Chapter 729: Uncharted
Pweeeeep! Pweeeeep! Pweeeeeeeeeeeep!
The whistle had not finished dying when the whole bench emptied. Every last one of them, the subs, Steeley, Rebecca, the kit lads, off the touchline and sprinting onto the pitch before the sound had left the referee’s mouth.
WHRRRRRROOOOOOAAAAAAAR!
It hit like a physical shockwave. 78,000 people reacting at exactly the same second, a colossal, stadium-shaking collision of sound.
50,000 Russian hearts breaking at once, a gut-wrenching groan rolling down from the upper tiers, swallowed whole by the piercing shrieks of 30,000 Moroccans.
The eleven turned and ran to meet them, and the two waves hit in the middle of the pitch. Tracksuits and towels and water thrown up into the blinding floodlights, coming back down like rain. I never stood a chance.
Bray got me, then Steeley. Then a wall of substitutes crashed into us, thud, and I went down under the lot of them in the centre circle. An elbow caught me in the mouth, a knee drove into my spine, and I could not have cared less about either.
My ears were ringing. The floodlights were too bright and the roar had gone so total it had stopped sounding like noise at all.
I lay there under a pile of Moroccan substitutes in the middle of Moscow and could not for the life of me work out how a lad off the Moss Side nights had ended up here.
Out on the pitch it was carnage. Bounou had sprinted the length of it from his own goal, launching himself into a heap of bodies at the halfway line. En-Nesyri was up on Hakimi’s back, both fists at the sky. Ziyech was flat on the turf with three of them on top of him.
And the red end had come clean off its hinges.
30,000 of them, packing three sides of the ground. The drums rolling up through the concrete and into my boots, boom, boom, thwack, boom, boom, thwack. Flares lit, fsss, the air going thick and bitter with the sulphur of them.
"DIMA MAGHRIB! DIMA MAGHRIB!"
Then the chant that had carried us through the whole tournament started up, shaking the seats. "SIIR! SIIR! SIIR! SIIR!"
Around the margins you could hear the neutrals, the thousands in yellow and white who had bought tickets hoping for a spectacle, getting swept up, clapping in time with the Moroccan drums.
And from the Russian end, a chorus of sharp whistles, fweeet, and the dying chant of "Rossiya... Rossiya..." fading into the red noise.
It was not a football noise coming from our end, not underneath. It was 30 years of people who had spent their lives feeling overlooked, second-generation lads from Paris and Brussels and Amsterdam and every cold corner of Europe, letting go of all of it at once.
Bray hauled me up out of the pile by the collar. "Gaffer. Look. Look what you’ve done."
I looked, and one by one they were going down. Onto their knees, and then flat, foreheads pressed to the Luzhniki turf. Bounou. Benatia. Saïss, Sofyan, the whole eleven, and the boys off the bench crossing to drop in beside them.
Sujood. I stood there in my damp suit with my hands hanging loose at my sides, marooned in the centre circle. I did not share their faith and I did not pretend to understand the depth of it. But the humility of it took the breath clean out of me.
78,000 people were screaming above us, the flares choking the air, and my whole team lay still as stone, giving thanks to something a long way above my head. It was not for the fans, and it was not for me.
It was the most private thing I have ever watched a man do, and they were doing it in front of the whole planet. I just watched, and hoped Elena’s lens caught how beautiful it was, because I knew the pundits back home would not have the first clue what to do with it.
Then Benatia’s head came up, he was on his feet, and the noise doubled. Carnage all over again.
He came at me first, streaming sweat and tears, and got me round the middle. "You see it?!" he roared in my ear, his voice cracking. "You see where we are? Nobody! NOBODY has ever taken us here!"
Before I could blink, Sofyan had me by the thighs, Bounou by the waist, Benatia under the shoulders, and my feet left the grass.
"HE’S OURS! ALLEZ LE COACH! HE’S OURS!" they chanted, and threw me at the sky.
Up I went, the lights blinding me, the stadium a spinning blur of red flags and open mouths. They caught me and threw me again, and gravity stopped meaning a thing.
And it was up there, weightless, that it got me. My own lads at Palace do this. Every trophy, every time, they get round the gaffer and put him at the roof. It is our thing.
And here was a team that was never even mine doing the exact same, at a World Cup, and it took the legs clean out from under me.
Somewhere down there Bray was bellowing a number up at me, one Marcus had just shoved in his ear. 29 years old. The youngest man in the history of the World Cup to take a country into the last 8, and a country that had never once been there before.
A shelf stacker off the Moss Side nights, 29 years old, making history he had never gone looking for, thrown at the Moscow sky by a team that was not his.
They put me down just as the heavy gates by the tunnel gave way. Clang, rattle, clang.
The families were through. Mothers, wives, and little ones in shirts three sizes too big came spilling onto the pitch.
Saïss had his boy up on his shoulders inside a minute. Bounou’s lad, five at a push, was lost inside a pair of his dad’s spare gloves, and Bounou scooped him up and would not put him down.
Hakimi was already at the hoardings, pulling his mother by the arms. She was in a bright headscarf, weeping openly as she kissed his cheeks. "Habibi, habibi," she kept saying, holding his face like he was still a 10-year-old boy.
And Sofyan found his mother in the thick of it. He was grey and half-dead on his feet from 90 minutes of running through a wall, and he wrapped her up and put his forehead down on hers. "Alhamdulillah," she sobbed into his neck, over and over. "Alhamdulillah."
I got close enough to see those hands. Working hands. The hands of a woman who had scrubbed other people’s floors in some cold European city so this boy could chase a ball, worn and cracked and gripping his soaked shirt like she would never let it go again.
I knew those hands. Not hers. My own mother’s, off my own street. I did not have a word of her language, but I understood everything there was to understand about that woman, and she about me, and it sailed clean over the top of all of it.
The lads went to the fans then, the length of that red end.
"BOU-NOU! BOU-NOU! BOU-NOU!" The stadium announcer’s voice crackled over the PA, trying to restore some order, and he was drowned out inside a second by the ultra groups leading a song with no gaps in it.
I went down to the boards with them. My 40 from South London were a drunken knot of blue and red bedlam under the old SELHURST ON TOUR bedsheet.
"QUARTER-FINALS, GAFFER!" one of them screamed over the rail, his face an impossible shade of purple. "YOU ABSOLUTE BEAUTY!"
But I was looking past him, at the old man.
He was up on his seat, singing until his voice cracked. Tears had cut clean tracks down the dust and sweat on his face. He stopped when he saw me.
He did not pound his chest or make a show of it. He just looked at me through the smoke and gave me a slow, heavy nod, the look of a man finally let put down a weight he had carried for 32 years.
I nodded back. My throat was too dry to do anything else.
Behind us the ground was emptying. Scuff, scuff, scuff. 50,000 locals filing out into the Moscow dark, heads bowed, low murmurs of disbelief. "Spasibo, parni," one lone voice called down from the stands, thank you, boys, and it was swallowed whole by the red noise.
Their players had gone down all over their own grass, dropping where they stood the way beaten men do.
Dzyuba on his haunches, head buried in his hands. Golovin flat on his back, staring straight up into the lights. Zhirkov on his knees with his shirt pulled up over his face. Akinfeev had not moved from his post, hollow, gone somewhere else.
A whole team of them scattered across the turf, still lying where the whistle had dropped them, while ours danced past.
Cherchesov found me and shook my hand. He looked emptied out. He said a thing in Russian I did not catch and did not need to.
It sobered me, that handshake. This game is played in inches, and the only thing between me thrown at the floodlights and that man staring at his own boots was a few of those inches falling our way and not his.
Then it was down the tunnel, the concrete shaking with a bassline from the dressing room that felt like it came up out of the ground, thump, thump, thump, and the door had barely shut before the room went off.
The heat hit first. A tiled box turned furnace, steam off soaked bodies, the air wet with it. Music blasting off somebody’s phone, blown out to nothing by the walls, bzzt. Benatia hammering a rhythm into the lockers with the flats of both hands, bang, bang, bang.
Boutaïb up on the physio bench with one boot gone, waving a shirt, screaming a chant that 24 other men hurled back at him. Splash. En-Nesyri crept behind Bounou and tipped a whole cooler of iced water down his neck, sending half the room into hysterics.
I did not understand one word of it. Darija and French and a bit of Dutch tumbling over each other, a wall of shouting I could not have translated to save my life. And it did not matter, because I understood the exact frequency of that room down to my boots.
They did not want a speech. The tactics did not matter any more. I pulled my tie loose, rolled my sleeves, leaned into the corner and let the heat and the din wash over me.
The last 8 of a World Cup. I said it under my breath, once, just to hear how it sat in my mouth.
A month ago I was an outsider the federation had taken a gamble on.
Now Boutaïb reached out and hauled me into the middle of the bouncing circle, and I shouted the words I could not pronounce, phonetic nonsense, just to feel the thing move through me, and there was not one other place on this earth I was meant to be.
***
Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.
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