January Window

42

I shouldn’t have been nervous but because this was my first match as the new manager of London City, I was. The previous Saturday’s game against Newcastle didn’t count; then I’d been talking to a football team that Zarco had picked and which was playing for him. All of the players had wrongly assumed that at some stage Zarco would turn up in the dressing room and hand out praise to those who’d played well and, more importantly, bollockings to those who’d played badly. No one ever wanted a bollocking from João Zarco.

But the game against West Ham was very different and everyone knew it. A manager’s first match in charge sets the tone for how his tenure is perceived, not just by the owner and the sports writers, but more importantly by the club’s supporters, who are as superstitious as a wagon-load of gypsies. My ex-wife’s brother refuses to go to an Arsenal game without his lucky cat’s whisker; he’s just one of many serious, rational men who follow football but who believe in jinxes and curses and the acts of a capricious God who ordains a win or a loss. A bad defeat in this first match would be like an albatross around my neck. I don’t know what Napoleon’s opinion of Premier League football was, but he knew the value of luck and I badly wanted to be lucky with my first game in charge. In spite of what Geoff Boycott says, good luck is the most valuable commodity in sport.

I’d even managed to convince myself that the League Cup was worth the candle; if we beat West Ham we’d be in the final and now that the match was less than an hour away the idea of my first trophy as manager of City was looking much more persuasive. Hadn’t the League Cup win cemented José Mourinho’s reputation in his debut season as manager at Chelsea, in 2005?

Of course none of this meant I was any less inclined to play a stronger side against the Hammers; I was sticking to my young guns, come what may, with only five of our regular first team players in the side: Ayrton Taylor, Kenny Traynor, Ken Okri, Gary Ferguson and Xavier Pepe. Three of our back four — Ken, Gary and Xavier — were first team regulars, of course, and I was trusting that they would steady the rest, none of whom — with the exception of Kenny and Ayrton — was older than twenty-two. I wasn’t and never had been a believer in what Alan Hansen had famously said, that you don’t win anything with kids.

Our second youngest player, Daryl Hemingway, who we’d bought in the summer from West Ham’s Academy of Football for £2.5 million, was just seventeen. I’d watched Daryl play when he was still at Hainault Road and thought him as promising a midfielder as I’d seen in a long time; he reminded me a lot of Cesc Fabregas. He wanted to show his old club the mistake they had made getting rid of him. Daryl was playing alongside our youngest, the sixteen-year-old Zénobe Schuermans, from Belgium, and Iñárritu, the twenty-year-old Mexican that João Zarco had bought from Estudiantes Tecos, in Guadalajara.

Iñárritu’s was an interesting story. The young Mexican had fled his country after police rescued him from a kidnapping ring tied to the local Gulf Cartel, which had abducted him. Iñárritu had narrowly escaped death when members of the drug cartel filmed him on their phones being dangled outside the window of his apartment building — the ninety-metre-high Plaza building in Cuauhtémoc — in the hope of making his father, who was a wealthy banker with BBVA Bancomer, pay a ten-million-dollar ransom. The kidnappers had actually dropped him — accidentally — and Iñárritu had only survived because he had fallen into a window-cleaning cart a couple of floors below. The Mexican was keen to play although, following a broken leg against Stoke City who were always good at breaking legs, he was still getting himself back up to first team fitness.

Playing 4-3-3 requires enormous stamina from your midfielders, but given our three had a combined age of just fifty-three, I figured they could probably run around all night without much of a problem. Even Iñárritu. I had no real worries about him, either. Iñárritu had been fond of Zarco and wept openly when the news of his death was announced; I knew that if anyone was going to play his heart out in memory of the Portuguese it was the young Mexican.

Of the three up front, Jimmy Ribbans on the wing was returning from a groin strain. There are plenty of players who are right-footed — too many, if I’m honest — but Jimmy was naturally left-footed, which was odd as he was actually right-handed. They say left-footers are a dying breed but they’re often very good technically, and the importance of having a great left-footer in your team cannot be overstated; most teams will try hard to hang onto a good one. Messi is a lefty and so are Ryan Giggs, Patrice Evra and Robin Van Persie. But Jimmy had a good right foot, too, and we usually played him on the right side, which made his sweet left foot even more unpredictable. As a defender I always found natural lefties more difficult to deal with and perhaps the best of these was Giggsy.

On the left wing was Soltani Boumediene, a twenty-four-year-old from Israel who was almost as good with his left as he was with his right: nicknamed the Comedian, for obvious reasons — he was indeed a bit of a joker — Soltani had previously played for Haifa and had been Israel’s most prominent Arab footballer before joining Portsmouth, from whom City had bought him during the garage sale that followed Pompey’s relegation from the Premier League in 2010.

Ayrton Taylor was, of course, our centre forward. The newspapers said he’d lost his mojo and had no chance of playing for England again, but although it was five weeks since Ayrton had scored a goal — at least a goal that was not disallowed — I knew that he was keen to show that the sports writers were mistaken. I was confident that his disciplinary problems were behind him. I suspected that these were mostly the result of the relentless ribbing he’d endured at the hands of his team mates following an incident in a London nightclub when two girls had spiked his drink with Rohypnol and, back at his flat, had photographed him on their iPhones in a state of disarray; they subsequently sold their story and the pictures to a Sunday newspaper. It was, they famously remarked, like taking candy from a baby. Footballers are a merciless lot and for several weeks afterwards Ayrton had found his shearling coat pockets filled with packets of Haribos and lollipops. If anyone was going to score a goal for us I felt it was Ayrton Taylor, despite William Hill, Bet 365 and Ladbrokes giving odds of 4–1 against him scoring at all.

Odds like that were too good to miss, even for me, especially as I still had ten grand of Zarco’s bung left in my bag.

‘You want to be careful, boss,’ Maurice said when I told him what I was planning to do with the money. ‘This isn’t a five-pound Yankee. If Sportradar or the FA finds out you’ve got ten bags of sand on with a bookie then they’ll have your guts for fucking garters.’

He was right — what I was doing was expressly forbidden by the FA’s betting rules but we’d done it before, of course. Everyone in football was betting on games, week in week out, and provided you never did anything as bent as betting against your own team there was, in my opinion, nothing wrong with this. It’s no different to what boys in the City do all the time.

‘I take it you want me to use our mate Dostoyevsky,’ he said.

Dostoyevsky was what we called a professional punter whom we’d met in the nick. For five per cent of a bet he’d put a house to let for anyone, on anything.

‘Of course. For the usual commission. Besides, if I win, the money isn’t for me. It’s for the Kenward Trust. An anonymous donation. Seems appropriate somehow, don’t you think? That some old cons should profit from a dodgy bet?’

Maurice laughed indulgently. ‘That sense of humour of yours, boss. One day it’s going to get you in trouble.’

‘I’m an old con myself, Maurice. What do you expect?’

‘On the other hand maybe you should mention it in the team talk before the match. They might play a bit harder if they know you’ve got ten k on Ayrton Taylor.’

‘This is Zarco’s night, Maurice, not mine. It might be me giving the team talk but it’s him they’re going to be playing for. They won’t be in any doubt about that, I promise you. The minute they walk into that dressing room they’ll know exactly what this match means. Not just to me, but to anyone who supports this football club. Anyone who fucks up tonight is going to have to explain himself to Zarco, not me. You see, he’s going to be there, Maurice. Zarco’s going to be with us all in that dressing room.’