[Luzhniki Stadium, Moscow. Wednesday 20 June 2018.]

Down in the tunnel the strip lights buzzed in their housings. The studs of twenty-two pairs of boots clattered on the concrete, restless, and under all of it something else was bleeding down through the ceiling.

"AL-MA-GHRIB! AL-MA-GHRIB! AL-MA-GHRIB!"

It came up through the soles of my feet and sat in my back teeth. Seventy-eight thousand of them up there, and they hadn’t even laid eyes on us yet.

I stood at the mouth of it with my lads at my back. Portugal made a line of white right alongside, close enough to smell the Deep Heat off them. And at the head of the white line stood the man himself.

I’ll tell you something daft, on the one night I’m meant to be plotting how to stop him. I’ve loved that man near enough as long as I’ve loved the game.

I’m a Manc.

I watched him turn up at Old Trafford a skinny kid all stepovers and dropped shoulders, watched him decide to become the best there’s ever been and then go and actually do it, on the training pitch, in the gym, up earlier and wanting it harder than anybody alive.

You don’t do my job and not love him a bit. He’s the thing the rest of us are all chasing.

He wasn’t doing owt. Twenty-two players jigging and blowing their cheeks out and crossing themselves, and him stood dead still, staring down the tunnel at the square of Russian daylight like it owed him money.

I looked at him. I couldn’t not.

And the shape settled over him the way it does, the numbers coming up out of the man.

Cristiano Ronaldo. CA 195. PA 196.

And I just stood there and stared at it.

I’d known he was him. Course I had. I’d had his tape on a loop for a week. But I’d never once seen him through the System before tonight, and the number it laid over him wasn’t a footballer’s number.

I’ve read the best there is on this planet. Not one of them had ever once made the thing show me a 195.

My captain stood right behind me, reads 152, and Benatia’s a wall. Ziyech, the best footballer I’ve got, reads 158.

The best I’d ever clapped eyes on before tonight sat in the 170s, and I’d had it fixed in my head that the 170s was the roof of what the game could build.

And a 196 next to it. At 33, with every medal there is sat in his house, the System was telling me the man still had a notch of ceiling left to climb into.

And stood there gone, lost in that number like a kid with his nose on the museum glass, I felt him feel it.

Course he did. He’s spent 33 years feeling rooms turn to look at him. His head came round, slow, and he found me. The one bloke in that tunnel not getting himself ready. Just staring.

We locked eyes.

I should have looked away. A manager’s got no business letting the other lot’s best player catch him gawping like a kid outside the players’ entrance. But I couldn’t, and for a second neither did he, and there it was.

The two of us stood in the concrete with thirty thousand voices coming through the walls. Him knowing exactly what I was looking at. Me not even bothering to hide it.

He held it. Then the corner of his mouth moved, barely, the ghost of something that never quite got to be a smile, and he gave me the smallest nod. One pro to another. A man who’d always known the thing was in there, taking a quiet little confirmation off a stranger that it was.

Then his eyes were gone, back down the tunnel to the daylight, and the moment was mine to keep.

There’s no plan for that number. That’s the thought that came after, the chant still in my teeth. You don’t out-coach 195. You starve it and you pray.

I will not kick a ball for you, the thing said, dry as dust. I only tell you what is there.

"Aye," I said, under my breath. "Cheers. Big help, that."

The official dropped his arm, and we walked out into it.

We came up the steps into the light and the sound shoved me in the chest.

"DIMA MAGHRIB! DIMA MAGHRIB!"

I broke stride. An actual stutter in my own legs. The whole green end of the Luzhniki was already up on its feet, thirty thousand of them, the noise pushing back on my ears like a flat hand.

Then Ronaldo and the white shirts stepped onto the grass, and the green end turned on him.

"BOOOOOO!"

Fweeeeeee. Ten thousand whistles, shrill, going for his ears, trying to scrub the man off the earth. And under the howl of it, the heartbeat. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Three rows back a kid no older than ten sat up on his dad’s shoulders with a drum clamped between his knees, and he was the one setting the tempo. The whole end took its time from him.

Boom. Boom. Boom. "Olé, olé, olé, olé! Maghrib! Maghrib!"

A massive fella leaning right over the hoarding, his face a smear of green and red paint, caught my eye.

"We fight them, Danny!" His fist out over the boards. "We fight them tonight!"

I threw a fist back and he near climbed the glass.

Off to the left of him, a knot of red and blue in all that green. Palace. They’d followed me all the way out here, the daft sods.

"Walsh! Walsh! Walsh!"

And right down the front, a Russian lad in a borrowed green scarf, mangling the words a half-beat behind everyone, watching the mouths around him and trying to catch up.

"Deema... Magreeb."

Close enough. He’d have it by the end of the night.

The old fella behind our dugout had both arms locked over his head and the tears already running, his shirt two sizes too big, his lad holding him up by the elbow.

I made myself look away from the lot of it. Because out on the grass there was a man who hadn’t looked up at one second of it.

I’d spent three days on the plan and it came down to a single word. Starve.

I knew their side the way the System lets me know a side, which is to the decimal.

Moutinho sat deepest, Passing 17, Vision 17, the one who’d thread the ball that killed you, so I wanted Sofyan in his pocket all night, eating his time and his angles.

Bernardo had the feet and the wriggle but didn’t fancy the running back, so if we got Hakimi at their left it was a mismatch sat there waiting. Guedes was raw pace down the channel, one for Saiss to watch the shoulder of.

And behind the lot of them, the one I couldn’t subtract.

So: the fist, the 4-1-4-1, El Ahmadi the single bolt in front of the four. Deny the 7 the ball. Double him the instant he got it. Benatia and Saiss with him in the air, Bounou commanding his box.

And whatever else happened out there, do not, under any circumstances, give that man a free-kick anywhere he could see the goal from. He’d buried one in the top bin against Spain from twenty-five yards the week before.

Then hit them. We had the legs to break, Hakimi and Ziyech and En-Nesyri, against a back four with a switched-off left-back in it. Win it deep, go fast, make the carnival sing.

That was the plan.

It lasted 4 minutes.

The whistle went, Pheep, and the roar somehow climbed.

Bernardo wriggled past Sofyan out on the left. Mendyl lunged across him, Scrrt, and it spun off for a corner. Pepe came barging up from the back for it, shoving a forearm into Benatia’s chest on the way, and the green end let him have it.

"BOOOOOO!"

Moutinho stood over the ball, deaf to all of it. And I came up off my seat and onto the white line, already reading it wrong, already too late.

Ronaldo had drifted off the back of the pack to the edge of the six, Benatia half a step off his shoulder, and the System lit him up where he stood. Jumping Reach 20.

"GET TIGHT! BENATIA, GET TIGHT TO HIM!" Hands round my mouth, and the noise ate it whole. Forty yards of grass and a wall of sound between us, and all I could do was stand there and watch it come.

Moutinho took two steps and swung it in. Whip. Up out of the light, over the top of the six, hanging.

And Ronaldo waited. He didn’t go early. He let Benatia commit, let the whole box rise and start to come down, and then, a beat late, on his own clock, he went.

He left the floor like the rest of them were nailed to it.

Everyone else reached the top of the jump and started down. He kept going. Up past Benatia’s shoulder, up past the ball, and then he hung there, a half-second longer than a body should, in the white Moscow sky with his neck cocked.

He snapped his forehead through it.

The ball went down off his head, dipped, kissed the grass a yard out and skidded up. Bounou threw himself full length, an arm out, fingers reaching.

For half a heartbeat I thought he’d got it.

He hadn’t.

Thwump. Bottom corner.

And the loudest place I have ever stood died.

Not went quiet. Died. Thirty thousand throats cut in the same half-second, and into the hole where all that noise had been came the thin far-off wail from the Portugal end.

"SIIIUUUU!"

And one voice just behind our dugout, clear as a bell in the dead air.

"Oh, no."

The kid up on his dad’s shoulders just stared out at the pitch, both small palms flat on the skin of his silent drum. Ronaldo jogged to the corner flag with his arms wide and his palms up, not a flicker on his face.

Then one beat of that drum came through the quiet.

Boom.

Just the one. Then another, slower. Then a single hoarse voice down the front.

"Di-ma! Ma-ghrib!"

The blokes round him caught it. "DIMA MAGHRIB! DIMA MAGHRIB!" And the singing crawled back up out of their chests out of pure stubbornness, louder for having been cut.

I didn’t watch the celebration. No time for it. The goal was scored and gone, and the only thing it was worth to me now was the lesson in it.

I was off my seat and onto the white, both arms going, bawling for Bray.

"Man on him." He was already up beside me. "Zonal’s dead. We go man on, every dead ball, the rest of the night."

"Benatia." I found my captain’s eye over the din, jabbed a finger at Ronaldo, then at him, drew the line between them in the air. You. Him. Nowhere else. He nodded once and went to tell the rest.