Chapter 888 - 888: UCL Nights

At 74 I had both hands on the dugout roof and Sarah came and stood about 2 feet to my left and stayed there, and she did not say anything, and she was not there to say anything. She has done that 4 times in 15 months and 2 of the 4 were in this stadium.

[MAURO ICARDI. 78 MINUTES. SHOTS 4. ON TARGET 0.]

29 goals in Serie A last season and not 1 of 4 on target at Wembley, because Sakho and Tarkowski spent 78 minutes making it a physical night for him, which is word for word what Ivan Perišić told me to do on the 30th of August.

I made the last 2 at 81. Ellis Cartwright for Christian Benteke, Michael Olise for James McArthur.

McArthur came off to 60,000 people on their feet, and he is 30 and he has 250 appearances and nobody has ever written a paragraph about him, and he got the whole building on his own for about 9 seconds and did not know where to put his hands.

James Rodríguez moved 2 seats along so Olise could get past him to the board and said something on the way, and I did not have to ask what it was, because he had told me at 10 past 7 in a dressing room.

The pitch is the same size.

Ellis Cartwright is 18. He is on List B. He cost this football club nothing, and on the 6th of June this football club released him.

He came on at Wembley in the 81st minute of a Champions League match, and Ron was at the mouth of that tunnel with his cap in his hands watching him go, and 60,000 people who had never heard of him cheered him onto the grass because he was wearing the shirt.

"NUMBER 40."

Rebecca had her hand on my arm for that one and she did not say anything either.

87 minutes.

Inter had 8 men in our half because they had to, and Perišić took it off Vecino 30 yards from our own goal.

Come on.

shhk. shhk.

He went 40 yards without looking up once, and Milan Škriniar went with him for 30 of the 40 and then had to make a decision about a boy he had never heard of.

He chose Perišić. Every defender alive chooses Perišić.

Ellis Cartwright was on his own.

The stadium got there before the players did. 60,000 people were already up while that ball was still under Perišić's foot, and the noise started before the pass did, which is a thing I did not know a crowd could do.

I saw Škriniar's shoulder turn. I saw de Vrij 4 yards into a sprint he had no chance of finishing. I saw Samir Handanović set his feet for a shot that was not coming.

Perišić rolled it. Flat, slow, 12 yards.

Boom.

Right foot. 10 yards. Into the roof of that net.

2-0.

RRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

"AND I'M FEELIN'..."

"PALACE!"

Twice in 26 minutes, in a competition this club had never played a minute in at 8 o'clock.

Cartwright ran to the corner where the drum is and got there before anybody caught him, and then stopped, because he had not planned any of it and had nothing to do when he arrived. Olise got to him first and put him on the floor. Connor Blake came off that bench and ran 40 yards and Michael Steele did not stop him. Joel Ward got there last and pulled 3 of them off the top of him because somebody has to think about ankles.

Nathan says Terry Dolan was 4 rows behind that corner with both arms up and his son had hold of his coat.

I stood in a technical area with both hands on top of my own head and did not make a sound. There is a photograph of it and I look like a man who has been told something at a door.

[ELLIS CARTWRIGHT. CA 109. PA 148.]

104 on the 15th of August. 109 on the 18th of September. 34 days.

PRRRRRRP. PRRRRRRP. PRRRRRRP.

Crystal Palace 2 Internazionale 0.

[QUEST: SURVIVE THE ELITE TABLE. 1 OF 6. WON.]

113 years.

They play Glad All Over at Selhurst at the start of every home match, and they play it again at the end of every one this club wins, and it has been that way since 1968.

They played it for the third time on Tuesday at 22 minutes to 10, and nobody went home for it.

I have been in this stadium 5 times in 15 months and watched 60,000 people leave it 5 different ways, and on Tuesday they stood in it and sang at 11 men on the halfway line who did not know whether they were allowed to go round.

Scott Dann sent them. Club captain, did not play a minute, got the whole lot of them by the arm and pointed at the far corner.

So they went round, all of them, the 12 who did not play as well, and it took 11 minutes because Wilfried Zaha would not walk past anybody with a phone.

Nick Pope went round on his own at the back with his gloves in one hand.

Rúben Neves stopped in front of the Holmesdale end and put both arms out and stood there while 400 people sang at him, and he is 21, and 2 hours earlier a 30-year-old Belgian had stood on his shoulder for 45 minutes and taken his night off him.

Ivan Perišić got to the north east corner last. 4,200 Internazionale supporters stood up and applauded him, all of them, for about 40 seconds, and he put a hand up once and walked off.

Steve Parish came down onto that grass with his tie off and got to Ron before he got to me, and I watched the chairman of this football club shake hands with a 71-year-old who has worked a barrier since 1999, on a pitch at Wembley, in front of 60,000 people, before he remembered there were footballers to speak to.

"WE ARE PALACE. WE ARE PALACE. WE ARE PALACE."

The banner was up over 14 seats in the Holmesdale end for 4 hours. 113 YEARS. WE NEVER STOPPED. They were the last 400 people in the building and the stewards gave up on them at 10 past 10.

Luciano Spalletti shook my hand and held onto it and said 1 thing in English.

"You have a team."

Then he went and found Ivan Perišić and put both hands on his face for about 4 seconds and said something, and Perišić nodded twice, and that was all of it.

Michael Cooke was stood in the mouth of the tunnel when I came off.

He runs the under 23s, he has been in this building 9 years, he does the releasing meeting for every 18 to 23-year-old who goes out of it, and on the 6th of June he sat in a room with Ellis Cartwright and Ellis Cartwright's mother and told that boy he was finished here.

He had not said anything to me about tonight all week.

"Where were you sat?"

"126." He had his hands in his coat pockets. "Row 9."

"And?"

Michael Cooke looked out at that pitch for a while.

"His mum was 3 rows in front of me," he said. "She did not know I was there and I did not tell her."

I did not have anything for that.

"I have done 15 of those meetings a year for 9 years," Cooke said, "and I have never once had to sit and watch what happens if you get it wrong, because they go and it is somebody else's stadium. And tonight it was mine, and it was 2-0, and she had her hands over her face."

He took a breath.

"Do not put that in a press conference."

"No."

"Right." He straightened his coat up. "I will see you at 9."

That dressing room was the quietest I have ever heard a room be happy.

Somebody put a speaker on for about 9 seconds and turned it off again and I do not know who did either of those things. Zaha sat with a towel over his head for 4 minutes. Nick Pope kept a clean sheet against a man who scored 29 in Serie A and then sat taking his own tape off like it was a Tuesday in February. Scott Dann went round that room and shook 14 hands.

Ellis Cartwright sat in the corner with his boots and his shirt still on and did not move for about 6 minutes, and then Michael Steele went over and said something to him and he started taking his boots off.

I asked Steele on the Thursday what he had said.

"I told him to take his boots off."

"That is it?"

"He was going to sit there in them," Michael Steele said. "Somebody has to tell them."

Marcus got to me in the tunnel with a phone in each hand.

"2 things and you want the second one."

"Group B."

Tap.

DORTMUND 3. CRYSTAL PALACE 3. PSV 0. INTERNAZIONALE 0.

"Dortmund won 3-1 in Eindhoven. Same points, same goal difference, above us because they scored 3 and we scored 2." He turned the other phone round. "That is the first one. Here is the second."

It was a photograph off the Internazionale supporters' account. The flag with Perišić's face on it, folded, being carried up a staircase in the north east corner, with a line under it in Italian.

"What does it say?"

"Bravo, Ivan," Marcus said. "That is the whole caption. 31,000 likes and it is climbing."

Ivan Perišić found me on the Thursday morning at Beckenham on pitch 3 and told me what Luciano Spalletti had said to him before kick off. He had been carrying it for 36 hours.

"He said he was sorry."

"For what?"

"For selling me." He had a ball under his foot and he was not looking at me. "He said it was not his decision and he told them 3 times and they did it anyway, and he wanted me to know it before I played against him and not after."

"And after?"

"After the match he said 1 more thing." Perišić rolled the ball back under his foot and stopped it. "He said the boy who scored the second one is going to be a problem for somebody, and he asked me how much we paid for him."

Tk.

"What did you tell him?"

"The truth," Ivan Perišić said. "That you released him in June, and he kept coming through the gate at 7 in the morning until somebody noticed."