh. Splsh.
There were suits along the top of those steps, and faces I have seen on the news my whole adult life.
The president of Russia stood under an umbrella the size of a parasol, held over him by a man whose entire job that was. Nobody else had one. Not the French president, not the Prince, and not one of my players, who were all stood down there in it getting drowned.
He put his hand out and said something short and I said something short back, and the whole of it took about 4 seconds. I could not tell you now what either of us said.
Ptt. Ptt. Ptt. Rain coming off the rim of it in a curtain, onto the carpet, a foot from my shoes.
I remember the umbrella. That is what I have kept from meeting him. The umbrella.
The French president was 2 along, soaked to the skin and not caring, kissing the side of Griezmann’s head.
I had looked up at that box twice all night, which is twice more than I ever look anywhere but the pitch.
The first time was at 3-0, and he was on his feet with both arms over his head and his tie already gone.
The second time was at 3-3, and he was sat down with both hands flat over his mouth, with the face of a man watching a house burn.
That is what we did to France in 31 minutes, and I did not read it in a paper. I got it off one man in a glass box 100 feet above my head.
Then, at the end of the row, the Prince.
I had never met him. That is my own doing. In May they offered me an audience before we flew out, and I said, with every ounce of manners I could find, that the squad needed 10 days at altitude more than I needed a morning in a palace, and I took them to Switzerland instead.
I have wondered since whether that ever got back to him.
It got back to him.
He was soaked through like the rest of us. No umbrella. Hair flat to his head, suit finished.
He took my hand in both of his. Sh. Water came out of my sleeve when he squeezed it.
"So," he said. "The famous Switzerland."
And in the rain, 20 minutes after losing a World Cup final, I laughed.
Then he stopped smiling.
***
Thank you to Sir nameyelus and Kostas_Gounakis for the support.