[Dulwich. Saturday.]

She slept on a while with her hand flat on my chest, and I let her, because there was nowhere on God’s earth either of us had to be and a man ought to know when he is well off.

By the time we’d surfaced and found the kitchen it was gone half twelve, and the flat was humming with a sound I’d been hearing through the whole long morning without once letting it in.

The phones.

Both of them, face down on the kitchen island where we’d dumped them the night before, buzzing themselves an inch across the granite with every fresh hit, on and on, a pair of wasps trapped under a glass.

They had been at it since six in the morning. They were not going to stop for a week. I just had not been listening, because for one whole morning the world had shrunk to a flat in Dulwich and the woman in it, and now the world was back, and it had been trying the door the entire time.

Emma got to hers first, in one of my shirts and not much else, bare legs hooked over the stool, hair a disaster, and she started reading the damage out while I did the coffee, gloop, gloop. She is a journalist. She reads a feed the way a medic reads a monitor. And her face was doing something I had not seen her face do before.

"Okay," she said. "Right. Before I say any numbers I need you to understand they are not going to sound real, so don’t argue with me, just let them happen to you."

"Go on."

"The trophy clip. Pato doing the auctioneer. Carabao. FA Cup. And." She turned the screen at me. "Forty-one million."

"Forty-one million what?"

"Views. Overnight. One clip, one phone, some lad in the Holmesdale held it over his head and now it is forty-one million and there is a version set to opera and a version where the and drops a bass note and a man in Ohio who has never watched a game of football in his life has filmed himself crying at it and got nine million of his own off the back of yours."

She thumbed down, fast. "Wilf, waving down the empty road at his nan. Twelve million. The Standard found the nan. She’s done an interview. She is the greatest woman who has ever lived, she says she still won’t come because it’s too cold and the toilets are too far from her seat and she’d sooner watch it with a brew."

Scroll. "Konaté flat on his back laughing. There’s a thread, quarter of a million people on it, and the whole thread, top to bottom, is just human beings finding out he has teeth."

Scroll. "Olise on the phone to his dad. That one’s not funny, love. Grown men in the replies saying it’s set them off at their desks."

She went quiet. Turned the phone round, slow. Sarah, on the staff bus, both hands clamped over her mouth, and under it a stranger had typed four words, the woman who drove the minibus, and ninety thousand people who only knew that line because of a documentary had sat up in the night and decided they loved her.

"And then there’s you." She set the phone flat on the island, finally, like it had got too hot to hold.

"You are trending above the result, Danny. Not the trophy. You. Your speech is a T-shirt and the T-shirt has sold out, the make every big club sick of the name Crystal Palace one, somebody screen-printed it before breakfast. L’Équipe have given you the entire front page. The Italians are calling it la favola. The fairytale. There’s an old fella in a white sun hat the internet has adopted and named and started a fundraiser for who has no idea any of it is happening to him."

She looked up, and for once Emma, who is never short of the next thing to say, looked a little bit lost in it. "It is not the back pages. It is not even the front pages. It is everywhere there is. My mum sent me the Konaté one. My mum thinks offside is a kind of cheese."

The telly was on with the sound down behind her, Sky Sports News, the yellow ticker crawling, and then it was not the ticker. It was the studio, three people in three chairs across a desk, three people I have sat opposite, and they were talking about me.

I turned the sound up. You always think you won’t and you always do.

They had a graphic up between them, my face on the left and a column of numbers down the right, and the presenter was setting them off like a man lighting fireworks and stepping back.

"Gary. Greatest manager in the history of Crystal Palace. Yes or no."

Neville did not go straight at it. He never does. He tilted his head, the way he does when he’s about to make you wait.

"I’ll answer it. But carefully, because I got this wrong once already this season on this exact desk, and I’m not doing it twice." He let it sit.

"In August I sat here and said let’s see this Palace project in February. I said it like I was being generous. So before I answer Greatest Palace Manager, I’d like everyone to remember that the last time I had a strong opinion about this man I had to come back on and apologise for it on the air. With that said. Yes. It’s not close. It’s not an argument."

"Jamie."

"He’s wrong." Carragher was already forward in his chair. "Not about the answer. About the question. Greatest Palace manager is too small, and Gary knows it’s too small, he’s just enjoying being right for once."

"I am enjoying it. I’ve earned it."

"You’ve earned ten seconds of it." Carragher turned to the screen, hand up at the numbers.

"Look at the graphic. Not the trophies. The age. Twenty-eight. Now the club’s age. A hundred and thirteen years. This club existed a hundred and thirteen years and won nothing, and a man who is twenty-eight, who two years ago was at a semi-pro club in the Manchester County League, who was coaching this same club’s under-eighteens eighteen months ago, has won them five trophies in thirteen months. Three of them major. One in Europe. You cannot put that man on a list of Palace managers. The list is too short. He’s walked off the end of it."

"So put him on the proper list," Neville said.

"That’s what I’m doing."

"Then say the name of the proper list, Jamie. Don’t make me say it."

"I’m not saying it in May. I said it once about a fella and had to walk it back, and I’m not doing it on a Saturday morning over a parade."

Henry had not said anything. They both noticed at the same time, the way they do, and stopped, and the camera found him sat back with his fingers together.

"Thierry."

"You are both still arguing about the frame." Henry let a beat go. "How old he is. What list he goes on. Whether Gary is allowed to be smug. This is the conversation people have about a thing when they are a little frightened of it, because it is easier than the thing itself."

"Go on then. What’s the thing."

"The thing is the football." He leaned in, and the studio went quiet for him the way it does.

"Forget twenty-eight. Forget the parade. Watch a match. There is an idea in this team. The press is not effort, it is a design, every player knows the trigger, you can see them counting it. The patience on the ball. The use of the boys. The set pieces. A complete idea of football, top to bottom, and there are exactly three managers in this league I’d say that about. Klopp has it. Pep has it. And this boy has it, at Crystal Palace, on a wage bill one twentieth of the other two."

Carragher sat back. "That’s the line."

"That is the line," Neville said.

"One twentieth," Carragher said, to nobody, like he was tasting it. 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

***

Thank you for 100 Power Stones.