Philip Kerr - Hand of God

‘Why you pickin’ on me, man?’ asked Prometheus. ‘I didn’t do nuthin’. All I said to the cap here was that those big, hairy, white Scotsman’s knees of his was goin’ to lose us the game if he wasn’t bloody careful. It was like, a joke, y’know?’

It was no wonder Fergie threw boots around the dressing room; at that particular moment I wanted to take that ridiculous boot out of his hand and ram it down his throat. Gary was muttering, ‘Shut the fuck up,’ while Bekim was shaking his head, silently. Others just turned away as if they didn’t want to see what was going to happen next.

I smiled. ‘It was like a joke, yes, except that it wasn’t fucking funny. You don’t make jokes to your colleagues when they just scored an own goal for the simple reason that they might be feeling a little sensitive. It’s never funny when someone scores an own goal, unless it’s the other team that scores it. I shouldn’t have to spell this out for you, sonny — and don’t ever interrupt me again or I’ll tell Gary to shove one of his big, hairy, white Scotsman’s knees into your small, hairless, black Nigerian balls. That is if you’ve got any balls. Understood?’

Prometheus said nothing which seemed to indicate that he’d got the message. I rocked back on my heels for a moment and glanced around the dressing room. There was no one else I felt deserved any particular criticism; Leicester had ridden their luck, and that was all there was to it.

‘It’s a fact,’ I said, ‘that on the first weekend of the football season, newly promoted clubs often do well. They fancy their chances against one of the big boys. And why not, when they finished the season with — what did they get in the Championship — eighty-six points? They deserve to be in the Premiership and if they can’t give us a good game today, when they’re all fit and rested because only a couple of them saw any international duty, they never will. I guarantee if you play this same team at the end of the season you’ll walk all over them. So, don’t be surprised if their tails are up today. But keep your shape, and keep the ball; pass it around. Toblerone football, like we practised in training. Let them lose themselves in the magic triangles. If necessary, make them so fucking impatient to get on and win the game that they come to you. That’s when you open them up.’

It ought to have worked out that way, too. But it didn’t. We lost 3–1, following a brace of goals from Jamie Vardy and David Nugent who looked as potent a strike partnership in a newly promoted side as I’d seen in a long time. At 4.40 p.m. Leicester went top, on goal difference.

London City was third from bottom.

PA (Performance Analysis) software is so useful. I often wonder what managers used to do without a tablet; edited footage of a game’s key events on an iPad are an essential tool for any manager and I like to view these with just two or three players on the coach home because I don’t always want to do it in front of the whole team. In my experience a player who makes a mistake doesn’t need to see it endlessly replayed on a screen in front of his mates to know that he fucked up. I know from experience how humiliating that can be. But this time I sent the pictures from my iPad up to the TV screens on the coach so that everyone could listen in to what I had to say. Sometimes a little humiliation is good for the soul.

‘Let me have your attention here,’ I said into the microphone as our coach drove away from the King Power Stadium. ‘Shut the fuck up, okay? What are you talking about? How good they were? How quick that guy Vardy was? How good their goalkeeper was? How like his daddy he is? Fuck you. That isn’t why we lost today.

‘Over there, to the west of the King Power Stadium, is the River Soar. And I’m now pointing right for all those of you who don’t seem to know your right from your left, or your arse from your elbow. It used to be said that after the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, the victorious Tudor side threw the body of King Richard III into that shitty-looking river. Although obviously that can’t be true as they recently found his skeleton underneath a car park in the centre of Leicester. I guess the poor bastard lost his ticket and couldn’t get out. Either way I’m sure a lot of you now know what old Richard must have felt like. I know I do. It’s no fun losing in fucking Leicester city.

‘Everything happens for a reason and sometimes the reason isn’t always immediately bleeding obvious because small actions can have large consequences. It’s what scientists call chaos theory. Or what lawyers and philosophers call causality or causation. Historians do this shit too: the cause of the First World War isn’t just that the Archduke Ferdinand got himself shot in Sarajevo; that was only the straw that broke the camel’s back. You see? When you play professional football you get a fucking education. Something some of you are clearly in need of. I’m here to help. That’s right, guys. You want to know stuff: come to me.

‘Being a football manager is a bit like what those other guys do; it’s even a bit like being a detective — if what we’re doing here on the coach is looking at the already stinking corpse of that match, in search of an explanation for why we lost. Because it’s never as obvious as you think. Let me show you why we lost. We can forget about the own goal. Like I said before, that was just unlucky. So, instead, we’ll take a closer look at the first goal they scored; James Vardy’s goal. The guy’s always full of running and when he plays he takes a lot of the pressure off Nugent. Gary found Vardy a handful today; so did all of our back four. Vardy’s a striker but to me he looks more natural on the left, where the goal came from. Frankly, he was playing out of position, which is why you found it hard to mark him. It was a good goal and he struck it well, but he scored because none of you thought he had the room to shoot. We know different now. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the longer you stand off a striker like that the more tempo he builds, and the more tempo he builds the more chance he has of scoring. Don’t try to match him turn for turn. You won’t, because he’s thinking faster than your body can move. There’s nothing faster than the speed of thought. So, keep your eye on the ball and commit to the tackle and, if necessary, a trip to an orthopaedic surgeon.

‘But if we reverse the action and go and look at what happens a whole minute or two before he scores Kenny rolls the ball out to Gary, who passes to Kwame, who can’t think of anything else to do with it but square it John — only there’s just not enough pace on the ball for that to happen safely, which means John is stretching for it, and his pass to Zénobe isn’t going to get there in a month of Sky Super Sundays. Nugent intercepts the ball and chips to Vardy, who turns one way, and then the other, and then again, with everyone standing off him like he’s got the fucking plague, until the moment when you all think he hasn’t got room for a shot, and you relax a little; only it turns out he has got just enough room, and he scores.

‘Looked at again, before Vardy even had a sniff of the ball, what I’m saying is this: Kenny, before you rolled that ball out, did you not see that Prometheus had acres of space in midfield? You’ve got better eyesight than a Comanche Indian; you’re also one of the most accurate kickers in the game; you could easily have reached him, so why did you roll out? Rolling out like that only works when their striker has got concrete in his boots; this one was like a fucking whippet today. No, wait, let me finish.

‘And, Kwame, this isn’t pass the parcel we’re playing here. When you’re making a pass you have to think what the other guy is going to do with the ball when he gets it. That’s fine if you’re trying to create space, but here you don’t know what to do with the space you already have.