Glory Of The Football Manager System

Wednesday afternoon. Gatwick. Three o’clock.

The squad flew from Gatwick to Milan Malpensa on a chartered Titan Airways 757, the same aircraft that had taken them to Lisbon for the Europa League group stage, the same aircraft that Barry had spent twenty minutes loading with kit bags and medical equipment while muttering about "airlines that don’t understand the specific spatial requirements of professional football luggage."

The flight was two hours. The squad slept. Ate. Read. Neves watched footage of Milan’s last three home matches on his iPad. Kovačić, who had played at the San Siro for two seasons with Inter Milan, sat beside Sakho and talked quietly about the stadium, the dressing rooms, the tunnel, the noise.

Sakho listened with the focused attention of a man who was about to walk into a building he had been dreaming about since childhood and who wanted to know every detail before he arrived.

They landed at five-thirty. The hotel was in the centre of Milan, a five-star on Via della Spiga that Jessica had booked three weeks in advance. The lobby was marble. The rooms were large.

The beds were firm, which Rebecca had specified because soft mattresses disrupted the players’ sleep cycles and disrupted sleep cycles disrupted performance and disrupted performance was unacceptable forty-eight hours before a cup final.

Training at the San Siro was at eight. The bus left the hotel at seven.

And then the road changed.

The bus turned onto Viale Certosa, the broad avenue that led towards the San Siro district, and the world outside the windows became something that none of them, not even Kovačić, had experienced before.

The police arrived first. Four motorcycles, blue lights flashing, pulling in front of the bus and behind it, the riders in black helmets and high-visibility vests, their bikes weaving through the traffic with the practised, slightly aggressive efficiency of Italian law enforcement clearing a route.

Then two patrol cars, flanking the bus on either side, the sirens not sounding but the lights strobing, the blue and white cutting through the February darkness. Then, as the bus turned onto Piazzale Axum, the avenue that led directly to the stadium, horses.

Six mounted police. Carabinieri. On horseback. Their animals were enormous, dark, muscled, the riders sitting high in their saddles, their posture rigid, their faces invisible beneath their helmets.

The horses walked beside the bus, the hooves striking the asphalt with a rhythm that was audible inside the vehicle, a sound that was older than football, older than stadiums, older than anything that the players on the bus had ever heard in the context of a match.

Sakho was at the window. His eyes were wide. Not with fear. With recognition. The boy from the 19th arrondissement, who had watched this on television, the footage of teams arriving at the San Siro, the motorcycle escorts and the mounted police, was now inside the bus that the cameras filmed. The television was real. The dream was real. The horses were real.

"This is it," he said to Konaté, who was beside him. "This is the San Siro."

"I know," Konaté said. The eighteen-year-old’s voice was calm. His face was not. His eyes were moving, processing, calculating, the way they always did, the way they did when he read a striker’s run or anticipated a through ball. Except this was not a striker. This was a city.

The city was alive.

The Italian media had spent seven days building the narrative. "La Remontada." The comeback. The word, borrowed from Barcelona’s historic 6-1 comeback against PSG in 2017, had been plastered across every sports programme, every newspaper front page, every social media account in Milan since the first-leg result.

The fact that the comparison required Milan to score seven goals without reply, a feat that had happened approximately never in the history of European football against a team of Palace’s quality, was irrelevant. The narrative was not about mathematics. The narrative was about belief. And Milan’s fans believed.

The flares started half a mile from the stadium.

Red smoke rising from the pavements. Not scattered. Continuous.

A corridor of pyrotechnics lining both sides of the avenue, the smoke thick enough to turn the headlights of the police motorcycles into diffused, orange-red halos, the smell of sulphur and gunpowder and the particular, acrid sweetness of stadium-grade flares seeping through the bus’s ventilation system.

The smoke was so dense that the driver, a local man named Marco who had been driving teams to the San Siro for fifteen years, turned on the windscreen wipers out of habit before remembering that smoke was not rain.

Behind the smoke, the people. Thousands of them. Lining the avenue. Red and black scarves. Red and black flags. Drums beating. Songs rising. The ultras had mobilised the entire San Siro district. Families. Children.

Old men in Milan shirts that predated the modern-day Premier League. Women with flares held above their heads, the red light catching their faces, the fury and the passion and the irrational, beautiful, entirely unjustified belief that tonight, at the San Siro, AC Milan would score seven goals against Crystal Palace and advance to the next round.

They would not. Everyone on the bus knew they would not. Sarah knew. Bray knew. Rebecca knew. The players knew. Danny Walsh, sitting in the front seat, watching the smoke and the flares and the horses and the fury through the windscreen, knew.

But the knowing did not diminish the spectacle. The knowing made it more powerful. Because the people outside the bus, the thousands of Milanese who had come to the avenue to greet their team and to intimidate the visitors, were not performing belief. They were feeling it.

The remontada was impossible. They believed it anyway. Because that was what football demanded of its people: belief in the face of evidence. Faith in the absence of reason. The willingness to stand in smoke on a Thursday evening in February and sing for a miracle that was not coming.

On the bus, Wan-Bissaka, who had grown up in Croydon and who had never seen anything like this, was pressing his face against the glass. Neves was filming on his phone, the video shaking because his hands were shaking, not from fear but from the adrenaline that the spectacle was pumping into his bloodstream.

Rodríguez was looking out the window with the composed, slightly amused expression of a man who had experienced the Bernabéu’s White Handkerchief protests and the Maracanã’s wall of noise and who was now adding the San Siro’s flare corridor to his collection of footballing spectacles.

Kovačić was watching quietly, his face neutral, his mind already in the dressing room, already in the match, already past the smoke and the horses and the noise.

Dann was in the middle of the bus, his armband not yet on but his captain’s posture unmistakable. He was looking at the younger players, checking their faces, measuring their responses to the spectacle.

Tarkowski beside him, jaw set. McArthur, arms folded, unimpressed, because James McArthur had played away matches in Greece and Turkey and the Balkans and treated every hostile atmosphere with the same professional indifference. Milivojević, who had played for Olympiacos in front of the Gate 7 ultras, who were certifiably insane, was reading a book.

Pato was at the back of the bus. Alone. His headphones on. His eyes on the window. The flares outside were red and black. The colours he had worn. The colours he had been. The city he had lived in, the stadium he had played in, the fans who had sung his name and then stopped singing it. He was coming home. And home was on fire.

The bus turned the final corner. The San Siro appeared.

The stadium rose from the February darkness like a cathedral.

The four towers, the cylindrical concrete pillars that supported the upper tiers, were lit from below with floodlights that turned the brutalist architecture into something that resembled, from certain angles, a spacecraft that had landed in the suburbs of Milan and had been there so long that the city had built itself around it.

Eighty thousand seats. The ground where Sacchi’s Milan had changed football. Where Maldini had played for twenty-five years. Where Kaká had danced and Pirlo had conducted and Shevchenko had scored and the history of the sport was embedded in the concrete the way fossils were embedded in limestone.

Sakho pressed his hand against the window. The glass was cold. The stadium was close. The boy from Paris, who had watched this building on a television in a flat above a bakery, was looking at it with his own eyes for the first time.

"It’s bigger than television," he said.

Nobody disagreed.

The bus pulled into the players’ entrance. The police escort peeled away. The horses turned and walked back towards the avenue, their hooves echoing in the underground car park. The flares were behind them.

The smoke was behind them. The noise was muffled by concrete and steel and the architecture of a building that had been designed to contain eighty thousand voices and that was now, tonight, waiting to see whether those voices could produce a miracle.

They could not. Everyone knew it.

But the San Siro didn’t care about what everyone knew. The San Siro cared about what it felt. And what it felt, tonight, was the last, desperate, beautiful, futile hope of a football club that had once been the greatest in the world and that was now trying to pretend, for ninety minutes, that it still was.

The bus doors opened. The squad stood. Danny Walsh, in his suit, his Palace tie, his shoes polished, walked down the steps and into the car park and looked up at the concrete ceiling above him and thought: I am inside the San Siro.

Then he turned to his squad, twenty-five men who had followed him from South London to the most famous stadium in Italy, and said: "Same as Selhurst. Same identity. Same system. Different postcode."

They walked inside. The dressing room was waiting. The pitch was waiting. The eighty thousand seats were filling. The flares were spent. The smoke was clearing. And the match, the formality that was not a formality, the second leg that the mathematics said was over but that the San Siro refused to accept, was ninety minutes away.

[Wednesday-Thursday, February 21-22, 2018.]

[Monday: Cup final media day. Nike bespoke kit (gold trim, Wembley date inside collar). Squad portraits. Dann holds replica trophy.]

[Tuesday: EFL video content. "112 years. What would it mean?" Dann to Sakho in corridor: "Sunday is the day."]

[Wednesday morning: Rio Ferdinand BT Sport interview. Off-screen. 45 minutes. Airs Saturday evening.]

[Milan squad: 25 senior players. ZERO academy/U18 players. Blake, Olise, Kirby, Morrison stay in London. "The San Siro is not a classroom."]

[Wednesday evening: Flight Gatwick-Malpensa. Hotel Via della Spiga. Training at San Siro under floodlights.]

[Thursday: Bus to San Siro. Police escort: motorcycles, patrol cars, mounted Carabinieri on horseback. Flare corridor. Red smoke. Thousands lining the avenue.]

[Italian media: "La Remontada." Borrowed from Barça-PSG 2017. Mathematically impossible. Emotionally irresistible.]

[Sakho at the window: "It’s bigger than television." Pato at the back: headphones on, watching the city that gave up on him burn.]

[Danny at the San Siro car park: "Same as Selhurst. Same identity. Same system. Different postcode."]

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Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the Massage Chair.