The smell in the centre circle was Deep Heat and sweat and torn-up grass.
That is what I remember. Not the noise. The smell, and 22 men lying about in the mud like something had been dropped on them from a height.
Rebecca was on her knees with Saïss's leg hooked over her shoulder, driving both thumbs into a calf gone hard as wood. The sound he made going into that stretch is not a sound a grown man should make in front of 80,000 people.
Boussoufa lay flat on his back, eyes shut, chest going like a bellows.
Somebody was being sick on the halfway line. Nobody turned round.
And I needed 5 names.
Not for the referee. He does not want them. He just needs to know who is walking when they walk. The list is for me. It is the only thing left in this entire stadium that is still mine.
Crk. Mustapha slapped the board into my chest and the pen was dead in my hand, and I stood there in the middle of a World Cup quarter-final scribbling circles on my own palm to drag the ink down.
