Chapter 952 - 952: Needles II

On Tuesday Michael Steele had Tim Krul on his own on pitch 3 with Hennessey hitting balls at him from the edge of the box. Steele said 1 thing to Krul about City's corners that I could not hear from the fence. Krul asked him to say it again. Steele said it again in exactly the same words.

Lorraine rang me on Tuesday afternoon. She has never once rung me.

"It has gone," she said. "Wembley, the 23rd. Every seat we had, by 10 o'clock this morning. I have had to unplug the phone in the ticket office."

Then she told me about Row 31.

Emma's father wanted his seat back for the 23rd. It was his seat. His knee had been done in December and he had told everybody since Christmas that he was getting up those steps for a semi-final if he had to be carried. That left Mrs Asare with nowhere to sit.

Lorraine had already fixed it.

Clive, who had sat next to Emma's father since August and spent most of that time on the 1990 cup final, had bought a second season ticket in the summer for a son in Bristol who had used it twice.

Clive had rung the ticket office himself on the Monday. The son was not coming, he said, and the seat was the other side of him, and he would be glad if it went to the woman who knew the words now.

"So she is still in Row 31," Lorraine said. "1 along, next to Clive. And Clive is next to Emma's father. I have told all 3 of them. Nobody asked me to."

I thanked her.

"I did not do it for you," Lorraine said, and put the phone down.

On Wednesday Emma did her show and I came home at 6 and tried to cook.

Not an egg. A real meal, the kind with a pan for each part of it. I had found it on her laptop, which she leaves open on the kitchen table: chicken thighs with lemon and garlic, potatoes in the oven, green beans. It said 45 minutes. I gave it an hour and a half.

At 7 the smoke alarm went. I stood on a chair under it waving a tea towel, with the potatoes still hard and the chicken black on 1 side and pink on the other, and the window open in January.

Bzzt. My phone, on the counter, under the chopping board.

EMMA. 19:04. On the bus. What is that smell. I can smell it from the bus.

She could not have. She came in at 20 past and stood in the kitchen doorway with her coat still on, looking at the chair under the smoke alarm and the tea towel on the floor and me, and she did not say anything for a long time.

Then she took her coat off. She cut the black side off the chicken with a bread knife, put the pink side back in the oven for 12 minutes, and boiled the potatoes she said I should have boiled first.

We ate the whole thing at the kitchen table at 8 o'clock with the window still open and her nose red from the cold. She told me it was very nice. It was not. She said the green beans were perfect, and they were, because I had left them alone until the last 5 minutes.

On Thursday morning Ron stopped my car at the barrier and gave me his Wednesday through the window, from memory, with his glasses pushed up on his head.

7 names. Ryan Fletcher had been in goal for Bromley every match since he went, with Michael stood behind him at Hayes Lane on the Tuesday nights, and his only question for Ron was why crosses come in so much faster in the National League than they do at Beckenham.

Antoine Semenyo had come off the bench on Saturday, Bristol City had beaten Bolton 2-1, and the first thing he asked Ron was who was playing left back at Wembley.

The centre half from Thornton Heath had played twice and liked it. The winger from Streatham had played 20 minutes and wanted to know whether Michael Cooke was coming on Saturday.

"Tell Michael yes," Ron said. "I have already told the lad yes. Michael can sort the rest."

"And the other 2?"

"From the 24th." He put the barrier up. "I have known the pair of them since they were 9."

On Thursday night Emma took me dancing.

That is not quite true. She took me to a church hall in Herne Hill at 7 o'clock, where there was a dance teacher, a CD player on a trestle table, and a radiator that clanked every 30 seconds and did nothing about the cold.

Clang.

We have a first dance to do in June in front of 91 people. Emma had decided in December that she was not going to stand in the middle of a room watching me move from foot to foot like a man waiting for a bus.

The teacher was a woman of about 70 in a cardigan and running shoes. She looked at me in my coat for a long time, and told me to take it off and put my phone on the chair, face down.

I put it on the chair, face down.

We did 50 minutes. She counted the whole time, out loud, in a voice that carried to the back of the hall, and every time she got to 3 my left foot went somewhere it should not have.

Emma could do it. Emma had done it at a cousin's wedding in 2014 and remembered every step, and she spent most of the lesson trying hard not to laugh at me and failing.

"He is thinking," the teacher told Emma, as if I had gone out of the room. "You can see him thinking. Stop thinking."

Emma said she had been trying to get me to stop for 3 years.

"Then we will tire him out," the teacher said, and she did.

By the end my shirt was stuck to my back and I could get once round the hall without standing on Emma. The teacher turned the CD off, nodded at us, and said next Thursday, same time, and practise in the kitchen.

We walked back up the hill. It was cold and very clear, there was frost on the cars already, and Emma had her arm through mine.

"You were awful," she said. "Really awful. She is going to tell her friends about you."

She had no idea who I was, I said.

Emma stopped under a streetlight.

"Danny. The vicar came in at half 7 to get his reading glasses and stood in the doorway for 10 minutes. You do not need 10 minutes to pick up your glasses."

I had not noticed the vicar.

She said I never notice anything, and took my arm again, and we did the box step up the rest of the pavement, badly, past a man walking a dog who stopped to watch the 2 of us and then carried on without a word.

In the kitchen before bed she put the radio on low and made me do it twice more. The second time I got all the way through it. At the end she put her face in my neck and stayed there, and the kettle boiled and clicked off behind her, and neither of us went to make the tea.

On Friday Sarah ran 11 against 11 with the side she wanted for Wednesday, and I watched it from the fence with a coffee going cold in my hand.

Mitchell did not put a foot wrong. Blake scored twice and tried to give the second away to Olise.

Dion Asare played on the left of the bibs and went at Aaron Wan-Bissaka 6 times, and got past him twice, and Sarah looked across at me from the halfway line both times and kept her mouth shut.

Chilwell played for the bibs and kicked Mitchell 3 times, harder each time, and Mitchell got up 3 times without a word, and after the third Chilwell nodded at him as if something had been settled.

Nya Kirby was in the middle of it all, and he was good. He was always good. But he turned on his left foot every time, never his right, and when he jogged back to his position he did it on the outside of his right boot, the way you walk on a beach with a shell in your shoe.

I noticed it at the time and thought it was nothing. Rebecca was 10 yards along the fence from me with her card against her chest, and she did not take her eyes off him for the whole 40 minutes.

Southampton on the Saturday was 4 days before Wembley, and Rebecca's sheet was mostly red.

Ralph Hasenhüttl had been there 6 weeks. He had Southampton in a back 3, wing backs up the pitch, pressing all at once the way his sides in Germany pressed, and St Mary's was loud 10 minutes before kick-off because they were near the bottom and had started to believe the man.

CRYSTAL PALACE: Pope. Hakimi, Dann, Sakho, Chilwell. Neves. Bowen, Højbjerg, Rodríguez, Perišić. Pato.

Bench: Krul, Tuanzebe, Ward, McArthur, Eze, Cartwright, Benteke.

SOUTHAMPTON: McCarthy. Vestergaard, Stephens, Bednarek. Valery, Romeu, Ward-Prowse, Targett. Armstrong, Redmond. Ings.

Prrrp.

For half an hour they pressed us into the grass. Ings and Redmond and Armstrong ran at our back 4 in a line. When we got it out, Romeu was there. When we got past Romeu, a wing back came back at us at full speed.

On 33 Scott Dann went through the back of Danny Ings a yard outside the box, and James Ward-Prowse put the ball down.

Bray was up before the ball was on the grass, shouting for 6 in the wall and Pope's side.

Ward-Prowse put it over the 6 and dipping. Pope got a glove on it. It was not enough of a glove, and the ball came off his fingers and the inside of the post and into the net.

Thock.

1-0.

Bray sat down very slowly and took his laminated card out and did not look at it.

We got it back on 58. Rodríguez put a ball through for Pato, Pato went round McCarthy, and McCarthy took his legs. Graham Scott gave it and booked the keeper. Rodríguez took it, because Rodríguez always takes it, and McCarthy went the right way and could not get there.

Tk.

1-1.

60 minutes. Eze for Bowen.

72 minutes. Benteke for Pato.

80 minutes. Tuanzebe for Dann.

They came at us for half an hour and could not get another. We could not either. On 89 Eze hit the bar from 25, and on the far touchline Hasenhüttl crouched down on his heels with his hands over his mouth until the ball was dead.

Prrrp. Prrrp. Prrrrp.

Southampton 1 Crystal Palace 1.

Hasenhüttl came across with his hand out and rain on his face. He said something about Wednesday that I could not hear over the noise, and went to his players, who were sat on the grass as if they had won something.

61 points, 23 played.

Rebecca was waiting at the door of the away dressing room with her card already turned round.

She does not wait at doors.

KIRBY. WEMBLEY: NO.

I looked at the card and then at her.

"The heel," she said. "The blister from Manchester has gone underneath and it is infected. He went to his own GP on Wednesday and got antibiotics, and he told me this morning, because he thought it would clear up by itself, and because he knew that if he told me I would do exactly what I am doing now."

Could he play with it strapped?

"He can play with it strapped," Rebecca said. "And on Thursday I will be cutting his boot off."

She stood there and waited for me to say it.

Behind her, along the corridor, Nya Kirby was sat on the floor outside the physio room with 1 boot on and 1 boot off and his foot wrapped in white. He had the boot in his lap.

He was looking at me.