Chapter 898 - 898: Unseen Work

We beat Borussia Dortmund 3-0 on Wednesday night and on Thursday afternoon I watched the same 64 minutes twice, and Rúben Neves is not in either of them. 30 touches in the whole match. 11 of those came in the first 20 minutes, so he had 19 in the other 44, and 6 of the 19 were a ball rolled sideways to a centre half and rolled straight back to him.

Marcus had the clips up on the big screen in the analysts' room with the blinds down and a coffee going cold next to the keyboard.

"Boss, before you say it. I know."

"Say what."

"That we won."

"I was not going to."

Tk. Tk.

He ran it. Neves comes short. Witsel comes with him. Neves goes and stands between his own centre halves, which is the last place a manager wants his 6 to have to go, and Axel Witsel follows him into it and stands 6 feet off his shoulder with his arms folded like a man queueing for something.

"Again."

Marcus ran it again.

"Now the 54th minute."

Same thing. Same 6 feet.

"Here is the bit nobody has written about," Marcus said, and he had it queued, because he had been sat in that room since half 1. "Favre made 3 changes in that match. He took off Bruun Larsen, he took off Philipp, he put Alcácer on. He never once thought about Witsel. That man ran 11.2 kilometres doing a job that cost his team nothing, and he could have done another 20 minutes on top."

"Say that again."

"He could have done another 20 minutes on top." Marcus sat back off the desk. "It is free, boss. Marking Rúben costs Dortmund nothing at all."

I have had this football club for 15 months and there are 4 of my players on the front of a German newspaper this morning. Achraf, Aaron, Ellis and James Tarkowski. Nathan had to read the club's follower number out loud twice in an airport lounge because nobody believed him the first time, and Deano made him do it a third time for a woman from the laundry who had missed it. And I came home with a 21-year-old who did not play in it.

Clnk. The barrier going up, and going down, and going up.

Ron was on it at 2 o'clock as if nothing had happened anywhere.

He has 11 names left on a list of 40 and his next Wednesday is the 10th, and he was in his own coat with his flask on the shelf and a Ford Focus in front of him that he was in no rush with.

"Good trip, gaffer?"

"It was."

"They tell me you won."

"We did."

"Right," Ron said, and looked past me at the Focus. "Dave. Your pass is upside down again."

The 14 who played did not see a football on Thursday. Rebecca had them in the pool and then on bikes in a room with the windows open, and she stood at the end of that room with a clipboard and did not let a single one of them do anything he wanted to do. Christian Benteke asked if he could go out on the grass and she said no before he had finished the sentence. Mamadou Sakho asked her the same thing 4 minutes later in French and got the same answer in French.

Hiss. The machines going. Somebody's music on, low, and nobody arguing about it.

The other half of that squad got the pitches, and this is the half of a football club that nobody outside it ever looks at on a Thursday.

Scott Dann ran the back 4 again because somebody has to and he wants it, and this time it was Tuanzebe and Chilwell and a 17-year-old from the under 23s who did not know where to stand and got told 6 times without anybody raising a voice. Eberechi Eze spent 40 minutes of it playing against them on his own, because Dann asked for a man who would not make it easy, and at the end of it Dann shook his hand, which Scott Dann does about twice a season. Wayne Hennessey did doubles with Michael Steele and Tim Krul. Alexandre Pato stayed out after and Bray fed him balls, the way the pair of them have done since August, and neither of them has ever mentioned it to me.

Jack Grealish did the whole session and then came and found me at the edge of pitch 2 with his boots already off and his socks rolled down.

He is 23, Rebecca has had him capped at 60 minutes since the 2nd of September, and on Wednesday he sat through all 90 in Germany without pulling a face once.

"Go on then."

"What?"

"You have been walking at me for 20 yards, Jack."

"Alright." He put the boots down. "What is the 60 for?"

"You know what it is for."

"I know what she says it is for." He was not angry about it. He has never once been angry about it, and I would have an easier week if he was. "Calf, twice, and the second one was my fault because I told her it was fine on the Tuesday and it was not fine on the Tuesday."

"Then you know."

"So when does it stop being 60?"

"Ask her."

"I have asked her. She says ask you."

He stood there and waited me out. He is very good at that.

"You sat in Dortmund for 90 minutes on Wednesday," I said. "8 men would have had a face on. You had a bottle in your hand for Aaron at 88 before he got to the line."

"He had run 70 yards."

"Yes. And 4 of that bench were watching the pile of players and you were watching the man who was not in it." I picked his boots up and gave them to him. "That is the answer and it is not the one you want. The 60 goes when Rebecca says it goes, and you are not going to hear it from me first, because the day I overrule her on a calf is the day her card stops meaning anything to anybody in this building."

"She has never been overruled."

"She has never been overruled."

"Right." Jack Grealish took the boots off me. "Is it alright if I am annoyed about it?"

"I would think less of you if you were not."

At 3 o'clock Christian Benteke took the under 23s for 20 minutes on defending corners.

He asked me for it in a hotel corridor in Dortmund on Tuesday with a cup of tea in his hand and I said yes, and then I stood 30 yards away on the Thursday and watched a centre forward with 9 goals in 11 matches try to coach for the first time in his life.

The first 6 minutes were not good.

He explained, and then he kept explaining. He had Connor Blake and Ellis Cartwright and Nya Kirby and Michael Olise and Antoine Semenyo stood in a line in front of him while he talked about zones and about which shoulder and about the 6 yard line, and Olise is 16 and was nodding at every word of it and taking in none of it, and Kirby had started looking at the far pitch. It went on for 6 minutes. Then Benteke stopped talking.

Tk. He kicked a cone out of the way and left it where it went.

Then he walked over and put Connor Blake on the front post with a hand on each shoulder and turned him 30 degrees so his body was open to the pitch.

"There. Not there. There."

"Why?"

"Because from there you can see it and the man. From there you see only it."

Fwp. Ball in. Blake headed it out to the corner flag.

"Again."

Fwp.

He did that 11 times without saying more than 4 words at a go, and by the 11th one Cartwright was moving Semenyo before Benteke got to him.

Michael Cooke stood on that touchline for 26 minutes and did not open his mouth once, and he runs the under 23s and it was his session that was being taken off him.

I went and stood next to him at about the 15th minute.

"You could have done that."

"I have done it," Cooke said. "About 40 times. It does not take."

"Why does it take today?"

"Because I am the man who tells them in April whether they have got a career." He did not take his eyes off it. "He is the man who scores the goals. When he tells Connor Blake where to stand, Connor Blake thinks he has been let into something."

Benteke asked for 20 minutes and took 26, and nobody stopped him, and by the end of it Michael Cooke had moved 15 yards closer without appearing to move at all. At the end of it Ellis Cartwright asked him a question I could not hear and Christian Benteke took about 4 seconds over the answer, stood still, looking at the boy while he did it.

I asked him on the way in what the question was.

"He asked why nobody teaches it."

"And?"

"I told him the truth." Benteke had his boots over his shoulder. "Nobody teaches a striker to defend a corner, so the only men who know where a striker is going are strikers. That is not a secret. It is just that nobody is in the room."