Glory Of The Football Manager System

There is 1 day a year at this football club where nobody is allowed to ring me and everybody rings me, and it is the Monday after a final.

Sarah put it in the calendar in July. MON 6 AUG. NO CONTACT. She sent it to 14 people and 9 of them replied to say they understood it.

I woke at 20 to 6 out of habit, in the dark, with a lip like a bicycle inner tube and nothing to get up for.

I have not had a Monday off since the 24th of April 2017.

The shield was in the boot of a car on a road in Dulwich because I got in at 20 past 10 and could not be bothered to carry it, and it is still worth about as much as that car, and I have thought about that a great deal since.

She had recorded it. There was a note on the coffee table in biro on the back of a receipt.

Watch the first 6 minutes. Keane says a thing. Do not skip it, D.

So I sat down at 20 to 6 in the morning and put the television on.

Bzz.

And there was 1 message on that phone, sent at 18:52 the night before, while I was in a corridor at Wembley in a wet suit with a shield under my arm and 30 men behind me.

DOUGIE: Brazil have got the Santos thing. Not us. A journalist in São Paulo has had it since Friday and it is going out tonight or tomorrow.

DOUGIE: Nothing you can do and nothing I can do. It is your day off. Read it Tuesday.

I read it at 22 minutes past 10 in my own hallway with my shoes in my hand and rang him back from the doorstep before Emma had got the kettle on, and we did 9 minutes on it stood in a dressing gown at half past 10 at night.

That is what a no contact day is at this football club.

David Jones on that screen at 20 to 6 in the morning, in a shirt he had been in since 11 o'clock the previous day.

4 of them, 2 either side.

Carragher forward on his elbows already. Neville with his sleeves up. Keane on the end with his jacket still buttoned. Thierry Henry on the far side with 1 hand flat on that desk.

And the graphic behind them was a face for once. It was mine. I have seen it 9 times in 6 weeks and I have got up and left the room for most of them.

DANIEL WALSH. 29.

"Right," Jones said. "Before anything else."

He came forward on his forearms.

"On Tuesday night, on this programme, I asked 4 men on this desk about Crystal Palace and Manchester City and I want to read something back."

Ha. On my own, in the dark, at 20 to 6.

"Jamie. Tuesday. Quote. They will get beaten on Sunday."

"I did say that."

"Roy. Tuesday. Quote. Everybody at this desk knows he is going to get beaten on Sunday and none of us are going to say it."

"I did say that as well."

"So."

"So he got beaten," Keane said, "and I have watched it twice and I would say the same thing again on Tuesday."

I laughed at that on my own in a dark room at 20 to 6 in the morning, and 4 other people in south London had laughed at it 7 hours earlier and I had the receipts on my phone.

"Gary," Jones said. "You were the only one of the 4 who would not call it."

"I was not being clever. I did not know." Neville had his sleeves up. "And I have spent 4 days trying to work out why I did not know, and I think it is because I have stopped being able to predict what that man is going to do, and I do not like it.

"Put the number up, David."

Tap.

5 FINALS IN 8 MONTHS. WON 4.

"Carabao Cup. FA Cup. Europa League. World Cup. Community Shield." Neville counted them off on his fingers and got to 5 and put the hand flat on the desk. "David, that is 8 months."

"8."

"8 months. Not 8 seasons. Not a career. He has walked out for 5 finals in the time it takes to have a baby, and he is 29, and 2 years ago he was doing 3 sessions a day with an under 18s and driving himself to them."

"Has anybody done that?"

"Not in this country. I have looked."

"And the 1 he lost?"

"92nd minute of a World Cup final," Neville said. "3-3 with a country that had never won a knockout match in its history, and Kylian Mbappé put it in the corner in the 92nd minute.

"And that is the list. 1 goal. 92 minutes."

And then the stairs went behind me.

Emma came down at 10 to 6 in a t-shirt of mine she took in 2016 and kept, with her hair flat on one side of her head, and she left the light off.

She got onto that sofa behind me, on her knees, and put both arms over my shoulders and her chin on the top of my head, and stayed there.

That is us. That has been us since a bench at a Sunday league pitch in 2015. Neither of us is any good at the talking part and both of us are alright at this part.

"You have gone red," she said, into my hair.

"I have not gone red."

"You have gone red. I can feel it off your ears."

Then she got a hand under my jaw and turned my face towards the light off the screen and looked at my mouth for a while.

"That is worse than it was."

"It is fine."

"It is not fine, it is going to be purple by Wednesday and you have got a press conference." She let go of my face and put her hand flat on my chest instead and left it there. "Sit still and watch it."

And I sat on that sofa with a bag of peas against my mouth and my fiancée breathing on the back of my neck, and thought the thing I have been thinking since about March.

Nobody has asked me whether I can do it again.

Not once. Not in a press room, not in a mixed zone, not in 40 interviews. They asked Mourinho it in his first summer. They asked Pochettino it. Every manager who has ever won anything in this country gets asked whether it was a fluke, by somebody, within about a fortnight.

I have won 5 things and nobody has put it to me.

"You have worked it out, then," Emma said.

"Worked what out."

"Danny."

She came round the end of that sofa and sat down on it properly, sideways, with her feet under my leg because they are always cold and she has been doing it since 2015, and she took the peas off me and held them against my mouth herself.

"You have had that face on since Thursday."

"How long have you known?"

"It is the first question I would ask you and I have never asked it." She took the peas off me. "Somebody will. In February. In the rain."

"I know."

"Have you got an answer?"

"No."

"Roy," Jones said. "You have been quiet."

"I have been quiet because I have run out of things to say and I said so in July."

"Say the thing you said to me in the car park."

Roy Keane sat forward about 4 inches, and every man on that desk stopped talking.

"Nobody on this desk has asked him whether he can do it again."

Emma stopped with the peas halfway to my mouth.

"Not once. Not from anybody. And every man on this desk has asked it of every other manager who has ever won anything, because it is the question. It is always the question." Keane had his hands together. "We stopped. We all just quietly stopped, somewhere around February, and I did not notice I had stopped until Thursday."

"So what is the question, Roy?"

"What he is like when it goes wrong."

I said that out loud at the same time he did, sat on a sofa in Dulwich with a bag of frozen peas against my mouth, and Emma did not turn her head that time. She had been waiting for it.

"He has never had a bad November," Keane said. "He has never been 11th at Christmas with a fanbase that has turned, and he has never stood in front of a camera on a Tuesday night in Burnley and explained himself.

"And that is coming. It comes for everybody. I have got no idea what he is like when it does."

Then he said the last bit, and he said it to the camera and not to Jones.

"And neither has he."

There he is wrong.

I have known what I am like when it goes wrong since I was 19 and it is the reason I do this job the way I do it.

He will find out in November, same as everybody else.

"Right." Jones turned. "Let us do the pictures."

And they put it on the screen.

I have not watched that back on a television since that night and I am not going to.

Jesús Navas went up those steps first.

Nobody made that decision in a meeting. Christian Benteke was captain for the afternoon and Christian Benteke got to the bottom of those steps and stopped and stood to one side and put his hand on Jesús Navas's back, and Wilfried Zaha got behind him and did the same, and by the time Navas got 5 steps up there were 30 men behind him, and all 30 of them had worked it out on their own.

He is 32 years old. He came here on a free when nobody in England would look at him.

He took it off the man in the blazer and he held it about as high as his own chest and 60,000 people made a noise like a roof coming off.

Then he passed it back down the steps.

Nobody does that. I have watched trophies lifted since I was 6 and I have never seen a man do that.

Benteke took it off him and lifted it properly.

And then I did the thing that is on the internet.

The FA Community Shield is not a cup. It is a shield, and it sits on a base, and the base has got the name of every winner since 1908 on little plates on it, and it is heavier than it has any business being and it does not balance.

Nobody told me that. Nobody tells anybody that.

I got 2 hands under it and lifted it the way you lift a trophy, straight up, over your head, and the base came round on the hinge of my own wrists and hit me square in the mouth.

Tonk.

"OHHHHH."

I have watched that clip once. It lasted 6 seconds and I watched 2 of them.

Hahahahaha.

***

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