Free Web NovelChapter 698: Saint Petersburg: Iran
[Saint Petersburg Stadium. Group B. 15 June 2018.]
The Iran fans found our bus before our bus found the stadium.
They came off the pavements in their thousands and closed round us at the lights, a sea of red and white with the green flash of the flag through it, scarves up, faces at the glass on both sides. A flag slapped flat across Hakimi’s window and slid off.
A man in a Persia shirt got both palms on the glass by Sofyan’s head and bellowed something through it, grinning, not nasty, just full to the brim.
Sofyan bellowed something Arabic back. The two of them had a whole row neither could hear through four inches of glass and forty thousand people, and both came away laughing.
"They are happy, coach."
"They’ve not played us yet, son."
Boom-boom. Boom-boom. A drum somewhere down the side of us, a chant I couldn’t catch the words of rolling past, all of it coming through the glass thick and muffled, a party heard through a wall you’re about to walk into.
Then the crowd thinned at a checkpoint, and there it was, lifting up out of the red. A saucer. Eight white spires raking off a roof the shape of something that had landed, the whole of it lit silver and glowing under a sky that would not go dark.
Half five this far north in June, and the light was the pale of an English noon, and meant to stay that way past midnight.
Nobody said a word to it. Even Benatia took his eyes off his headphones and his own head for a second, and looked.
Inside, the cold hit. They keep these new grounds at fifteen degrees whatever the sky’s doing, and we came out of the white evening into a corridor of clean chilled nothing that smelled of paint and liniment.
A steward the size of a wardrobe pointed us left without a word of English and a kindness in it anyway.
There was a peg by the dressing-room door with WALSH printed over it. I looked at that for exactly one second too long, then a stud bag went clatter on the tiles and a kit lad swore and it was football again.
We walked the pitch in our suits an hour out, the way you do, and the bowl took the legs out from under the young ones.
The roof stood open on its eight pylons to that pale northern sky, the floodlights already burning under it, lamps blazing over a stadium that had no night to light.
Out on the grass not one of us threw a shadow. Sky still bright, lamps full on, every man casting nothing at his feet, and it did a strange thing to the eye.
The grass had been watered to a deep green gleam, the white lines fresh and sharp. The smell of it came up under our shoes, cut grass and wet earth, the one smell every footballer on the planet knows blind.
A ring of boards round the pitch ran its colours one into the next, and on the big screen above the far end a Moroccan flag the size of a house rippled and melted into an Iranian one.
A PA voice rolled team names round the bowl in Russian and English, each one booming and dying in the half-empty tiers, the drum never stopping under it. The Iran end stacked itself row by row into a single sheet of red, scarves up, the chant already on its feet.
IRAN. IRAN. IRAN. Off the back row, down the tier, round the bend of the stand and into our half of the ground.
Our corner was a thumbprint of green in the middle of it. A few thousand who’d got here from Casablanca and Brussels and God knows where, drowned and roaring anyway.
One lad down the front had a flag with a name and a date sewn in the corner, and every time the green found a song he hoisted it over his head and shook it at the pitch, like he was showing somebody.
En-Nesyri stopped walking. Twenty years old, first one of these in his life, and he looked up at the tiers climbing into the light and his face came apart.
"Coach. It’s so big."
I got him by the back of the neck. "Same goal. Eight yards. Same as the cage you grew up on." I turned him round to face it. "That lot can’t kick it. Only you."
I let my eyes go across to the Iran keeper while they finished their warm-up.
ALIREZA BEIRANVAND · GK · 25 CA 138. A wall on his line. From distance you’ll have to earn it.
Then the lad up top, the only one of theirs who’d stayed forward.
SARDAR AZMOUN · ST · 23 Pace 16. The ball they’ll leave high. A yard in behind and he’s gone.
A good keeper, a quick striker held back for the break. The rest would be home behind the ball the instant we kicked off. Their manager had promised for a week he’d come to suffocate us, and I believed him.
We went in. They changed. I said next to nothing, because a man who makes a speech an hour before a World Cup is a man who doesn’t trust the week.
A FIFA fella in a blazer put his head round the door, and we lined up in the tunnel mouth, and the children were waiting.
Little kids in little kits, one for each player to walk out by the hand. En-Nesyri got a girl of seven who clamped onto two of his fingers and would not be moved, and the hardest man in our forward line crouched down to her and said something that set her giggling into her own shoulder.
The tournament’s music came up, that big swelling thing, and the line moved, and we came out of the dark mouth of the tunnel into a wall of light and colour that hit like a slap.
ROAAARR.
Sixty-seven thousand of them, the red end a single rippling sheet under the burning floodlights, phone-lights pricking out in their thousands like the stand had caught fire. The pale sky pouring over all of it. I couldn’t hear the man beside me and didn’t want to.
My heart was going like a fist on a door and my mouth had gone to sand, and I’d stood on the touchline of a Europa final and not felt the half of this. You could smell it as well as hear it, smoke and beer and fried something on the warm air, the smell of a crowd that size.
We lined the players across the centre, giants in green beside the little ones in their kits, hands held, and the anthems came.
Theirs first. The red end gave it everything, sixty thousand fists on sixty thousand hearts, the words fired back down at the grass.
Then ours, our thumbprint of green doing the work of a stand ten times its size, Saiss with his eyes shut and his chest going, Benatia roaring it up at the lights, the captain’s armband tight on his bicep, like he’d waited his whole life for the chance.
ting. The coin went up off the referee’s thumb at the centre circle, a lean man in black with a face like he’d seen it all twice.
Benatia won it and pointed us to defend the Iran end second half, so we’d be running at that wall when the legs and the nerve start to go. I hadn’t told him to. He just knew.
The cartoon wolf the size of a fridge waved and trotted off. The match ball sat alone on its plinth in the centre circle, the Telstar, white with its black panels, under a camera that slid back and forth above it on a wire. Behind each goal a bank of photographers knelt shoulder to shoulder, a wall of long lenses.
The subs went to the bench in their bibs. Bray laid his set-piece folder on his knees and pressed it flat with both hands. Marcus thumbed his stopwatch. Steele stared at the pitch and said nothing, which is how Steele prays.
Right behind our dugout, close enough to flick my ear, sat a barrel of a man in a Team Melli shirt with a flag knotted round his neck like a cape and a flask between his boots. He’d picked me out before a ball was kicked.
"ENGLISH!" He jabbed a finger at the back of my head. "You go home tonight! You go home crying!"
I gave him a thumbs-up without turning round. He loved it, and hated that he loved it.
Beside him a Russian lad in a Zenit shirt sat with his arms folded, there for the show and backing nobody, watching the two of us like a man at a zoo.
MOROCCO · 4-1-4-1 Bounou; Hakimi, Benatia, Saiss, Mendyl; El Ahmadi; N. Amrabat, Sofyan, Boussoufa, Ziyech; En-Nesyri.
We don’t go through the wall. We go round it. Their left-back takes their free kicks and gallops up to take them, so the grass at his back is the one soft spot in a hard team, and Hakimi and Nordin were going to stand on it all night.
And when the cutback came, we did the thing forty mornings in Voronezh had been for. We didn’t sky it.
PEEEP.
