I'd left the phone face down on the side table all night, buzzing itself to the edge of the wood, and I didn't turn it over till the grey light was in the room and I'd run clean out of reasons not to.
Bzz. Still going. The screen had given up counting. A little plus sign sat where the number should've been.
The goal was everywhere, En-Nesyri's finish a thousand times over, off every phone in the ground. But it wasn't the goal that had the world by the throat this morning.
It was the floor.
Somebody had got a photo of our dressing room after we'd cleared out of it. The folded kit. The bagged bins. The mopped floor, the benches all wiped down, the room handed back cleaner than we'd found it. Three words under it I couldn't read, and below them, over and over, in a language I could.
A nation of gentlemen.
I lay there watching the number climb. More people had shared a photo of us putting the bins out than had watched the goal go in. Honest to God.
