Philip Kerr - January Window

‘He said that?’

Colin nodded.

‘The cunt. You’re sure it was me he was talking about and not João?’

Colin nodded again.

‘Hey, don’t drag me into this,’ said Zarco. ‘I’ve enough enemies already.’

‘You’ve noticed that too, huh?’

João Zarco had been on the front of GQ and Esquire and was frequently voted the best-dressed man in football; on match day he cut a very dapper figure in his Zegna suits, cashmere coats and silk scarves. Sometimes he seemed to be as famous for his designer stubble, his Tiffany cufflinks and his bling watches as for his candid thoughts about football. Perhaps that’s not a surprise; these days you don’t just judge a club by results but by the style of the manager, and if you doubt that then ask yourself this: if you were obliged to support a club because of the manager, who would you choose? José Mourinho or Sir Alex Ferguson? Pep Guardiola or David Moyes? Diego Simeone or Rafa Benitez? AVB or Guus Hiddink? These days it’s not just the image rights of players that are important to football clubs; how a manager looks can actually affect the club’s share price. Winning is no longer enough on its own; winning while looking good is the essence of the modern game.

I like good suits but I think it’s important that, unlike the manager, the coach dresses like his players on a match day. Besides, it looks a bit weird if you take charge of the warm-up in a tailor-made whistle that cost five grand. I don’t like tracksuits very much but I always wear one on the day of a match; picking training cones off the pitch and doing mountain climbs alongside the lads is just easier in a tracksuit.

London City is nicknamed Vitamin C because the club colours are orange and because it’s good for you; no one in east London gives a fuck about Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, which is why the club colours are orange in the first place. A lot of modern kit looks like it was designed by the art class in a primary school. You expect African World Cup sides to wear shirts that look like shit, and even a few Scottish ones, but not big European sides. Was there ever a worse kit than the one Athletico Bilbao wore in 2004, which looked like some fat bloke’s intestines?

City’s kit was designed by Stella McCartney, and so were the tracksuits. I don’t mind the kit so much: the orange makes your players easy to see on the park, and on a foggy night in Leeds that can be a real advantage. It’s the equivalent of playing golf with an orange ball; it seems that seventy-three per cent of golfers find a vividly coloured ball easier to see in flight and on the grass. Come to think of it, that must be why I’m so crap at golf.

In truth, Sonja likes the City tracksuits better than I do. It helps that hers is a size too small and when she wears it she looks just like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill: Volume 1 , only without the Hattori Hanzo¯ sword. But when I’m wearing an orange tracksuit I look like a fucking carrot. We all do. Which is why some rival supporters call us cat shit; apparently some cat shit is orange. You learn something every day.

When Sonja puts her tracksuit on it’s all I can do not to put my hands inside her bottoms, so I usually don’t bother trying to resist the temptation; unless it’s the day of a big game when, out of solidarity with my players — who are supposed to refrain from sex on the day of a match in order to keep their testosterone levels high — I do my best not to touch her. Testosterone helps players remain aggressive and it’s generally held that aggression helps sportsmen to win. Of course, Sonja knows I find her sexy when she’s wearing the tracksuit and, on a match-day morning, she often wears it anyway and then goes out of her way to be sexually provocative; I don’t know what else you’d call it when she wears the tracksuit bottoms a little too far down her butt and with a tiny bit of dental floss that masquerades as a pair of knickers. Then again she never has knickers like that on for very long; not when I’m around.

You wouldn’t believe how different Sonja looks when she goes off to her Knightsbridge consulting rooms to listen to girls discuss their eating disorders — anorexic girls on Tuesdays and Thursdays, fat girls on Mondays and Wednesdays: it wouldn’t ever do for them to be in the same waiting room. She doesn’t think my jokes on that subject are very funny, however.

Sonja wears a lot of nice Max Mara suits, good shoes and stockings. It’s her Dr Melfi look, which I find almost as sexy as her arse in an orange tracksuit. Unlike a lot of the girls she treats, Sonja has a great-looking arse — she works out a lot — and if I mention her arse so fondly it’s because the part of me that’s still a player seems to find it easier talking about how attractive and sexy my girlfriend is than saying how much I love her, which I do. Like a lot of men in football I find it hard to discuss my feelings; being a shrink she’s aware of that and makes allowances. At least I think she does. She knew I was already upset about what had happened to Didier Cassell and then to Drenno, which was why I didn’t talk about it; and until the day of the Newcastle match I really thought that the worst had already happened. But in truth it hadn’t, not by a long chalk.

I expect Ukrainians like Viktor Sokolnikov have all sort of poetic proverbs and sayings for it, but where I come from we just say this: that troubles come in a packet of three.

Zarco and I always picked the team in his office at Hangman’s Wood before boarding the coach to Silvertown Dock. Organising a squad of overpaid, often intellectually challenged young men can be like herding cats and it’s always better if everyone arrives at the stadium as a team to avoid any confusion.

There’s a lot of bullshit talked about choosing the tactics before you choose the team but here’s a truth: unless you want to rest someone for a more important fixture you always pick the very best players available to you. It’s really that simple. Anything else is just Fantasy fucking Football. The press loves to speculate that one player has been picked at the expense of another — to cause trouble, if they can — but if someone has been left on the bench there’s usually a damn good reason, and more often than not it’s simply to do with fitness and attitude. Attitude is even more important than fitness because even when a player is fully fit, he’ll sometimes get it into his head that he’s not playing well. And if there’s one thing that a manager or a coach is paid to do, it’s to try and fix whatever is going wrong in a player’s mind. To that extent it’s useful living with a psychiatrist, as she gives me some good tips on motivation.

Of course, now and then you get a player who pulls a sickie and claims that he’s not fully fit, although this isn’t nearly as common these days. Thankfully physios are better able than ever to find out if a player is bullshitting you about a niggling muscle or hamstring, and to treat it, too: electrotherapy, ultrasound, lasers, magnetotherapy, diathermy and traction therapy can fix a lot of problems in a short period of time. If all else fails you can always inject some cortisone into a joint that’s giving pain, and few players are even remotely keen on that solution; the truth is it hurts to have a needle pushed four or five millimetres into a leg. It hurts like buggery.

After we’d picked the team, Zarco left early in his own car to attend Viktor’s lunch, grumbling about how he had better things to do on the day of a match than meet with a lot of Greenwich planning officers and town councillors. Apart from that he was in a very good mood and loudly confident that we were going to stuff it to the Toon.