[Voronezh, Russia. Tuesday 3 July 2018.]
Two days on from Luzhniki, and the noise had not stopped. It had spread.
Not just the streets, though the streets were still going. Casablanca, Rabat, and past all that, the whole of it. Cairo. Amman. Tunis. Beirut. Lagos, Dakar, Abidjan, that café in Nairobi that had taken us in weeks ago and would not let go.
Africa and the Arab world both, deciding at the same moment that a team of ours was a team of theirs, and getting behind it like nothing else on earth mattered.
But it was the desks now too. Marcus had the lot of it up on his tablet when he found me at breakfast, whether I wanted it or not.
Every studio in England had run the same graphic that morning. My face, and a number under it. 29. The youngest manager in the history of the World Cup to take a country into the last 8.
