Glory Of The Football Manager System

Thursday, February 15th. Selhurst Park. Seven o’clock in the evening. Europa League, Round of 32, first leg. AC Milan.

The flares started at six.

The Milan ultras had arrived in South London on a fleet of coaches from Gatwick, two thousand of them, and they had brought the theatre of Italian football with them.

Red smoke rising above the Arthur Wait stand an hour before kick-off, the acrid, sweet, unmistakable smell of pyrotechnics drifting across the Selhurst Park car park and settling on the evening like a fog.

The stewards were confiscating flares at the turnstiles and finding more. The ultras were experienced. The ultras had been smuggling flares into stadiums since before Danny Walsh was born. They treated English stewards the way a river treated a dam: as an inconvenience to flow around, not an obstacle to stop at.

The noise was different from a Premier League night. Not louder. Different. Rhythmic. Organised.

The drums in the Arthur Wait beating a cadence that was more Mediterranean than English, the songs rising and falling in waves, the choreography of a fanbase that had been doing this in the San Siro for decades and that had brought the same energy, the same passion, the same undying, irrational, beautiful belief in the red and black stripes to a twenty-five-thousand-seat ground in South London.

But the stripes were fading.

Not literally. Literally, the shirts were immaculate, the Milan crest sharp, the away kit pristine. But the club beneath the shirts was not the club of Maldini and Baresi and Van Basten. It was not the club that had won seven European Cups and three Intercontinental Cups and had defined the meaning of defensive excellence for half a century.

This was a Milan in transition. New Chinese ownership that was already in financial difficulty. A squad assembled with two hundred million pounds of someone else’s money, the cohesion still forming, the identity still searching.

Bonucci from Juventus, brilliant but exposed without Chiellini beside him. Çalhanoğlu from Leverkusen is talented but inconsistent. André Silva from Porto has been expensive but goalless in the league since November. And Donnarumma in goal, nineteen years old, the most talented young goalkeeper in the world, carrying the weight of a legacy that the men in front of him could not support.

Sarah had identified all of it. Three weeks of preparation. Thirty-one hours of footage. And a tactical brief that said, in the precise, clinical language that defined Sarah Martinez’s approach to football: "They are a great name with a good squad. We are a good name with a great squad. The identity is the difference."

I stood in the tunnel and looked at the "VISITORS" sign above Milan’s dressing room door and thought about July. Singapore.

The International Champions Cup. A pre-season friendly that meant nothing and that had meant everything. Palace 3-0 Milan.

Pato scoring twice, crying on my shoulder after the second, the boy who had been the golden boy of the San Siro returning to destroy the club that had given up on him. Rodríguez coming off the bench at sixty minutes and turning the match into an art exhibition.

That was July. A sketch on a whiteboard. A squad still being assembled. A system still finding its shape.

This was February. The finished painting.

[Starting XI: AC Milan (H). Europa League R32, First Leg. Pope; Wan-Bissaka, Konaté, Sakho, Chilwell; Neves, Kovačić; Navas, Rodríguez, Zaha; Pato. Bench: Hennessey, Dann, Tarkowski, Digne, Milivojević, Kirby, Blake.]

The dressing room before the match was the quietest I had ever heard it.

Not tense. Focused. The focus of twenty men who understood that the next ninety minutes would define their season and possibly their careers. Sakho was in his corner, his eyes closed, his lips moving. Not prayer. Visualisation.

The boy from the 19th arrondissement of Paris, who had grown up watching Milan lift the Champions League trophy on a television in a flat above a bakery, was about to walk onto a pitch against them. He had waited thirty years for this. He was not going to waste the moment on noise.

Konaté was very still. Eighteen years old. About to face AC Milan. The name that meant history, that meant Sacchi and Capello and Ancelotti, that meant the football that had changed the sport.

He was sitting on the bench with his hands on his knees, his long legs folded, his face carrying the composed, ancient calm of a boy who saw football in spaces rather than names and who was therefore unimpressed by the weight of Milan’s history and entirely focused on the weight of Milan’s defensive line.

Pato was lacing his boots. The same ritual he performed before every match, the left boot first, the right boot second, the laces tied twice, the same sequence he had followed since he was sixteen years old and lacing boots in the San Siro dressing room for the first time. Except tonight, the San Siro dressing room was on the other side of the tunnel.

And the boots were Palace red, not Milan black. And the boy who had been the golden boy was twenty-eight years old and playing for the team that had believed in him when nobody else would.

I stood in the centre of the room. Tomás was in the corner. The Netflix camera was rolling. I did not think about it.

"AC Milan," I said. "Seven European Cups. The club of Maldini, Baresi, Pirlo, Kaká, Gattuso. The most decorated Italian club in European history."

I looked around the room. "That is their past. This is their present. And their present is a squad that has won four of their last ten matches, that has conceded in seven consecutive games, and whose central defensive partnership has been together for five months and still doesn’t communicate."

I looked at Pato. "Alex. You know this club better than anyone in this room. You know their rhythms, their habits, their weaknesses. You know what the shirt feels like and what the badge means and what the San Siro sounds like when it’s full and what it sounds like when it’s silent. Tonight, you use all of it. Every memory. Every moment. Every goal you scored and every goal you didn’t. You turn it into fuel."

Pato looked at me. His eyes were dry. His jaw was set. The fire that had burned in Singapore was burning now with the contained, controlled, absolute fury of a man who was about to play against his own ghost.

"Mamadou." Sakho opened his eyes. "You grew up watching Milan. Tonight, you play against them. The boy from Paris on the pitch with the team from his television. Make the boy proud."

Sakho said nothing. He closed his eyes again. The visualisation continued. Whatever he was seeing behind his eyelids was private. Whatever it was, it was ready.

"This is the biggest match in the history of Crystal Palace Football Club. The biggest. Not because of what it means for the table or the coefficient or the prize money. Because of what it means for the identity. A club from South London, playing European knockout football against one of the giants of the sport. Twenty-five thousand people out there who have waited a hundred and twelve years for a night like this."

I paused. "Don’t waste it."

The teams walked out. The Holmesdale erupted. The Milan ultras in the Arthur Wait answered with their drums and their smoke and their songs. Two walls of noise, crashing against each other, the sound filling the Selhurst Park bowl and rising into the February night.

And then something happened that nobody expected.

Twenty-four seconds.

The kick-off. Neves to Kovačić. Kovačić to Rodríguez. Rodríguez, first touch, played a pass forward to Pato on the halfway line. Pato received, turned, and ran.

In 2011, in the Champions League, Alexandre Pato had scored against Barcelona after twenty-four seconds.

He had received the ball on the halfway line at the Camp Nou, beaten the offside trap with a burst of pace that made Carles Puyol look like he was running in sand, and slotted past Victor Valdés with the cold composure of a boy who did not understand that scoring against Barcelona in the first thirty seconds was supposed to be impossible.

The goal was shown on every highlight reel for the next decade. It was the goal that defined him. The goal that said: I am the fastest, the most fearless, the most devastatingly direct striker in European football.

Tonight, at Selhurst Park, against Milan, he recreated it.

Bonucci was high. Sarah had identified this. The Italian centre-back, who pushed further up the pitch than any defender in Serie A, left the space behind him that Kovačić’s corridor was designed to exploit. Bonucci was high, and Pato was faster, and the pass from Rodríguez was perfect, and the Brazilian was through on goal before the Milan defence had completed their first collective breath.

Twenty-six seconds on the clock. Pato, one-on-one with Donnarumma. The nineteen-year-old goalkeeper who had been the best young keeper in the world since he was sixteen, who had replaced Dida at Milan at an age when most boys were worrying about their A-levels.

Pato didn’t chip him. Not this time. He slotted it. Low. Left foot. Past Donnarumma’s right hand. Into the far corner. The way he had slotted it past Valdés at the Camp Nou. The same finish. The same composure. The same cold, beautiful, devastating efficiency.

Crystal Palace 1-0 AC Milan. Pato. 1 minute.

The Holmesdale did not know what had happened. The goal was so fast, so sudden, so absurdly early that twenty-five thousand people spent three seconds in silence before their brains caught up with their eyes.

Then the sound hit. The sound of a football ground realising that a man who had scored against Barcelona in twenty-four seconds had just scored against Milan in twenty-six and that the greatest night in the club’s history had begun before most people had found their seats.

Pato’s celebration, which was out of place as he refused to celebrate in the preseason, was the celebration from 2011. The right arm extended. One finger pointing to the sky.

The trademark that the world had not seen enough of. The trademark that belonged to the San Siro and the Camp Nou and the Bernabéu and that was now, tonight, being performed at Selhurst Park, in South London, by a man who had been given up on and who had refused to give up on himself.

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