Chapter 739: The Longest Night II
2-2. 30 more minutes. A World Cup semi-final at the far end of them.
I did not wait for them to come to me. I walked out into the middle of them and got them into a ring, and some of them could not straighten their backs to stand in it.
I did not shout. There was no shout left in me, and it was not the moment for one anyway.
"Look at them." I nodded across the circle at the white shirts flat on the turf. "Older than us. Less in the tank than us. 30 minutes, and their legs go first. When they go, we go through them. That is the whole game now. Are you with me?"
Sofyan could not get a word out. He grabbed my wrist, grey, wet-eyed, and squeezed, and that was the answer for all of them.
Benatia was already talking before I had finished, low and hard, half in Arabic and half in French. En-Nesyri had his jaw set the way he gets. Bounou banged his gloves together once. They did not need me any more. They needed 30 minutes.
Behind us the crowd would not sit down for the break. They drummed and sang into it, boom boom boom boom, holding their 11 upright by will alone.
I played my last card at the break. Fresh legs on for a dead pair, and I held the lad by the collar before I let him run on. "Their legs are gone in the last 20. Get in behind and run at them until they fall down. Every time you touch it."
That is what it comes down to in the last half hour of a night like this. Who has one sprint left in him, and where you choose to spend it.
Then extra time, and the thing I had bled them for a fortnight to believe in began to come true in front of 40,000 people.
Croatia’s legs went. You could watch it happen. Modrić kept his, but the men around him were running in wet sand now, and my boys, off the noise, off spite, off something I have no name for, found one more gear.
We battered at them. Subašić flung himself across to deny Ziyech again. Boutaïb dragged one a yard wide. And every time Modrić got the ball to slow the storm down there were 2 green shirts on him and 40,000 whistles in his ears, wheeeee, and even he could not carry 10 dead men on his back.
We had them pinned now. A corner, then another, the green end roaring each one down, Benatia climbing at the back post to nod one just over. Croatia hacked their lines clear by inches and dropped deeper, back onto their own 18-yard line, out on their feet and hanging on.
Something had to give.
It gave in the 104th minute, and it came from a boy of 19 who should have had nothing left in his legs and turned out to have wings folded up in them.
Bounou caught a cross and rolled it flat to Hakimi’s feet, deep in our own half. Croatia were high, and cooked, and slow to turn. Hakimi killed it with one touch, lifted his head, and I watched him see the whole pitch open up in front of him like an empty road.
He went.
Rakitić lunged and got a bootlace on air. Brozović threw his dead legs across and could not lay a glove on him. And behind the boy as he ran the noise came up off the seats in a wave and rolled down the tier with him, louder at every stride.
Vida was the last man. He stepped across to shove him wide, the coaching thing, show him the line. Hakimi dropped a shoulder, checked half a yard, and went outside him instead, close enough that Vida’s trailing hand closed on the air off his shirt.
Him. The keeper. 40,000 people on their feet.
He did not blast it. A boy of 19, in the 104th minute of a World Cup quarter-final, and he rolled it. Low, across his own body, into the far corner, the one place a diving keeper can never get back to.
Subašić went full length, every fingertip stretched at it.
crack.
Off the inside of the post. In.
net.
I cannot give you the sound. I have never stood inside a sound like it, and I do not want to again, because a thing that good is frightening.
40,000 people came apart at once. The tier behind the bench did not shake this time. It moved. It lurched down and back, and I would swear the whole stand leaned out towards the sea.
The women’s cry went up and round the whole roof and would not come down, lu-lu-lu-lu-lu-lu, and the drums behind the goal had lost all their rhythm, just noise now, joy with no shape left in it.
Hakimi went to his knees and slid, screaming up at the roof of the sky with his whole body. His mother was over the boards reaching for a son she could not touch. The bench buried him, subs and physios and all, a heap of green 6 bodies deep.
Behind me the old man had both arms straight up, his face wet and wide open, 32 years old and 8 years old at once. Emma was screaming with no sound coming out of her. Jessica had both hands flat on her head and had forgotten she had ever been anyone’s agent.
Down the touchline Bray had Marcus off his feet. Nadia had both hands pressed to her mouth. Ruth had put the boom down. Elena had stopped directing and was only watching, and Tomás held the camera on my face because nobody had told him to move it.
Away in their corner the checks had gone dead still. The flare smoke hung on over their heads, but the stamp had stopped, the chant swallowed. 3,000 people with their hands on their heads, watching a semi-final walk away from the last golden side their small country would ever send out.
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