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SOFYAN AMRABAT · Defensive midfield · Age 21 Current Ability 128 / Potential 160 Stamina 16 · Work Rate 16 · Tackling 14 · Aggression 15

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A kid. A squad player. The younger brother of Nordin.

Because Nordin is the Amrabat everyone knows. The Watford man, the workhorse winger off the Premier League, with the name and the caps and the highlight reel. Nordin’s card I could’ve drawn from memory.

Sofyan’s I’d glanced at and moved on. One for the last twenty minutes when a game needed legs thrown at it. Potential 160, fine, a future, file it.

Then the kid walked into the room.

And I looked at him properly, in the flesh, the way you cannot off a screen, and the number stopped matching the man.

It was the way he carried himself among the senior ones. Twenty-one years old, in a room full of internationals twice the capped man he was, and not a flicker of the deference a kid that age usually wears.

He sat near his brother. Not behind him.

When Benatia said something low, Sofyan was the one who answered, and the captain listened. He had the stillness of a player who already knows he belongs and is just waiting for everyone else to catch up.

The iPad had given me a squad filler. The room was showing me a midfielder.

Potential 160 my eye.

I made a note, the first real note of the camp, and it was three words. Look at Sofyan.

The number had undersold him, and I’d taken the number’s word for it. That is exactly the mistake the thing behind my eyes is built to make me lazy enough to commit. A shape is so easy to trust that you forget it’s a week-old photograph of a man, and not the man.

So you watch them in the flesh. Always. That’s the entire reason for a mountain.

The screen gets you the squad. The grass gets you the truth. And sometimes the truth is a twenty-one-year-old you nearly left in the file marked legs for the last twenty minutes.

A federation man stood to introduce me. The translator rose at his shoulder, ready to turn my English into something the room could use.

I lifted a hand and sat him back down before he was off his chair.

"Bonjour," I said. To the room. In French. "Ça va? Asseyez-vous, on commence."

Sit down. We’re starting.

You want to know what a room of footballers looks like when the manager they were promised needed a translator opens his mouth in fluent French instead?

Bounou the keeper actually turned his head to check the translator wasn’t doing it for me.

Two of the young lads at the back swapped a look. Did you know? No. Did you?

The earphones that were still in came out.

And the temperature of the whole room moved. One degree. The sound of forty-six feet going still under twenty-three chairs.

Then I switched to English, mid-breath, easy, and watched the second wave land.

Because here’s the thing nobody in that London studio had bothered to work out, the thing I had. Half this squad’s first football language is French, the lads off the French and Belgian and African game.

The other half is not. Ziyech grew up in Dutch. The Amrabats too. Some of them you reach in English first, the Premier League ones, the ones who learned the game on a school field in Holland.

You do not stand in front of twenty-three men, pick one language, and leave a third of the room reading lips.

So I gave them both. A sentence in French, a sentence in English, the federation translator sat down and out of a job either way.

And the room worked out, in real time, that the Englishman who supposedly couldn’t say good morning had walked in knowing exactly who was sat in front of him, and exactly how to reach each one.

That’s a different thing from a party trick. A party trick says look what I can do. This said I’ve already done my homework on every man in this room.

And Benatia, front and centre, did the one thing in that whole room I’d been watching for.

He unfolded his arms.

That was all. No smile. No nod. Nothing he hadn’t decided to give.

But the arms came off the chest and the weight came forward onto his knees, and the captain who’d walked in ready to sit through a translated speech from a tourist was, instead, listening to a manager who’d taken the trouble to be understood by everyone he was about to ask something of.

You don’t win a captain with a bit of French and English. But you can make him give you the next ten minutes. And the next ten minutes are where the winning’s done.

So I took the ten minutes, moving between the two languages without thinking about it, the way you do when you actually have them.

I didn’t give them the speech they were braced for. The shirt, the pride, a nation behind you. They’ve had that off every manager they ever had and it goes in one ear.

I told them what I’d actually seen.

That I’d watched every minute of their qualifying. That a side does not go a whole campaign without conceding by luck, and I hadn’t come up a mountain to break the best thing about them three weeks out to make it look more like mine.

That they already defended better than most teams at this tournament, and we were keeping every brick of it.

And adding one thing.

"La vitesse," I said.

Pace.

And I let my eyes go, just once, to the boy in the second row.

"And I think one or two of you have a lot more of it than anyone’s ever let you off the leash to use."

Hakimi sat up like I’d put a current through the chair.

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ACHRAF HAKIMI · Right-back · Age 19 Current Ability 138 / Potential 178 Pace 17 · Acceleration 18 · Stamina 17 · Work Rate 16 Crossing 14 · Off the Ball 15 · Decisions 13 · Composure 13

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Nineteen. A ceiling you can’t see the top of, and a head that hasn’t caught his legs up yet.

The young ones are the easy ones. They spend their whole lives waiting for somebody with authority to look at them and say the true thing out loud. I’d just said it to this one, in front of the captain, in front of everyone.

I watched him decide, on the spot, that he’d run till his heart came out for a man who saw it.

Had him before we reached the grass.

The hard one at the end of the row hadn’t moved.

But he was listening now. Properly. The watchfulness turned my way, weighing the new voice against everything he already knew he was.

Not won. Not lost. Filed me, the way clever men file a thing they haven’t decided about, for later.

That’d do. For a first morning, that’d do.

"Sur le terrain," I said, and clapped once. Clap. Flat in the thin air. "Ten minutes. Bring your lungs. You’re going to need them up here."

They went. Twenty-three of them up and moving, and the noise going out the door was already a different noise than the one that came in. Louder. A couple of them laughing. Hakimi first to the door.

Bray fell in beside me. Watched them file toward the tunnel and the gradient that was about to introduce itself to their legs.

"They didn’t know either," he said, low. "Same face as that pundit, the lot of them. You could’ve warned your own staff, you know. Rebecca near dropped her coffee."

"More fun this way."

"You’re enjoying yourself." He said it like an accusation and a blessing at once. "What did you make of the captain?"

"He unfolded his arms."

Bray grunted. He’s stood in enough rooms to know exactly how big that is, and exactly how little it is yet.

"And your problem child. The Ajax one."

"He’s not a problem child. That’s everyone’s mistake and I’m not making it."

I watched Ziyech go out. Last. Easy. A word for the kid beside him, then peeling off into his own yard of space without seeming to mean to.

"He’s the best player for this team at this whole tournament, and he doesn’t fully believe anyone’s going to build a team that deserves him. My job’s to prove him wrong before Spain."

"Where do you start with a thing like that?"

I’d been asking myself that since the room. The answer was somewhere in twenty-three men I’d known nine minutes. In who Ziyech laughed with on the way in, and whose handshake lasted a beat too long to be nothing.

"That’s what the fortnight’s for," I said. "Come on. Let the mountain do the introductions."