I woke up at six. The hotel room was dark. The curtains were thick, the Hilton’s idea of luxury, heavy fabric that blocked the Wembley Way streetlights and the February dawn and everything except the thing that no curtain could block: the knowledge that today was the day.

I lay in bed for eleven minutes. I know it was eleven minutes because I watched the clock on the bedside table change from 6:00 to 6:11, and I thought about nothing and everything and the gap between the two was the gap between a man who was calm and a man who was pretending to be calm. I was pretending.

The calm would come later, when the suit was on and the mask was in place and the touchline was beneath my feet. Right now, in the dark, in a hotel room on Wembley Way, I was a twenty-eight-year-old from Moss Side who was about to manage in a cup final at Wembley and who was, despite everything he had said to Emma and Ferdinand and the press, terrified.

Not of losing. Of the weight of it. A hundred and twelve years. The fans. The history.

The promise he had made in the press conference after the Milan match, the promise that was now public, that belonged to twenty-five thousand people who would be in the Palace end this afternoon, that belonged to George Elphick and his dead father and Lorraine and her twelve passengers and James Ochieng in a bar in Nairobi and Frankie Morrison in the Railway Arms and his mum in the directors’ box and Emma in a new outfit he hadn’t seen.

I got up. I showered. I put on the suit. The Crystal Palace tie. The shoes that Jessica had polished because Jessica polished everything that represented the club, including the manager.

Breakfast was at seven-thirty. The hotel’s function room, reserved for the squad, the staff, and nobody else. The doors closed. The outside world kept outside.

The players ate the way players ate before the biggest match of their lives: some of them too much, some of them too little, all of them in silence.

Pope was at a table with Steele, the two of them going through the visualisation routine. "De Bruyne free kick, far post." "Set my feet, push it wide." "Agüero, one-on-one." "Make myself big, stay on my feet, don’t dive early." The routine was the same as every matchday. The stakes were not.

Neves ate slowly, methodically, the way he did everything. Scrambled eggs. Toast. Coffee. His phone was in his pocket. Lurdes’s photograph was his lock screen. He had not looked at it this morning because looking at it made him emotional and emotional was not what the next nine hours required.

Kovačić was eating quickly, the slightly aggressive consumption of a man who had not started a match in twelve days and who was treating breakfast as the first act of a performance he had been rehearsing in his mind since the draw.

Sakho was not eating. Sakho was sitting at a table with Dann, his plate untouched, his coffee held in both hands, his eyes on the window. Dann was eating toast. The captain ate toast before every match.

The same toast. The same butter. The same knife. The routine that had sustained him through seven years of Crystal Palace and that was sustaining him now, on the morning of the first cup final in the club’s history.

Zaha was at a table alone. Headphones in. Music on. The world excluded. This was Zaha’s pre-match ritual: silence, isolation, the internal narrowing that turned Wilfried Zaha from a man into a weapon. Nobody interrupted him.

Nobody had interrupted him since August. The squad had learned that Zaha before a match was not the same person as Zaha after a match, and that the transition between the two required approximately ninety minutes of competitive football and should not be accelerated by conversation.

Benteke was with Pato, the two strikers discussing something in low voices. Not tactics. I could tell from their body language. Personal. Quiet. The kind of conversation that strikers had before finals, which was not about the match but about the meaning of the match, the weight of it, the opportunity that might not come again.

Eze was at a table with Kirby and Blake, the three academy boys, the three players Danny Walsh had coached at under-eighteens, sitting together the way they always sat together on matchdays, the proximity of boys who had grown up in the same system and who drew comfort from each other’s presence. Eze was quiet.

He had scored the two goals at the Emirates that had put Palace in this final. The turn and the curl around Čech. The chip over Čech into the top corner. The celebration that had taken him into the crowd, the scarf around his neck, and the yellow card that was a bargain.

He had earned the right to start this match, and he was on the bench, and he knew it, and he was okay with it because the team that started was the best team and the best team was not about individuals. It was about the identity.

Kirby, beside him, was eating cereal with the focused concentration of an eighteen-year-old who treated breakfast the way he treated midfield positioning: with meticulous, slightly obsessive attention to detail.

Blake was not eating. Blake was staring at his phone. His mum had texted. He had not replied because he did not know what to say to a woman who had raised him alone in Croydon and who was about to watch him sit on the bench at a cup final at Wembley.

Konaté was at a table alone, stretching his left leg under the table, the subtle, repetitive movement of a man testing a muscle that he did not entirely trust. Rebecca had cleared him yesterday. Green.

But the amber flag from Thursday’s session was still in his body, still in his mind, the tightness that Tom Yates had worked on for forty minutes and that had responded to treatment but had not entirely disappeared. He had told nobody. He had told Rebecca it was fine. He believed it was fine. The warm-up would confirm it.

At nine o’clock, the bus took us to Wembley.

The stadium was empty. The ninety thousand seats catching the February sunlight, the arch overhead, the Carabao Cup branding on every surface: the green and gold of the Thai energy drink on the perimeter boards, on the giant screens, on the backdrop behind the interview positions, on the trophy itself, which was sitting in a glass case in the tunnel, the ribbons green and gold, the silver gleaming under the fluorescent lights.

I walked past the trophy. I did not touch it. I did not look at it for more than two seconds. Superstition. The same superstition that prevented me from touching the "This Is Anfield" sign. You did not touch trophies before you had won them. You earned the right to touch them by winning. And the winning had not happened yet. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

The warm-up began at three o’clock. Ninety minutes before kick-off. The squad on the Wembley pitch, the surface perfect, the groundstaff having prepared it with the meticulous attention that a cup final demanded.

Steele took the goalkeepers to one end. Rebecca supervised the outfield warm-up at the other. Sarah stood on the touchline with her tablet, watching the players move, monitoring the body language, reading the physical and emotional state of twenty-eight men who were about to play in a cup final.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus and RAPAX for the support.