I have been in loud dressing rooms and I have been in nervous ones. I had never been in one this quiet.
No card school. No music. Boussoufa's deck still zipped in his bag. En-Nesyri, who I'd been begging to shut up for a week, sat with his boots in his hands and his mouth shut.
Thwack. Catch. Thwack. Catch. Ziyech bounced a tennis ball off the concrete, over and over, staring at the wall.
That was when it hit me what I was dealing with.
The group was the fairytale. This was the exam. One game, win it or fly home, and not one man in that room had been alive the last time this country played a knockout at a World Cup.
The occasion had climbed into them before I'd said a word, and my job, before any of the tactics, was to get it back out. So I didn't start with Russia. I started with Ziyech.
"Hakim." He looked up. "That bent FIFA tournament you've been running in Voronezh. Who actually won it?"
A beat. Then Boussoufa, from his corner. "He cheated."
"I did not cheat."
