Chapter 721: Top of the Group
The montage ran after that, and it was everywhere, every channel with a football licence. TalkSport’s phone-in had been going since 6, callers arguing whether it was the greatest group game in World Cup history.
The sweep at the bottom of the screen ran the same clip on a loop, En-Nesyri’s half volley, the wait, the arm pointing at the centre spot.
Then Marcus pulled the socials up, and it was every language, every corner of it.
Dima Maghrib was the top trend in the world, the game underneath it, and the wink underneath that. A neutral account with half a million followers called it the game of the tournament and said it wasn’t close, maybe the game of the decade.
A lad in Rabat had watched it with his father and his son and posted about three generations crying in one living room.
There was one from Dakar about the wedding, the groom swearing it was the best decision of his life, and his wife agreeing.
There was one from Lagos that said one African team wins and 54 countries celebrate, and that people outside it would never understand, and that last night Morocco was all of us.
And in among it, the ones that got me. 60-odd Palace lads in a bar in Nairobi at 1 in the morning, all in red, watching their gaffer win a World Cup group with somebody else’s team, the drum from the Milan night going in the background.
40 blokes posting that photo of the Selhurst to Kaliningrad flag in the Morocco end. A bloke saying he wasn’t crying, you were.
The old fella. Somebody in the crowd had filmed him being hoisted up at full-time, cap gone, arms out, and it had gone round the planet overnight. 12 million views of a man who’d waited 32 years.
And the wink was a meme by sunrise. The broadcast had caught it clean, Ziyech stood over the ball looking straight down the camera at me, and the internet had done the rest.
Ziyech had already made it his profile picture. Underneath it, in the squad chat, Sofyan had replied with two words. "Track back."
Marcus read it out and the three of us were gone for a good minute.
The front pages were stacked behind it, and Marcus flicked through them one by one. The Mirror had gone shelf stacker to world beater, and dug the old CCTV still out again to run beside it.
The Times had the night of Kaliningrad. L’Équipe put the Lions into history. Marca said one word, adiós, and nothing else.
Every front page in Casablanca was the same photograph, En-Nesyri with his arms out and his mouth open, and one word over it in Arabic that Sofyan had already translated in the group chat. Finally.
Even the English lot were leading with it, the same press I’d not given a word of English to in a month, running me across their back pages. There was something in that I’d have laughed harder at if I hadn’t been so tired.
Bray stood, gathered the mugs onto the trolley. "Players have seen the lot, by the way. Group chat’s not drawn breath since 2 in the morning."
"And En-Nesyri posted," Marcus said. "First time all tournament."
He showed me. One line, no photo.
"This is for everyone back home."
Before they went, Marcus pulled up one more thing. The bracket.
Groups A and B were done overnight, which meant the first two ties of the last 16 were already inked in, and one of them was ours.
We’d won the group. Us. Top of Group B on 6 points, a point clear of Portugal on 5.
And that was the sweet part of it. They’d beaten us on Wednesday, robbed us and beaten us, and it still hadn’t been enough. While we were taking Spain apart, Portugal could only draw with Iran. 1-1.
The night they stole a goal off us, they handed us the group 4 days later without ever meaning to.
So they’d finished second, and second drew Uruguay. Suárez, Cavani, Group A winners with a perfect 9 points out of 9. Good luck to them.
And us, top of the group, into the Group A runners-up.
Russia.
The hosts.
I sat and looked at that word a while. We’d watched them open the whole thing, all of us together, 3 weeks back.
The night before our own first game, the squad crammed into the team room round the big screen, half of them down on the floor, watching the hosts put 5 past Saudi Arabia without a reply while that whole stadium shook.
Back then it was just the tournament kicking off. Somebody else’s night, a good watch, nothing to do with us. Ziyech had been down on the carpet with a plate of pasta saying thank God we weren’t in their group, and half the room had laughed.
Nobody was laughing now. We’d drawn the same team we’d sat and watched terrify the place on its opening night, in their country, in front of a crowd that hadn’t stopped singing since.
Uruguay had just beaten them 3-0 in the last game, so they could be got at. But they were the hosts.
Every neutral on the planet had been ours for 3 weeks. Lagos, Dakar, Nairobi, all of it. For 90 minutes in the last 16, the 80,000 in that stadium were going to want us in the ground, and a whole country stood behind them.
The rest of the draw would come together over the next few days, once the other groups had finished. That was for another morning. There was a host nation in the road first.
"Recovery plan’s already Russia, boss," Bray said, halfway out the door. "Started an hour ago."
They cleared out after that and left me with the laptop still open and Henry’s bit already clipped and flying round on its own, a million views before breakfast.
I watched it once more with the sound low.
The toughness. The standing in the storm. Not just surviving it, coming out the far side of it stronger.
Then I shut the laptop, click, because it was the only thing anybody had said all morning that was actually true, and I didn’t know where to put it.
The rest I could let wash over me. The talent was theirs. The goals were theirs. The war out there was theirs, every yard of it. But that one bit, the not-folding, the standing up in it when going under would have been the easy thing, I’d put that in them myself.
Day by day, on a wet training pitch in Voronezh, in rooms nobody filmed, in 100 small hard conversations. And hearing Thierry Henry say it out loud to the whole of Britain at 8 in the morning did something to me I wasn’t set up for on no sleep.
The laptop shut, Marcus and Bray gone, the room went right back to quiet. No desk, no phone-in, no Africa. Just the aircon and the grey light round the edge of the curtains and me, sat on the end of the bed with the loudest morning of my life switched off at last.
For a minute it was the stillest it had been since the whistle. I let it ring.
I put the phone face down on the side table, tap, so it would stop lighting the room.
Because none of it, the maps, the desk, the 12 million views, none of it was the thing.
The thing was a clip I’d gone back and watched twice. A little girl in Dakar, 6, maybe 7, in a red shirt 3 sizes too big for her, up on her dad’s shoulders in a street full of strangers, the drums going under her, boom boom.
Singing a song she couldn’t have known a week ago. Screaming a name that wasn’t even her own country’s.
That was what we’d done. Not the game of the tournament.
That.
And into all that quiet the phone went off one more time, hard against the wood, bzzt bzzt, walking itself towards the edge of the table, and the morning was over. I turned it over.
Dougie. Two lines, Glasgow to the bone.
"Some game, son. Every sporting director in Europe just watched our right-back double his price. Enjoy the party. Then phone me."
I lay back and stared at the ceiling with it still in my hand.
Because that was the other side of last night, and it wasn’t going away. The window was still open. The deal I’d told Sarah to do quietly had just been advertised to the planet in high definition.
So I phoned him.
The bid was already in. £13 million to Real Madrid, first thing that morning, for a 19-year-old that 6 weeks ago nobody outside the game could have named. Real had come straight back and told us to add.
"So I added," Dougie said, dry as ever. "£15 million, and a slice of whatever we sell him on for down the line. They’ve not said yes. They’ve not said no either, and with Real Madrid before lunch, that’s about as close to a yes as you get."
"Money’s not the problem, son," he said. "The boy’s the problem. 19 years old, just tore a World Cup apart on your watch, and every club on the planet watched him do it. We need to get to him before they do."
And I couldn’t go near him.
That was the wall, and it wasn’t moving. I was the lad’s international manager. I’d picked him, coached him, sent him out there to turn himself into the most wanted teenager in the world, and I couldn’t say the word Palace to him without the whole thing going rotten.
"I know," Dougie said, before I could. "You stay well out of it. Which is why me and Sarah are getting on a plane."
I sat up in the bed. "You’re coming out here?"
"Tomorrow. Sarah’s on the flights now. We’ll sit down with the boy’s agent, keep it clean, keep it a mile from you. You worry about the hosts. We’ll worry about the right-back."
And something went through me at that, and it wasn’t the deal. 6 weeks I’d been out here, running another man’s team, loving it, and missing my own people more than I’d let myself stop and think about.
Dougie, who could close a deal in a language he didn’t speak. Sarah, who’d run my football club while I ran somebody else’s. Both of them getting on a plane. Coming to me.
"Aye, go on then," I said, and I could hear the grin in my own voice, and so could he.
"Get some sleep, son," Dougie said. "You look like death on the telly." And he was gone.
I lay back with the phone on my chest. A host nation 4 days off, a window ticking, and two of the best people I’ve got somewhere over Europe on their way to me.
Some morning after, this.
***
Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.
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