Chapter 940 - 940: Sprouts and Set Pieces

He sat down 4 rows away with his back to me, and the iPad came on in his lap, and it stayed on until Euston.

I could see the corner of the screen between the seats. A corner kick, frozen, 2 men in yellow bibs stood on the halfway line of pitch 2 at Beckenham. Every time the train went through a station the light from the platform went across it, and Bray did not look up.

Mamadou Sakho was asleep across 2 seats with his coat over his face and a carrier bag of boots on his chest, going up and down.

Across the table from him, Michael Olise and Nya Kirby were arguing about whose mum did the better Christmas dinner. They kept it quiet so as not to wake him, and lost the argument to each other in turn.

Kirby said roast potatoes. Olise said his mum does the turkey the night before, and you cannot argue with a woman who has been up since 4.

James McArthur, behind them, said without opening his eyes that he had been eating Christmas dinners for 31 years and both of them were wrong. Neither of them asked him why.

Bzzt.

EMMA. 22:41.

Mum wants to know if you eat sprouts. I have told her you do. You do now.

Manchester had gone a long time ago. There was nothing out of the window but the reflection of a carriage full of footballers in club tracksuits with their heads back.

50 points. The Etihad again in a fortnight. Madrid in February. Cardiff on Wednesday.

I put the phone face down on the table and thought about Cardiff, and about who I had not picked since August.

Rebecca had her card on the table in the meeting room at Beckenham at 10 on the Sunday. She had written it before she came in.

8 names in red. Konaté, Sakho, Neves, Kovačić, Hakimi, Zaha, Townsend, McArthur. 90 minutes at the Etihad each, and 4 days is 4 days.

Red was not a suggestion this week. Red was Sunday, Fulham, and every 1 of those 8 could start on Sunday if they did nothing on Wednesday except sit on a bench and eat. Eze was amber, 60 minutes or 30 from the bench, my pick.

Sarah had the squad list next to the card with a pencil on it. She had already crossed off the 8 and was looking at what was left.

Dann, Ward, Tarkowski, Chilwell, Tuanzebe and Mitchell at the back. Højbjerg, Rodríguez and Grealish in the middle. Perišić, Benteke, Bowen, Semenyo, Blake, Cartwright and Pato in front.

I put my finger on the last name.

Sarah did not say anything for a moment. That is how she starts an argument.

"Alexandre has been on 1 bench since August," she said, "and he did not get off it."

I told her Rebecca had Benteke amber in her head and had not written it down yet, and Rebecca did not deny it. I told her Bray had had Pato on pitch 1 after every session since August. 20 minutes and a bag of balls, with nobody watching.

"I have watched it," Sarah said. "My office has a window."

She put the pencil down.

"Then do not put him up there on his own against 5 centre halves. Cardiff play 3 in the middle with 2 wing backs and Warnock will tell them to stand on him.

"Put Jarrod on the right, wide, so their left wing back has to stay with somebody, and Ivan on the left. Alexandre needs men either side of him who make that back 5 stand still."

That was the team, and it was half hers.

Marcus had Cardiff on the big screen by 11. He did not show me a single attacking move of theirs from open play.

He showed me 9 corners and 6 free kicks. In all 15 of them Sean Morrison and Sol Bamba were the first men moving, and in 11 of them they were the first men to the ball.

"They do not need the ball for 80 minutes," Marcus said. "They need it for about 6 seconds, 15 times."

Bray took those 15 clips home with him on Sunday afternoon. He did not ask.

On Christmas Eve Emma had a day off and so did I, and we spent it doing the things everybody else in Dulwich had done on the 22nd.

We bought a tree from the man outside the church on Lordship Lane, the last 1 he had. It leaned to the left in its pot and would not stop leaning however many books we put under the far side.

Emma wrapped presents on the floor of the front room with the radio on, and it was not her station. She had told me on Sunday she would not listen to her own station until the 2nd of January. I did not ask why.

At 5 to midnight she went into the kitchen and opened the drawer under the cutlery.

She came back with something flat in green paper, with a ribbon round it that she had done badly on purpose. She sat on the arm of the sofa and held it in her lap until the clock on the cooker went to 12.

Ding. The cooker.

"Now," Emma said, and gave it to me.

It was an envelope. Brown, with a bank's window in it, and soft at the corners from being in and out of a folder for 2 months.

On the back, in Emma's handwriting, in pen, was the phone call she took from Ron in October while I was in the shower. All of it, down to the 2 who cried.

"I have been allowed to use that on the radio for about 10 seconds," Emma said. "It is yours now."

I read it twice. Ron's voice came off the paper in her writing, and he does not talk like that to me. He talks to me about passes upside down in windscreens.

My present to her was a print in a frame. The engraving out of the Illustrated London News, a table of men in top hats having their dinner inside the mould of an Iguanodon on New Year's Eve 1853.

I had found it at a dealer's in Cecil Court on a Thursday in November and kept it behind the wardrobe since.

Emma held it at arm's length with the tree leaning in the corner behind her.

"You listened," she said, the way she would say you ate the last biscuit.

She hung it that night on the nail where a mirror had been.

Ron was on the barrier at 9 o'clock on Christmas Day. The barrier does not know it is Christmas, and Ron has not had it off since 1999.

He had a Santa hat on that somebody in the ticket office gave him in 2009. He has told nobody it is the same hat.

"Tell Emma I have bought the tie," he said, and put the barrier up. "I am not saying what colour."

Sarah ran 50 minutes on pitch 1 with the men who were going to play on Wednesday.

Rebecca stood at the side of it with the 8 red names in a line, all of them in hats, all of them not allowed to touch a ball. Zaha lasted 6 minutes before he asked for 1 to keep on his foot. Rebecca took it off him.

Bray had his 15 clips on pitch 2. He walked Scott Dann to the near post and Morrison's run in pieces. Then he walked James Tarkowski to the spot where Sol Bamba lands, and then he did it again with Højbjerg as Bamba. Højbjerg did not enjoy being Bamba.

At the end of it Bray put Pato on the edge of the box with a bag of balls and fed him 20, the way he had done since August.

This time the whole squad was coming off pitch 1, and they stopped to watch.

Pato hit 18 of the 20 into the net. The 2 he missed went over the bar off his laces. When he had finished, Rúben Neves started clapping and the others joined in.

Pato turned round and bowed to them, very low, with his arm across his stomach, like a waiter.

Deano had the Secret Santa in a kit skip in the middle of the dressing room floor. He has run it since 1994 and the rules are his. 10 pounds, no cash, no aftershave, and nobody opens anything until he has read the name out.

Grealish's was from Nya Kirby.

Inside was a pair of shin pads, kids' size, small enough to close a hand round, with GRANDAD written across both in marker. Grealish took his own out of his bag. His are the size of a playing card. He held them up next to the new ones and they were the same size, and the room went.

Benteke's was from Connor Blake. Blake had framed a photograph a steward took at Wembley on the 18th, of Blake in front of the Palace end, turned round, pointing up into the seats behind our bench.

Benteke looked at it for a long time and did not make a joke. Then he put it in his bag carefully, with the glass facing his towel.

Achraf Hakimi's was from Dion Asare. A small box, and inside it a pair of gel heel cups out of a chemist and a note on lined paper in blue ink, in capitals.

HEELS.

"That is not his writing," Hakimi said.

"No," Dion said.

Hakimi put the note in the inside pocket of his coat and the heel cups in his boots. He wore them for the rest of the week.

Bray had drawn himself out of that skip by accident in 2017, and Deano will not let him forget it, so this year Deano had drawn for him.

Bray's was from Pato. An envelope with a card in it in Portuguese, 2 lines. Bray could not read a word of it and held it out to me. I could not read it either.

I asked Pato, for the 3rd time since Dortmund, what he had said about the prison. He said after Wednesday.

They went home for Christmas dinner at 1. They were all to be at the hotel at Wembley by 7.

Emma's parents live in a terrace with a front room the width of a car.

Her father had the new knee up on the same stool, in the same chair, and 2 crutches against the fire surround where the stick used to be. It was 14 days since Sidcup.

There was an arrow on his shin in marker that would not wash off, and he showed it to me before I had my coat off.

"Not there," he said. "You know where."

I sat where I had sat the night Chelsea beat City, out of his light.

He wanted Wednesday. He wanted to know who was up front, and I told him he would find out at 2 o'clock on Wednesday like everybody else.

He said I was a hard man. He said he had given his seat to a woman he had never met, she had been in it since Dortmund, and he had not had a word of thanks from me.

Emma's mother put a plate in front of him on a tray and told him to eat it and stop talking.

"I am not getting up those steps till the middle of January," he said, with his mouth full. "Mrs Asare keeps it till then. Clive says she knows the words to Glad All Over now."

The sprouts were done with bacon. I ate them.