Glory Of The Football Manager System

Chapter 763: The Longest Walk I

[FWEEEEEEEET!]

And then the world ended, and I could not move.

I have to make you understand the noise, because everything else happens inside it, and if you do not have the noise you do not have the night.

It did not come through my ears. It came up through the floor.

Up through the studs and into the bones of my legs and it did not stop, it went up through my chest and it sat in my back teeth and it stayed, and when I opened my mouth I was shouting and could not hear myself do it.

There was a drummer 20 yards behind our dugout. A big man, bare to the waist, the drum roped across his chest, and he had beaten it all night. When the whistle went his arms stopped dead in the air for half a second, both sticks up, like a man who has been switched off.

Then he hit it so hard the skin split, [BOOM], and he was gone, screaming, the broken drum swinging off him. Somebody right behind me had an air horn on the whole time. [PAAAAARP.] One long note that did not stop for breath.

[RRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.]

It was not cheering. Cheering has gaps in it. This had no gaps. It came off the green end and hit the roof and came back down on top of us, one wall, and I stood on my white line with my arms at my sides and could not make my body do one thing.

Because I had waited my whole life for that whistle. I dreamed it as a boy on a settee in Moss Side. And now it had come, and put Morocco in a World Cup final, and I could not move, because the thing I felt was too big to have a shape.

Everybody else had a shape.

Bray went past me sideways with both fists in the air, a noise coming out of him I have never heard a grown man make. Rebecca had both hands flat over her mouth, her eyes streaming over the top of them.

And out on the grass, 11 men stopped being footballers.

Sofyan went flat on his back with his arms and legs going like an upturned beetle. Munir dropped to his knees in his 6-yard box with both fists jammed in his eyes. Harit just sat down where he stood, in the middle of a World Cup semi-final he had won, and put his face in his hands.

Fajr was sprinting the length of the pitch at nobody, screaming with no words in it. Dirar and Aït Bennasser had each other by the shirt, foreheads together, roaring into each other’s faces. Da Costa had not moved at all, stood in the centre circle staring at the turf like a man who has been hit.

And Bouhaddouz was on all fours near the touchline, being sick, his whole body heaving, because I had asked these men to run until they were sick and he had done it.

20 yards from him, in a white shirt, Harry Kane sat back on his haunches with his head down between his knees. Maguire was bent double near his own box, hands on his knees, a big man with nothing left in him.

Somewhere behind them a young lad in white had gone down on the turf with his knees up and his shirt over his face, and nobody went to him yet.

That is the thing I want you to see. Same grass. One man on all fours because he had emptied himself. One man on his haunches because it was over. My men were wrecked from running. Theirs were broken from losing. And you could tell them apart from the dugout without reading a shirt.

Then Nordin’s head came up out of it, and turned, and found me, on my line, on my own.

I saw him point. I saw his mouth make my name. And then they were coming.

The whole green wave of them, turning as one thing and coming at the dugout, and I had a second to know what was about to happen and no way on earth to stop it.

Sofyan hit me first, off his feet, arms round my neck. Then Nordin had me round the middle. Then there were hands, a forest of them, under my arms and gripping fistfuls of my coat, and the grass went out from under me.

They lifted me clean off the floor.

The gaffer. Off my feet, up over their heads, up into the floodlights, held on the hands of 11 men no club or country on earth had wanted, and for one second I was above the whole thing and I could see all of it.

Green and red losing its mind to my left. ["AY-AY-AY-AY!"] The drummer with his split drum. A girl up on a man’s shoulders with a flag. An old man on the rail behind the bench with both hands gripping it and his mouth going.

And to my right, 38,000 in white going grey and silent, and a boy in a Kane shirt in the front row already crying.

Joy on one side. Grief on the other. Both of them mine.

Then they dropped me onto my feet and the second was gone.

"Down, put me DOWN," but they already had, and Sofyan was screaming at me and I got it on the third go.

"WE ARE IN THE FINAL, GAFFER."

"I know."

And I would have gone into that pile and stayed in it for an hour.

But a man was walking toward me across the grass, on his own, through all of it, and I owed him the longest walk in football before I was allowed a second of this.

Gareth Southgate.

He came across that pitch with his waistcoat on and his hand out, straight through the middle of a celebration burying his own tournament, with the face of a man who has lost a World Cup semi-final and has decided to do the right thing anyway.

I have thought about that walk more than any of the 3 goals.

I met him halfway. That is the rule. You go halfway. He had to lean in and put his mouth by my ear, because the green end would not let a normal voice live.

"You were the better team," he said. "All night. You deserve it."

"Gareth."

"No." He had my hand and would not let go. "What you did with that group. Nobody gave them a prayer. And you took them to a final."

And here is the thing I did not expect, and I want it on the record, because the man is going to get buried for this by people who were not on that pitch.

He did not mention it. He did not say the thing that every one of those 38,000 behind him was screaming. That I was English. That I had done this to my own. He took the one thing that could have cut me and left it on the floor where it belonged.

"You’ll win it," he said. "Go and win it."

Then he let go, and turned, and walked back into it to pick his own players up off the grass. He got to Kane first, still on his haunches, and crouched down and got a hand under his arm, and Kane did not want to come up, and Southgate made him.

There is no worse job in the world than that one.

I watched him for a second. Then I turned round, and the other half of the stadium was waiting for me.

Because the white end had found its voice, and its voice was not grief yet. Grief came later. First came the other thing.

["YOU LET YOUR COUNTRY DOWN! YOU LET YOUR COUNTRY DOWN!"]

38,000 of them. At me. Fingers pointing down out of the away end at the one man in that stadium who came from the same streets they did.

I made myself look, because you should always look at the thing you have done.

The man in the front row, 50 maybe, an England shirt over his belly, the one who had sung it was coming home at me since the 5th minute.

He was screaming now with tears running down his face, both at once, hate and heartbreak out of the same mouth, and I could not hear the words and did not need to.

A lad 2 rows back with his shirt pulled up over his face so only his eyes showed. The boy in the Kane shirt, 10 maybe, sobbing, turned away from the pitch by his dad’s hand on his shoulder.

[tok.] A bottle came down out of the top tier and bounced off the advertising boards by my feet.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus and Kostas_Gounakis for the support.