I let the week be loud up north and quiet where we were. The lads thought it was the funniest thing that had ever happened.
Hakimi made it his personal mission to read me the worst headline at breakfast every day in a posh English accent he did not have, and by the Thursday even Benatia, who finds almost nothing funny on principle, had cracked.
Then it was the fourteenth of June, and the noise stopped mattering, because the thing itself began.
We watched the opening together. All of us. I made it a thing, told Nadia to sort the big room and the big screen.
What I had not arranged, what Nadia had arranged behind my back off the date on my own accreditation, was the cake.
It was sitting on a physio table when I walked in. A slab the hotel kitchen had been ambushed into making at no notice, TWENTY-NINE in wonky icing, one candle, because Nadia said the smoke alarms were sensitive and she was not having me end the tournament under a sprinkler.
