Chapter 720: One of Those Games
My phone had been going all night. By the time I got it off the side it had stopped even trying to buzz, bzzt, and just sat there warm in my hand, the screen a wall of names.
Raj, who I’d argued football with across a till for six years, had sent a voice note that was just screaming. No words in it anywhere. Forty seconds of a man losing his mind in a stockroom in Moss Side.
The Railway Arms group chat had sixty-odd messages in it. The first team I ever picked. Because I never had team-mates, I never played past the park.
The closest thing I ever got was eleven blokes on a Sunday who trusted a shelf stacker with their weekends, and every one of them had stayed up till two in the morning for me.
My old man, who does not text, had texted.
Frankie Morrison, seventy-three and still refusing to learn what a voice note is, had sent one line. "Watched it in the Legion. Roof nearly came off. Proud of you, lad."
Steve Parish had sent his past midnight, my own chairman back home in London, made up that the manager he’d lent out for six weeks had put the club’s name in front of the whole planet.
Sarah had sent a video of a pub round the corner from Selhurst gone up like we’d won it there ourselves, and another landed behind it before I’d read the first, bzzt.
Outside all that, the room was dead quiet.
Curtains still shut against the grey Russian morning, the aircon humming to itself in the corner, a cup of tea I’d not touched going cold on the nightstand. The whole world was screaming and I was lying in the stillest place in it.
There was a knock, knock knock, and Marcus came in with his laptop under one arm and Bray behind him pushing the room service trolley, rattle, three teas and a plate of toast nobody would touch.
"You need to see this, boss," Marcus said. "All of it."
He turned the screen round. A map somebody had thrown together overnight, the whole of Africa lit up, clips pinned all over it.
Lagos. Nairobi. Cairo. Dakar. Abidjan. Accra. Not one of them a Moroccan city. The whole continent.
In Dakar they’d stopped a wedding to watch the last ten minutes, and the clip was the reception up on its feet when En-Nesyri’s went in, the noise blowing the phone speaker out into a fizz, krrr.
In Lagos a bar had emptied into the road, horns going up and down the street, paaarp. There were kids in Nairobi in red shirts who’d never been within three thousand miles of Morocco.
That’s the thing nobody outside it gets. When one African side goes deep, the whole continent goes with it. It doesn’t matter whose flag. For one summer they are all yours.
There was a clip of an old legend of the African game, a man I’d watched as a boy, sat in a studio in Lagos and unable to get his words out. Just shaking his head, wiping his eyes, saying it was about time. About time.
"Now the good bit," Marcus said, and clicked the other tab.
Sky. Their World Cup breakfast desk, going out live while we sat drinking tea in Russia. David Jones in the middle, and either side of him three faces that had spent the last fourteen months talking about me. Gary Neville. Jamie Carragher. And down the end with his arms folded, Roy Keane.
Jones set it going. "Morocco 4, Spain 3. Roy, I’ve worked with you a long time. Did you enjoy that last night?"
"I enjoyed every minute of it."
The desk waited. Keane didn’t blink.
"And I don’t say that," he said. "I’ve sat here and moaned through World Cup finals. Two teams went to war for a place in the last sixteen. Nobody hid. Nobody played for the point."
"Seven goals and about forty tackles that would get you arrested anywhere but a football pitch. That’s the game. That’s the game I grew up on."
Marcus near came off the bed. "Keane! Keane enjoyed himself!"
Carragher was already up at the touchscreen, dragging arrows down Spain’s left till you couldn’t see the grass under them.
"Look at this. Second half, every ball, this side," he said, jabbing at Alba’s channel. "They found the tired man and they made his life a misery for forty-five minutes. Hakimi, Ziyech, again and again and again. That’s not luck. That’s coaching."
"They’d have worked that out quicker than I said it to the players," I said, and Bray snorted into his tea, slurp.
Jones turned it. "Gary. You’re the man who sat here in August and said, let’s see where this Palace project is in February."
"I did say that." Neville had the good grace to laugh at himself. "And they were second in the league in February, so I’ve stopped giving Danny Walsh deadlines."
"There’ll be people at home this morning saying it’s a lovely story," Jones said. "One great night at a World Cup. Romance. Let’s not get carried away."
"One great night." Neville leaned forward, and out came the fingers, counting.
"Fourteen months ago, Alan Pardew got the sack, and Palace handed the job to a twenty-eight-year-old nobody the professional game had never heard of. This came fresh on the heels of a fairy-tale FA Youth Cup win for a guy who, barely a year prior, was running a Sunday pub team while stacking shelves in Moss Side."
"The Mirror ran that CCTV picture," Jones said. "Shelf stacker to history maker."
"Five games to keep them up, five points adrift. Wins all five. Then the Carabao Cup. Then the FA Cup. Then he beats Arsenal in a European final, Crystal Palace, champions of Europe."
"Second behind a City side that cost ten of him, on a budget that never touched seventy million, and he shipped twelve players out the door to build it."
Neville sat back. "One great night? He’s had fourteen months of them."
Keane again, flat as slate. "People said the five games were a fluke. Then they said the cups were a fluke. At some point you have to admit the fluke is just the man."
The room had gone quiet, the three of us just looking at the screen.
Then Jones brought in the fourth chair, off to the side, and Thierry Henry unfolded out of it, smooth as anything in a suit.
"Thierry. Spain are out. What did you see last night?"
"Everyone this morning is talking about the goals," Henry said. "I want to talk about the manager. You can coach talent. Morocco have always had talent, buckets of it, for years, and for years they have gone home early."
He put one finger on the desk.
"What this manager has given these players is toughness. He has taught them to stand in the storm, and not only to survive the storm. To thrive in it. They were robbed on Wednesday, robbed in front of the world, and there is no worse feeling in football."
"Another team feels sorry for itself and goes home," Henry said. "Four days later, these players took apart one of the best teams of the last ten years. That does not come from talent. That comes from the man."
I put my tea down and did not pick it back up.
Jones was grinning now. "And he does every press conference in French."
"As a Frenchman, I am delighted," Henry said, and the desk started going. "As a man who sat in English press rooms for twenty years, I am even more delighted. His French is better than my English was."
Even Keane laughed at that. Marcus was howling into a pillow.
"Final word then," Jones said, pulling them back. "The groups finish, the bracket comes out, Morocco in the last sixteen for the first time since 1986. Roy. Who stops them?"
Keane took a long second.
"On last night? I wouldn’t fancy anybody."
***
Thank you for 200 Power Stones.
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