Chapter 958 - 958: Two Lines III

In the second minute of added time Dion got to the byline again and pulled it back, and Pato hit it first time from 12 yards, and Gazzaniga got his knee to it.

Prrrp. Prrrp. Prrrrp.

Crystal Palace 1, Tottenham Hotspur 2.

We had won the FA Cup at Wembley in May. We had held it for 8 months.

Pochettino shook my hand on the line and said something about JJ that I could not hear over the Spurs end. Then he went to his players.

JJ came to me straight after. He had Aaron's shirt over his shoulder. I had not seen them swap. He stood in front of me in the noise with his own shirt half off and the other 1 hanging down his back.

"Are we all right?"

He had asked me that once before, on a Sunday morning, after he put a ball through the window of the Railway Arms.

"We are all right," I said. "Go and win it now. All of it."

He nodded. He looked at me a bit longer. Then he jogged off to the Spurs end. They sang his name and he clapped them, and he did not look back at our half.

In the dressing room nobody said anything for a long time.

Eze sat with his boots still on and his head back against the wall, looking at the ceiling. Aaron sat with the towel. Højbjerg had a cut on his eyebrow from Wanyama's elbow, and Rebecca was holding a bit of gauze on it, and he was letting her.

I did not make a speech. I did not know what speech I could have made. Every 1 of them had been out there and lost it, and they knew that better than I did.

Scott Dann stood up in the middle of the room with the armband in his hand.

"Huddersfield," he said. "Wednesday."

He sat down again.

Emma met me in the car park. She did not ask me anything. On the way home she put the radio on and found a programme about cooking and kept it on all the way to Dulwich.

When we got in she made cheese on toast under the grill and we ate it on the sofa with a film on that neither of us watched.

"My dad rang," she said, about halfway through. "He says to tell you he is going to Sidcup on Tuesday for his knee check, and he is taking the stairs this time. He is not getting in the lift."

I said to tell him to take the lift.

"I will not tell him that. He will do the stairs twice."

She put her feet in my lap and fell asleep before the end of the film.

On Tuesday night Manchester City lost at Newcastle.

Agüero scored inside the first minute. Then Rondón equalised after an hour, and Ritchie scored a penalty with 10 minutes left. Marcus watched it in the analysis room on his own and wrote the result on the canteen wall in pen at a quarter to 10 at night, under the table, and went home.

On Wednesday morning Ron stopped me at the barrier with the page in the plastic wallet already on his clipboard.

"7 names," he said. "I did them at 7 this morning, because of tonight. They were all up."

Mitchell had played his first match for Portsmouth at Luton on Tuesday night, all 90 minutes at left back. Portsmouth had lost 3-2. His first question to Ron was whether we had beaten Spurs, and Ron had told him the truth, and Mitchell had said he knew, he had only asked to hear somebody say it.

Blake had still not played. Pulis had told him on Monday he would be on the bench at the weekend.

"He asked me if the gaffer said anything," Ron said. "About him. I said the gaffer has been busy."

"Tell him I said Saturday."

"I will tell him." He wrote it down. "Semenyo came on for the last 20 on Friday night against Bolton and they won 2-1. He wants to know if JJ Johnson is any good." He looked up at me. "I told him to watch the goal."

Huddersfield came to Wembley that night with a manager who had been in the job for 9 days.

David Wagner had left them on the 14th. Jan Siewert had come from Borussia Dortmund's second team on the 21st. He was 36.

He had been coaching at Dortmund in October when we went there and won 3-0, and in December when we beat them again at Wembley, and I would have liked to ask him what had been said on their training ground about us the morning after. I never did.

They were bottom of the league.

CRYSTAL PALACE: Pope. Hakimi, Konaté, Sakho, Chilwell. Neves. Townsend, Rodríguez, McArthur, Perišić. Benteke.

Bench: Krul, Tarkowski, Wan-Bissaka, Højbjerg, Eze, Zaha, Pato.

HUDDERSFIELD TOWN: Lössl. Hadergjonaj, Jørgensen, Schindler, Kongolo. Hogg, Bacuna. Kachunga, Puncheon, Diakhaby. Mounié.

Rebecca had Ivan's hamstring green that morning. He had his name on the sheet before lunch.

Siewert stood on the edge of his technical area for the whole first half in a club tracksuit with his arms folded, and every time Huddersfield won the ball back he clapped his hands once, loud enough for me to hear it from 30 yards.

Prrrp.

On 24 Perišić went past Hadergjonaj on the left and crossed it with his right foot to the penalty spot, and Benteke climbed over Schindler and headed it in.

Thud.

Ivan ran to Benteke and then kept running, past him, all the way to our bench, and stopped in front of Rebecca and held 1 thumb up at her. She looked at him over her card and nodded.

On 66 we were given a free kick 30 yards out. Rúben Neves took 3 steps and hit it, and it went over the wall and dipped, and Lössl was still in the air when it hit the net.

Swsh.

Eze came on for Townsend. Zaha came on for Perišić with 20 minutes left, and Ivan came off to the whole of our end standing for him. Højbjerg went on for McArthur with 10 minutes left, with a plaster over his eyebrow.

Huddersfield brought on Aaron Mooy and kept trying.

Prrrp. Prrrp. Prrrrp.

Crystal Palace 2, Huddersfield Town 0.

Siewert shook my hand and said in good English that he had enjoyed watching us in October. I thanked him and wished him luck.

64 points from 24 matches.

On Thursday the 31st Dougie's window board was in the corridor outside his office where it had been since the 1st.

IN had nothing written under it. OUT had Semenyo, Bristol City, loan, from the 1st of January, then 6 more loans under that in Dougie's capitals, the last 2 dated the 24th. Nobody sold. Nobody signed. At 5 o'clock he wiped the pen marks round the edge of the board with his thumb and went home.

At 10 past 5 Sarah unlocked her drawer.

She printed List A, put it on my desk and gave me the pen. 25 names. Hennessey and Asare at the bottom in the new lines. No Perišić. No Højbjerg.

I signed it.

She scanned it, attached it to the email, read the email twice and sent it. Then she sat back in her chair.

"That is Madrid," she said. "20 days."

I said Chelsea was 4 days after that.

"And Chelsea 4 days after." She stood up and put her coat on. "Go home, Danny. You have a lesson."

The third lesson was Moon River from the first minute. The teacher did not count once. At the end of it she made us do it with our eyes shut, which I did not know was a thing anybody did, and I trod on Emma only once, at the very end, when the song stopped and I did not.

Afterwards we ate at the Turkish place at the bottom of the hill, the 2 of us at the table by the window, and it was nearly 11 when we started walking home. It was cold and clear, and at the top Emma stopped under the same streetlight as before and looked at her watch.

"It is 11," she said.

I knew what she meant. The window had shut. We had not bought anybody and we had not sold anybody, and every player I had at the start of January was still mine, apart from 7 who were on loan and coming back in May.

"Is that good?" Emma said.

She had not asked me a single question about football in weeks. I looked at her. She was looking straight back at me, waiting, in her coat, with her breath going up into the light.

"It is good," I said.

"Good," she said, and took my arm. She hummed Moon River the rest of the way down our road, out of tune, and I did not ask her to stop.