Glory Of The Football Manager System

Chapter 657: South London III

[Selhurst Park. 14:35 BST.]

Both buses came through the gates and the noise inside the ground hit different, because outside it was spread over miles and inside it was twenty-six thousand of them stacked in a bowl with a lid of sky on it and not one of them sitting down.

The pyro went off the roof of the Holmesdale. FOOMP. FOOMP. FOOMP. Red and blue, columns of it, and the smoke rolled down over the pitch, and then the cannons, FOOMP, confetti coming down in a blizzard that didn’t know what month it was.

The lads came off the buses and there was no order to any of it. Kit men next to internationals.

The canteen women next to Mama. Paddy’s kids chasing Olise across the grass on a lap nobody had organised. Pato got hold of a confetti cannon off the stage crew and fired it point blank into Konaté’s face, and Konaté, who does not smile, who breathes out through his nose instead of laughing, who has not changed his expression since September, Konaté grabbed Pato in a headlock and the pair of them went down into the confetti and that, that, was the moment I knew the season was really over, because Ibrahima Konaté was laughing on his back on the Selhurst pitch and I had genuinely never seen his teeth before.

Wilf went straight to the Holmesdale and put both hands on the advertising hoarding and just stood in front of his own end with his head down and let them sing at him.

Bojan and Mandanda took the long way round the pitch. Side by side, the running track, slow, two men who would not stand on this grass again after June, and nobody hurried them, and nobody had to be told why.

Coppell met me at the tunnel. Steve Coppell, who took this club to a final in 1990 and lost it, gripping my hand and not giving it back. Wright and Bright and Salako already up on the stage, Ian Wright with a microphone nobody had handed him and nobody was getting back.

Five trophies went up on the table. The three senior ones, and the two youth cups beside them, because Paddy had carried them up himself and set them down and dared a man to move them.

Elena had her whole crew at the foot of the stage, Tomás down on one knee with the camera up, Ruth beside him, getting the five trophies and the twenty-six thousand and the confetti coming down, because this was the last scene of her film and she knew it.

And then the noise found me.

I do not know who started it. It is always the Holmesdale, and it went round the bowl in about four seconds and it was my name.

"THERE’S ONLY ONE DANNY WALSH! ONE DANNY WALSH!"

Twenty-six thousand of them. My name. I have spent thirteen months pointing at the players and pointing at the badge and getting myself out of the light, and they would not let me out of it this time. The lads started it up on the stage too, Pato first, all of them, turned to me and pointing, and Mama put a hand flat on the back of my neck and turned my head to face the Holmesdale so I had nowhere else to look, and Dann said it in my ear, loud, over the top of all of it.

"A hundred and thirteen years, gaffer. Every manager this club has ever had. You’re the one. You. Take it."

So I took it.

I do not say the next bit. The record book says it, and a hundred and thirteen years of men who came before me and won nothing say it, and twenty-six thousand people in a bowl in Croydon were singing it into my face: the best manager Crystal Palace have ever had. And for once, soaked through with champagne, two medals round my neck and the third round Emma’s, I stood dead still and let it land on me and did not duck a word of it.

They put a mic in my hand. I am no good with a mic.

"South London."

The sound that came back nearly took me off my feet, so I waited, and then I said the only things that were true.

"A hundred and thirteen years. You waited a hundred and thirteen years. Some of you were carried in here on your dad’s shoulders an hour ago and some of you have been coming since before I was born, and what’s on that table is yours, every bit of it, because none of it gets built without you in those seats on the wet Tuesdays when we were nothing."

I had to stop. I got it back.

"And I’ll tell you this for nothing. We are not done. I am twenty-eight. Half this squad can’t grow a beard. We are going to do this again and we are going to do it bigger and we are going to make every big club in this country sick to the back teeth of the name Crystal Palace. So get your voices back by August." I lifted the Europa cup off the table because Dann put it in my hands. "Glad all over, South London. We’ll see you next year."

Dann and Mama lifted it together one more time, the suit and the captain, and the bowl came apart, and the pyro went again, FOOMP, and a song from 1963 went up off twenty-six thousand throats and you could feel it in the soles of your feet.

[Selhurst Park. The pitch. 16:10 BST.]

A thing like that goes through you and out the other side and leaves you standing in a foot of paper not quite able to feel your hands.

Emma came across the grass. My jacket. My medal, the third one, gold against the green of her dress. She got her arms round my neck and the medal pressed cold between us and for a second neither of us bothered with words.

"Your mum rang," she said into my collar.

"Yeah?"

"Watched the parade with Margaret. Said the buses looked lovely." She leaned back. "She’s doing a roast Sunday. She said don’t be late and she said bring the cup, and she’s said it twice now, so you are bringing the cup."

"I’m bringing the cup."

Sunday.

Eight hundred miles north of all this paper and pyro, a quiet patch of ground in Moss Side with two stones in it I had not stood in front of in fourteen years, and a roast, and my mum, and a cup she wanted to see with her own eyes.

I looked back out at the pitch. Pato had Connor up on his shoulders. Konaté was still on the floor. Mateo was upright on his crutch in the centre circle with Neves under one arm, refusing, still, to sit down.

Sarah was being hugged by a groundsman she had known ten years and almost certainly never touched. Paddy stood with his five trophies and his kids and took a photograph with no camera, just his eyes, the way you do when you already know it is the best day there will ever be.

Five trophies in thirteen months. A hundred and thirteen years for the first three.

I was twenty-eight years old, standing in confetti up to my ankles at Selhurst Park, and I did not have the first idea what we were going to do next.

I have never in my life wanted to find a thing out more.