by Philip Kerr
Instead I pushed my hands into my trouser pockets and looked at the ceiling as if searching for some inspiration. But none was there. And really, what was there to say? I’d already said everything that could be said before the game; to say anything else now would only look like I’d wasted my breath the first time. Besides, I’d have probably started to swear and chew the carpet like Hitler and that wasn’t going to help anyone; not tonight. They say actions speak louder than words and short of throwing boots and punches and kicking backsides I decided there was really only one thing I could do.
The lads were all looking expectantly at me now, waiting for the full Al Pacino, the Any Given Sunday, inch-by-inch, ‘I don’t know what to say’ speech that was going to work a miracle in their thick heads and turn the match around. I was all through with motivation. But I could, perhaps, offer a moment of epiphany, one simple symbolic gesture that would allow a leap of understanding where another thousand words would not.
I walked up to Zarco’s picture and lifted it away from the wall. I stared at the face for a moment, caught the expression in the eyes, and nodded; then I twisted the picture around on its cord and placed it back against the wall, face first, so that the Portuguese would not have to look at the players who, so far, had disgraced his memory. At least that’s what I wanted them all to think. Then I picked up my iPad and left the dressing room.
For a moment I stood outside in the corridor with all the noise of the stadium in my ears, wondering where to go. There were dozens of eyes on me now: policemen, officials, security men, ball-boys, television technicians and stewards. I had to get away from them, too, and as soon as possible.
I remembered I still had the key to the drug-testing station; I went in there and locked the door behind me.
I used the lavatory and drank some water. Then I sat down at the table with the black cloth on it and stared crossly at my iPhone and my iPad. As usual the iPhone wasn’t picking up any texts, or receiving calls, for which I was grateful; but there was a good WiFi signal in there which meant there were some emails on my iPad, including one from Louise Considine expressing concern for my humour and letting me know that it would be perfectly fine by her if I couldn’t face having dinner with her after the match. I realised I’d almost forgotten about lovely Louise sitting upstairs in the director’s box and immediately I emailed her back to say that after the match I was very much looking forward to her company one way or the other: to celebrate with or, more likely, to help me drown my sorrows.
Ignoring an email from Viktor suggesting that it was time we considered some substitutions, I sighed, opened another bottle of water and wished it could have been whisky. Brian Clough once said that players lose you games, not tactics, and while I could obviously have picked a different team I didn’t honestly think I should have done. There’s a lot of bollocks talked in pubs and television studios about tactics, and nearly always by people who haven’t coached and couldn’t manage their own Ocado order. As far as I’m concerned tactics are what fucking generals use to get a lot of decent men under their command killed in as short a period of time as possible. I knew I’d made the right decisions because whatever people say, making them in football is a lot fucking easier than making them in life; that’s why so many people go into football in the first place.
Not that any of it really mattered, as my doubts about Viktor Sokolnikov now seemed so compelling that I could see no real alternative to offering him my resignation immediately after the match was over. Because that’s what you do when you think you’ve been played for a fool by a crook. I couldn’t prove anything, of course; but perhaps, after the match, I might privately share a few of my suspicions with Louise. Given the likely result of the match my resigning would probably suit not just Viktor but the supporters, too. You see, it wasn’t only the players who had been jeered at the end of the first half. I could still hear someone shouting, ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Manson,’ when I’d walked off the pitch at half time.
This didn’t bother me very much; when the world has fallen in on your head once before, it means you know where the tin hats are when it seems about to happen again. A few tossers handing out abuse from the stands is how you know you’re doing a good job, because if everyone agrees with you then it’s obvious that it’s a job that absolutely anyone could do.
It was Zarco I felt sorry for. I’d honestly believed his players would have wanted to honour his memory with a famous victory. It wasn’t that West Ham were so good; it was just that ours looked like a testimonial side – a few VIPs and guest players invited to kick a ball around to raise a bit of cash for one of yesterday’s stars.
I was also sorry for the friends and relations of Zarco – the ones for whom he always arranged complimentary tickets to City matches. It can’t have been very nice for them to see such a poor excuse of a football match. I knew they were here because Maurice had sent me a list of their names before the game; many of them were regulars at Silvertown Dock and had also been at the ground on Saturday for the match during which Zarco had been killed. His brothers, Anibal and Ermenegildo, his uncle, Jacinto and his sister, Branca; his best friend Dominique Racine, who had been managing PSG until he got sacked for – it was generally reported – failing to get the best out of Bekim Develi; and retired players like Paul Becker and Tano Andretti, who had been with Zarco at La Braga. Two tweets from Andretti about Zarco had been universally quoted in all of the newspapers, not least because it was a little unusual that an Italian footballer should have chosen to commemorate his Portuguese friend with four lines from Percy Shelley’s poem, Adonais:
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep
He hath awakened from the dream of life
And:
’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife.
On that particular night, against a rampant West Ham side that looked like it was going to score at least another three goals in the second half, I certainly felt it was an unprofitable strife in which we were now engaged.
I glanced at my watch. There were five minutes to go before the second half started. I unlocked the door and went back outside to the dugout where the mood of the crowd was a strange mixture of dejection and delight: our own supporters, quiet and subdued and fearing the worst; and the West Ham fans, who were sensing a great victory and daring – perhaps – to dream of their biggest win since beating Bury 10–0 in 1983.
It seemed my career in top-flight football management was over before it had begun because everyone would assume I’d just not been up to it. I could hardly help that; perhaps I’d get another chance to manage a smaller club, a club where the owner was not the type to have his manager thrown out of a window and then make a joke about it afterwards.
Another email pinged onto my iPad: a list of names that Viktor thought should be on the field instead of the ‘kids and half-wits’ that were already walking back out of the tunnel. I ignored it.
Besides, there was another list of names in my head as I took my place alongside Simon Page in the dugout. (It was hard to imagine Viktor giving the blunt Yorkshireman my job when I resigned.)
‘What the fuck happened to you?’ he asked. ‘One manager disappearing at this club is unfortunate but two looks like fucking negligence. In case you didn’t realise it, boss, the ceiling is coming down on our heads. We’re getting done here. Maybe you should have wrung a couple of necks and kicked some fucking arses. I know which arses I would have kicked. That Scots twat in goal, for a start. He should never have come that far off his line. Not for a fifty–fifty ball like that.’
‘We can still win this,’ I said.
‘Did you not think you should have told them that?’
‘I did. But I did it my way. Just like Frank Sinatra.’
‘I recall the regrets and the times when he bit off more than he could chew right enough, but I don’t remember him staring down the barrel of a three-goal deficit.’
‘Simon? Shut the fuck up.’
‘Yes, boss.’
The players took their places in the centre circle; it was always my favourite moment of the game, when I had the sense that anything could happen. But for a few seconds I wasn’t paying much attention; I’d found the list of names that Maurice had sent me and was reading it again on my iPad.
All of the names on Zarco’s list of comps I was familiar with – bar one.
47
Somehow the crowd at Silvertown Dock had managed to lift its spirits. Hope springs eternal in the breast of any football fan. That’s the wonderful thing about football; it’s about so much more than just football. That’s what people who don’t go to football can never understand. If it wasn’t like this then no one would go. So when the Hammers fans started up with ‘Over Land and Sea’, our fans dug deep into their reserves of optimism and quickly drowned them out with a spirited rendition of ‘Sitting in Silvertown Dock’, to the tune of Otis Redding’s ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’. It was one of those transcendent moments when you feel part of a much larger soul and realise that at the end of the day football is the only game that has ever really mattered. That will ever matter.
England has given the world a lot, but football is its greatest gift of all.
I don’t know much about schizophrenia. I once saw a film called A Beautiful Mind about a Nobel-Prize-winning economist called John Nash, who was a schizo. For half of his life he seems to have been a genius; for the other half he was barking mad. I’m not sure I’d want to make too much of a comparison between the beautiful game and A Beautiful Mind, but as soon as the second half began at Silvertown Dock it was clear to me that our team of ‘kids and half-wits’ was displaying a very different personality to the one they had exhibited during the first half. I won’t say that the team was bordering on genius, because that’s a word that gets overused in football, but, like Nash, they seemed to be greatly gifted and frankly, extraordinary.
By contrast, West Ham’s players looked like they were playing with lead in their football boots and they did not have another shot at goal until the ninetieth minute, when Kenny Traynor saved a thunderbolt from Bruno Haider with what looked more like an audition for the role of the Roman god Mercury, such was the distance he covered and the speed with which he did it.
The tenor of the new half was set immediately when Ayrton Taylor scored within twelve seconds of the game restarting, finding the back of the net with a rocketing Roy of the Rovers volley that punished a miskicked clearance by Spiegel. The crowd at the dock went wild. 3–1.
‘Fucking hell,’ said Simon after we’d finished celebrating. ‘Now that’s what I call a fucking goal. That might just be the fastest goal in Premier League history.’
‘Nope. That was Ledley King, Tottenham against Bradford in 2000. Ten seconds. Besides, this isn’t a Premier League game.’
‘You know what I mean. Top three, then.’
‘Might be.’
‘If Taylor can do it twice more I’ll lick the ball clean after the match. And his balls as well, if he asks me nicely.’
‘I’ll remind you that you said that, you big daft Yorkshireman.’
But it was Zénobe Schuermans who scored our second after fifty-eight minutes, and it was only when I’d watched the replay several times that I understood exactly what he’d done. It was the kind of something-out-of-nothing goal that you might have seen painted onto a vertical sheet of glass by Picasso in a single, simple uninterrupted line with a very fine brush. Much later on, Sky Sports showed Zénobe’s goal in slow motion, accompanied by Glenn Gould playing the first of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, which only seemed to underline the perfectly sublime and almost draftsman-like quality of what was happening in the picture. (Today, it’s a goal that even professional players never get tired of watching in an attempt to deconstruct what makes a perfect footballer.) Xavier Pepe drives a long, low pass along the ground to Schuermans, who has his back to the goal. With his right foot, the young Belgian controls and flicks the ball around Chambers in one elegant pirouette, collects the ball on the other side of the defender at the same time as he blocks him with his arm and hip, and coolly opens his body to deliver a clinical finish with the toe of his left foot straight underneath Spiegel and into the far corner of the net.
There was nothing flashy about the goal, or the way Zénobe celebrated afterwards; you would have said it was a mature player’s goal but for the fact that the Belgian was just sixteen years old. He collected the ball from the back of the net and jogged quickly back to the centre spot, high-fived Jimmy Ribbans and Ayrton Taylor, and looked for all the world as if he just wanted to get on with the game as quickly as possible with the least amount of fuss. 3–2 to West Ham.
‘I don’t care if we win or draw now,’ I told Simon. ‘I’ve just witnessed one of the best goals I’ve ever seen in my life from a player in a team of which I’m the manager.’
‘I couldn’t agree more. Jesus Christ, I’m supposed to try and coach that lad on Thursday. I reckon he could teach us both a fucking thing or two, eh?’
‘That boy could play for another fifteen years and he’ll never score a better goal than that.’ I grinned as I saw a few West Ham heads fall. ‘Look at them. That’s their game plan finished. They know now they’re just hanging to the lead by some well-chewed fingernails.’
As the match restarted Sam Allardyce, West Ham’s manager, was shouting at his men – no one can shout as loud as Big Sam – to keep possession. Now that they’d lost control of the tempo of the game it was surely good advice; staying deep and passing the ball among themselves, forcing us to come and chase it, was the best way of keeping hold of their one-goal advantage. Unfortunately they hadn’t taken account of the speed of our left-winger. A simple back pass from a careless defender to Spiegel was pounced on by Jimmy Ribbans, forcing Spiegel to the ground and, on the hard, slippy surface of the dock, he came scything towards the winger like a jack-knifing articulated lorry, collecting the player’s legs and only then the ball in the process.
The referee did not hesitate and pointed to the penalty spot.
Ayrton Taylor’s penalty was a master class in how to take one: a long, fast run-up with litres of venom in the strike, like Mike Tyson punching an opponent, as if he actually hoped that the ball might strike Spiegel hard in the face and drive the bone of his nose up into his brain. The kind of penalty that makes a goalkeeper want to get out of the way of the ball. 3–3. There were just five minutes of normal time left.
I jumped out of my seat, fisted the air and walked to the edge of my technical area, applauding furiously. ‘That’s the way to take a fucking penalty,’ I yelled. ‘Well done, Ayrton. Fucking brilliant. Now let’s show these cunts what we’re made of.’
The fourth official turned to stare at me. ‘You’ve been warned about swearing before,’ he said and waved Paedo Donnelly towards us.
‘What?’ I said. ‘You’re joking.’
Donnelly listened to the fourth official for a moment and then walked over to my technical area.
‘You were told before about swearing at players,’ said the referee.
‘It was my own player,’ I said. ‘Besides, I wasn’t swearing at him. I was congratulating him.’
‘Tonight of all nights I’d have thought that you might moderate your language,’ said Paedo. ‘Out of respect for Zarco’s memory.’
‘I’m not going to take any lectures from you about Zarco’s memory. Nobody has more respect for his memory than I have. So don’t even think about sending me off.’
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said Paedo. ‘I deem your behaviour inappropriate, Mr Manson. And I’m sending you out of your technical area. Go. Now.’ He pointed to the stands behind me and then wrote my name on his yellow card. Then he turned and walked back to the penalty spot to restart the match.
I turned to the fourth official. ‘You know something? He’s a cunt and so are you.’
Meanwhile the crowd started to j
eer and then to chant, ‘Pae-do, Pae-do, Pae-do, Pae-do.’
One of the stewards pointed to an empty seat behind our players’ bench and feeling rather aggrieved, I sat down next to our technical staff. But this seat wasn’t far enough away to suit the fourth official and, to my amazement, he followed me and ordered me out of this seat, too. Much to my irritation I was obliged to get up a second time and to sit down alongside the real fans.
‘Did it hurt when you pulled that card out of your arse?’ one fan shouted after Paedo.
‘Great game,’ said another, shaking my hand. ‘Well done, mate.’
‘Fucking marvellous,’ said another.
‘Don’t worry. That’s just Paedo being a Paedo.’
I glanced at my watch. Normal time was now over. I looked anxiously at the fourth official to see how much added time there would be. If I’d not been looking at him I suppose I would have seen our fourth goal. And until I watched the replay on the big screen at the river side I had no idea who scored. West Ham had one last strike at goal by Bruno Haider saved brilliantly by Kenny Traynor, who cleared his lines with a huge kick and sent Soltani Boumediene sprinting for their goal. If West Ham hadn’t been lying so deep the Arab lad would have been offside; as it was he checked his run just before the penalty box, looked as if he was going to shoot, which sent the hapless keeper to one side, and then tapped the ball gently straight into the net. 4–3. The crowd was in ecstasy and I found myself being hugged by nearly everyone around me.
‘You’re a fucking genius, Manson,’ said one fan. ‘What a team you picked.’
I nodded. For a young team lacking experience, it was hard to imagine that a team composed entirely of all our first-choice players could have done any better. Our midfield looked every bit as good as Arsenal’s; perhaps even better. I had every reason to feel pleased.