Chapter 724: Round Of 16 - Russia
I have been in loud dressing rooms and I have been in nervous ones. I had never been in one this quiet.
No card school. No music. Boussoufa’s deck still zipped in his bag. En-Nesyri, who I’d been begging to shut up for a week, sat with his boots in his hands and his mouth shut.
Thwack. Catch. Thwack. Catch. Ziyech bounced a tennis ball off the concrete, over and over, staring at the wall.
That was when it hit me what I was dealing with.
The group was the fairytale. This was the exam. One game, win it or fly home, and not one man in that room had been alive the last time this country played a knockout at a World Cup.
The occasion had climbed into them before I’d said a word, and my job, before any of the tactics, was to get it back out. So I didn’t start with Russia. I started with Ziyech.
"Hakim." He looked up. "That bent FIFA tournament you’ve been running in Voronezh. Who actually won it?"
A beat. Then Boussoufa, from his corner. "He cheated."
"I did not cheat."
"He turned the difficulty down the second I started beating him."
And the room went, just a crack. A snort here, Sofyan shaking his head, En-Nesyri nearly smiling despite himself.
"Right," I said, and now they were with me. "Here’s the truth about tonight."
"Every soul in this stadium remembers what happened on this pitch the last time a team had the ball against Russia. They passed it, and passed it, and passed it, sideways, in front of them, and they went home. Spain. You watched it. That is not us."
"We go forward. Fast. First pass, second pass, we’re in behind them. Achraf." Hakimi’s head came up.
"Their left back is Zhirkov. He is 34 years old and he has got a long, long night in front of him. You did it to Alba. You do it to him. Every ball, that side, you run at him till his legs go."
"First 20 minutes, they come at us with 50,000 behind them and it’ll feel like the roof is coming down on your head. We ride it. We do not panic, we do not chase it, we hold, and it passes. And then we make them pay."
"Last thing. Set pieces. Dzyuba. 6 foot 5 and they will aim every ball at his skull. Yassine, Mehdi, that is the game tonight. That is the one place they live. We don’t give them that, they have got nothing else in the building."
Benatia got up. The captain didn’t shout. He just looked round the lot of them, slow.
"They robbed us on this grass," he said. "On this grass. Tonight we walk in there and we take it back. We do not go home today. Do you hear me? We do not go home."
And the room came off the benches. En-Nesyri was up first, roaring it back at him, "On this grass! On this grass!" Sofyan hammered a fist on the lockers, bang bang bang.
Bounou was dragging them into a huddle, and Ziyech, and there were 11 voices going at once now, Darija and French tangled together, and the fear was gone and something with teeth had taken its place.
I didn’t need another word. I pulled the door open and let them out.
Nothing prepares you for Luzhniki with a full house in it.
The tunnel spat us out into a wall of sound that hit me in the chest and kept pushing, like leaning into a gale. I could feel it in my back teeth. The air was cut grass and flare smoke.
78,000 of them, and the noise wasn’t one thing, it was two armies going at each other across a football pitch.
Down one whole side and packed into both ends behind it, red and white, 50,000 Russians, a sea of them, the last of the anthem still ringing off the roof.
And rising up against it, refusing to be drowned, high in the far corner and spilling down the other flank, 30,000 in red, DIMA MAGHRIB coming back at the hosts like an answer to a question.
The diaspora had come. From Paris, from Brussels, from Amsterdam, from anywhere a cheap flight and a Moroccan flag could reach Moscow, because this was the first knockout since 1986 and they were not going to sit at home and watch it on a screen.
"РОССИЯ! РОССИЯ!" off the 50,000, stamping, thump thump thump, a drum of it coming up through the concrete into my boots. A wall of white scarves went up along one whole side and turned as one.
"DIMA MAGHRIB! TAKE US TO THE QUARTERS!" screamed a fan in the front row, his face painted red and green, and 30,000 behind him took it up, the red corner bouncing as one body, and under it the song I’d heard all month in Voronezh, sung now at the top of the world.
Red smoke curled up out of the Moroccan end off a flare, fsss, and a green flag the size of a tennis court went hand over hand across the top of them. The two ends weren’t watching a match yet. They were fighting each other for the air.
And I found them. I do not know how, in a crowd of 78,000, but I found them, because I was looking. High up near the halfway line, a needle of blue and red in the sea of Moroccan red. 40-odd of them, and one bedsheet slung over the rail. SELHURST ON TOUR. My lot.
Two rows back, on his own, cap on, the old fella who’d waited 32 years and followed this team now like it ran in his blood. A big Palace lad next to the bedsheet saw me looking, cupped his hands, and bellowed, "EAGLES AND LIONS, BOSS! NO FEAR!" and thumped the badge on his chest.
The referee had his officials round him at the centre circle, checking watches against each other, the two linesmen jogging out to their lines, the fourth official already at his post with the board tucked under his arm.
He blew a short one, pheep, called the captains in. Benatia and Akinfeev. A word, a coin, a handshake that neither man meant an ounce of.
Then he looked at his watch, put the whistle to his lips, and 78,000 people took a breath at the same instant.
Pheeep.
And Russia came at us like the whole country was shoving them from behind.
They didn’t bother building it.
They didn’t need to, not with that noise under them.
They just came forward, hard. Golovin was screaming for the ball and driving straight at my back four. Cheryshev flew down their right. Dzyuba stood in the middle bellowing at them to feed him, a great arm up over his head.
***
Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the constant support,
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