Hakimi had been filming since Switzerland.
He had the phone pointed out the window when we came down through the cloud, narrating to it like a man on the telly nobody had hired.
"And now, the landing. We are landing. Coach, say something for the people."
"Put the phone down, Achraf."
"He says hello," Hakimi told the phone.
Out the window it was a white afternoon and a banner the length of a terminal, the only thing on the whole apron I could read. FIFA WORLD CUP RUSSIA 2018. Everything else was Cyrillic, letters pretending to be letters I knew and turning into something else when I looked twice.
There were plane tails parked up in a row. A green one. A blue one. A white one with a crest I half-knew. Other countries, already here, getting off their own jets into their own week.
I had a daft thought, belt still on. I had watched this tournament off a settee for twenty years, and I did not actually know what you were meant to do when you landed at one.
