Hand of God

19

We resumed the match abandoned the previous night with eighty-three minutes still to play. And the game started well. How could it not? We were already a goal up. This was an away goal too, the best kind in UEFA’s Animal Farm world where some goals are more equal than others. Our players seemed anxious to win the game, for Bekim’s sake if nothing else. The sports page of every English newspaper urged us on to victory over the Greeks and — with one Cassandra-like exception, the always-prescient Henry Winter at the Daily Telegraph — predicted that City would surely prevail.

Unfortunately no one had shown Olympiacos the script of how this particular revenge tragedy was supposed to play.

Our evening began to break up like the Elgin Marbles almost as soon as the City players stepped onto the pitch. It was as if, having lost Hector, our doom had been sealed for we were uncertain in defence, clueless in midfield, and impotent in attack. Schuermans and Hemingway were both outplayed by the thirty-two-year-old Argentine Alejandro Domínguez, who proved that his team had no need of centre forward Kostas Mitroglu — sold to Fulham for £12.5 million — to score goals. He equalised with just fifteen minutes on the clock, running on to a fantastic through ball from Giannis Maniatis, Olympiacos’s captain and central midfielder, whose pass looked as if he might have called Jesus Christ’s bluff and got a camel through the proverbial eye of the needle. Why our own midfielders didn’t close him down was one mystery; but it was wrapped up in the enigma of how our almost sedentary defenders didn’t manage to stop Domínguez from finding space to take a shot that Kenny Traynor ought to have saved easily. Unsighted and wrong-footed, our goalkeeper dived one way and Domínguez neatly flicked the ball the other. The ball crossed the line with an almost cartoonish lack of pace, as if Jerry the mouse could have stopped it, adding to Traynor’s obvious distress. He slapped the ground several times and shouted at the pitch, as if blaming the gods of the underworld below our feet.

The Legend fired off several red flares behind Traynor’s goal, which only served to underline the Scotsman’s infernal performance and filled the air in the stadium with a strongly sulphurous smell.

‘Fucking hell,’ exclaimed Simon. ‘I’ve seen some daft defending in my time but those two twats take the biscuit. The way they ran at the lad Domínguez you’d have thought they were trying to do a scissors in fucking rugby. Do you want to shout at them or shall I? Because I am so fucking angry about that, boss. I am so fucking angry.’

‘Be my guest,’ I said.

Simon spat out his extra-strong mint like a loose tooth, marched to the edge of the technical area, gesticulated furiously at our back four and let rip with a stream of obscenities that made me glad the Greek supporters were so loud. All I heard were the words ‘stupid cunts’, and in truth, when you come right down to it, those were the only two words he really needed. I wasn’t sure if FIFA could have envisaged what Simon was doing as ‘an element of the game’ within the change it had made to the laws in 1993, bringing technical areas into existence, but I doubted this kind of thing really did ‘improve the quality of play’. Of course, I was guilty of this sort of intemperate behaviour myself; indeed there were a couple of times when I’d been sent to the stands for what the referees’ association called ‘aggressive coaching’.

By now our goalmouth had disappeared in the cloud of red smoke from the Greek flares, which spared our goalkeeper’s blushes, and wisely, the referee waited a full minute before restarting the game.

‘Simon,’ I called, ‘come back here. You’ll give yourself a fucking heart attack.’

He didn’t hear me. Brick-faced and full of rage, the big Yorkshireman continued to shout and wave his arms about like a madman conducting an orchestra of deaf musicians and suddenly it occurred to me, after what had happened to Bekim Develi, that his having a heart attack wasn’t so very improbable. And as the game restarted I got out of my seat and, leaving the dugout, went to fetch him back. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Hristos Trikoupis complaining to the fourth official that I had stepped in his technical area, which wasn’t true, of course, but, at that particular moment, I had other things to worry about.

‘Leave it, Simon,’ I repeated, taking hold of his arm. ‘They can’t even see you, cos of the smoke.’

He was about to take my advice when a high ball came our way and, immediately in front of us, Daryl Hemingway and Diamntopoulou both jumped to head it. The Greek seemed to mount up on the Englishman’s back in an almost gymnastic attempt to reach the ball. Neither man quite making contact, but in the wrestling match that ensued the Greek suddenly fell clutching his face in pain, as if Daryl had deliberately straight-armed him to the ground. It was patently obvious to me and to Simon — and must have been equally clear to the linesman standing right beside us — that Daryl’s back-swinging arm had done little more than brush Diamntopoulou’s girlish top-knot of hair. But with the Greek still rolling on the pitch in agony as if he had been stabbed in the eye with a red-hot poker, we were astonished to see the lino raise his flag and Merlini, the referee, already striding towards Daryl and reaching for the card in his top pocket.

A yellow would have been bad enough; the red was an outrage. Daryl Hemingway stood there as if he could hardly believe what was happening. Nor could Simon and I. How we restrained ourselves from further comment at that moment, I shall never know. I put a hand on Daryl’s shoulder and started to walk him to the dugout but not before changing our own formation from 4-3-3 to 4-4-1. If we dug in, we might hold on to a draw, which was at least something we could build on back in London.

‘I didn’t fucking touch him, boss. Honest.’

‘I saw the whole thing, Daryl. It wasn’t your fault. One of these bastards has been bought. That much is now obvious, anyway.’

I looked back to the pitch in time to see Diamntopoulou get back to his feet, without a mark on his face, and Simon, still on the edge of the technical area, sneer: ‘You cheating, fucking bastard. He never touched you. Call yourself a sportsman? You’re a fucking girl, that’s what you are, son. A fucking girl.’

Diamntopoulou was barrel-chested, with more tattoos than a Scottish regiment, and under the Yorkshireman’s obvious derision he bristled, visibly.

‘You call me a girl?’

‘Well, you’re not a man, that’s for sure.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘No, but I’ll fuck you, if you like, girlie. That’s all you’re good for, you Greek malakas.’

‘You need to learn some manners, fat man,’ shouted Diamntopoulou, squaring up, as two Olympiacos players intercepted, and that the fourth official was there to put his body in front of the Greek’s.

‘Any time you’re ready to try, malakas, I’ll be fucking ready.’

Unsurprisingly, Simon found himself sent back to the dressing room; to be fair to the Greek officials, in all normal circumstances they might have sent him to sit in the stands, but these were hardly normal circumstances. It wasn’t judged safe for Simon to sit among the Olympiacos fans; and of course they had a point. Anywhere looked safer for Simon than the Olympiacos stands.

Reduced to just ten men we had a hard job containing the Greeks, especially Perez on their left wing. We held out bravely with Gary Ferguson rescuing us a couple of times and Kenny Traynor on his best form with three top-drawer saves, but now doubly demoralised it was an impossible task.

As soon as the second half restarted Perez escaped from Jimmy Ribbans to curl in a left-footer that was their second. Ten minutes later Schuermans failed to dispossess Perez who ran into more space than he could have imagined was possible and hammered in his second one of the match.

The ruins of our evening might fairly have been compared with the Acropolis when Dominguez was substituted in the 79th minute and Machado, who came on in his place, scored immediately with a scrambled millipede of a goal that came about because they just had more fucking legs to kick the ball than we did. The final score was 4–1.

I went to shake hands with Hristos Trikoupis and was more than a little shocked to see him grinning back at me and holding up four fingers. Under different circumstances I might have made something out of it; instead I turned away and then clapped my players off the pitch. They hardly needed another bollocking.

‘Come on, lads. Hurry up and get changed. We’ve a plane to catch. The sooner we get out of this madhouse and back to London the better.’

I wasn’t looking forward to the television interview I’d agreed to do immediately after the game; I certainly wasn’t going to tell their reporter, what I really thought of it: that this was a night of confusion, duplicity, disorder and defeat. That wouldn’t play well with anyone, even though it was the truth. Instead I’d already decided to be a bit Italian about it; Italian football managers are masters at dissembling and they have a saying that comes in useful at times like these. Bisogna far buon viso a cattivo gioco: ‘It’s necessary to disguise a bad game with a good face.’

Of course, it’s one thing putting on a good face when it’s only ITV waiting to speak to you in the players’ tunnel. It’s another thing altogether when it’s the fucking cops; it’s always more difficult putting on a good face for them.