I woke up at six. The hotel room was dark. The curtains were thick, the Hilton's idea of luxury, heavy fabric that blocked the Wembley Way streetlights and the February dawn and everything except the thing that no curtain could block: the knowledge that today was the day.
I lay in bed for eleven minutes. I know it was eleven minutes because I watched the clock on the bedside table change from 6:00 to 6:11, and I thought about nothing and everything and the gap between the two was the gap between a man who was calm and a man who was pretending to be calm. I was pretending.
The calm would come later, when the suit was on and the mask was in place and the touchline was beneath my feet. Right now, in the dark, in a hotel room on Wembley Way, I was a twenty-eight-year-old from Moss Side who was about to manage in a cup final at Wembley and who was, despite everything he had said to Emma and Ferdinand and the press, terrified.
