[Groupama Stadium. Full Time. Crystal Palace 3-2 Arsenal.]
I went looking for the loser first.
The pitch was chaos, bodies everywhere, Pato cartwheeling in his bib, Wilf on his knees at the centre circle with his shirt over his face, twenty thousand people behind the goal making a noise you could lean on. And then the noise found words, up at the top of the away end somewhere, and came down the cliff gathering voices as it fell.
DUM. DUM. DUM. "CHAMPIONS OF EUROPE! CHAMPIONS OF EUROPE!"
A hundred and thirteen years old, this football club. Five points off relegation thirteen months ago, on a losing streak, with an under-eighteens coach in a borrowed tracksuit. Champions of Europe by the time the song reached the front row.
Every lad I had was sprinting towards that end.
And I walked the other way, the long way, across to the far technical area, because there was a sixty-eight-year-old man standing alone in it and some things get done in the right order or not at all.
