Chapter 903 - 903: Empty Grass

The fourth official raised the electronic board, flashing a glowing red five into the Wembley twilight.

N'Golo Kanté remained glued to Rúben Neves's shoulder. Ninety-one minutes gone. Chelsea held a one-goal lead and a man advantage, yet the most relentless midfielder on earth was still strictly man-marking a boy who had touched the football exactly twenty-four times all afternoon.

Four minutes into the added five.

Neves stripped the ball from Pierre-Emile Højbjerg forty-five yards from the Chelsea goal. He paused. Then he pivoted and marched the opposite direction. He carried the ball away from the penalty area, walking deliberately toward our own corner flag with time bleeding out in a match Crystal Palace had been trailing for eighty minutes.

Kanté followed him. Kanté had shadowed his every footstep since the fortieth second, and Kanté's lungs do not burn at minute ninety-four.

Neves rolled the ball casually to Mamadou Sakho and kept walking.

Suddenly, a massive, gaping crater opened in the dead center of Wembley Stadium.

I stood forty feet above the pitch and saw the vacuum before a single player on the grass realized it was there.

The sixty-year-old man beside me in a faded 1990 replica shirt saw it half a heartbeat later. He grabbed my shoulder completely unaware of who I was until the Sunday papers pointed desperately at the empty green expanse, and screamed pure, unadulterated noise.

Højbjerg stepped into the space for the sixth time. The previous five attempts had yielded absolutely nothing.

This time, he had three full seconds of absolute freedom. His head snapped up.

He pinged the ball wide to Achraf Hakimi, driving it violently off the outside of his boot without taking a touch to set himself. Hakimi exploded to the byline. Marcos Alonso trailed two yards behind him, utterly exhausted, trapped in Hakimi's wake since the seventy-third minute. Hakimi fired a devastating first-time cross, hard and low, skimming fiercely beneath the desperate reach of the defense.

Kepa dove blindly into the airspace and grasped only wind.

Christian Benteke crashed the near post, dragging Antonio Rüdiger with him.

Joel Ward hammered into the space behind the chaos from six yards out and unleashed his right foot.

Twenty-eight years old, two hundred and fifty-four appearances, wearing the captain's armband for exactly twenty-two minutes because a man pressed it into his palm and refused to loosen his grip.

Boom.

The net violently snapped back.

Wembley fractured. Row fourteen erupted from the concrete and swept me upward in a tidal wave of limbs.

The man in the 1990 shirt wrapped both arms tightly around my ribs and hoisted me completely off my feet.

He roared directly against my skull. A plastic seat back dug sharply into my side, a stranger's heavy wool scarf whipped across my eyes, and an eleven-year-old boy balanced precariously on a chair inches away, his mouth stretched perfectly wide in a silent scream drowned out by the two hundred bodies thrashing wildly between me and the grass.

Crystal Palace 2, Chelsea 2.

The stadium stayed packed to the rafters. The upper tier, the Holmesdale end, the sweeping corners all completely full. The stewards surrendered their posts at ten past five.

Down in the south east corner, three thousand two hundred Chelsea supporters stood completely still for five solid minutes and simply watched the aftermath.

Down on the grass, four Palace players lay in a collapsed pile near the corner flag. Nick Pope had sprinted eighty yards from his own goal and was desperately trying to pull Joel Ward out from the bottom of the crush.

Out on the halfway line, Ellis Cartwright rested on his knees, entirely alone. Michael Olise walked forty yards from the bench, sat down on the grass right beside him in total silence, and the two boys remained there until a steward finally begged them to move.

Rúben Neves avoided the pile entirely.

He stood fifty yards away near our corner flag. N'Golo Kanté stood squarely next to him. Neves turned and stared at the celebrations with his arms hanging loose by his sides. Kanté watched the chaos, and then Kanté turned and looked deeply at Neves.

N'Golo Kanté extended his right hand. The two gladiators shook hands on an isolated patch of grass, fifty yards removed from the war they had just waged.

"OH WHEN THE EAGLES. GO MARCHING IN."

Played eight, won seven, drawn one. Twenty-one scored, four conceded, twenty-two points.

Manchester City won 3-0 at lunchtime. They had twenty-four points from eight.

I stood in the tunnel with both realities burning in my head, a stadium singing thunderously over the concrete roof, trying to determine exactly how I was supposed to feel.

Mamadou Sakho stormed up the tunnel carrying his jersey. He gripped my face with his massive bare hands, pressing hard into both cheeks. He is six-foot-three and he never asks for permission.

"You hear this? Coach. You hear this."

"I hear it."

"So. You go in that room and you tell them we must be better. We drop two points." He released my face, slapped his heavy palm flat against my chest, and held it there. "Eh? This is what you do. I know you."

"It is two points, Mamadou."

"It is two points on Monday." He walked backward, pointing a massive finger at my face. "Today, that room, it is six months of Tuesday nights. You tell them Monday. Today you say absolutely nothing and you let them feel it."

Maurizio Sarri intercepted me by the dressing rooms. He clamped a tight hand onto my arm.

"Your number 6. Today he does not play."

"No."

"No. He sits out because of you." Sarri jabbed a rigid finger into my sternum. "You. Not him."

He held an unlit cigarette in his other hand. He stared down at it with intense frustration.

"N'Golo. Two years I manage him. Two years. Never one man marking for ninety-four continuous minutes." He shook his head at the concrete floor. "Io non ne avrei avuto lo stomaco. I lack the stomach." He tapped his own ribs fiercely. "Here. At 1-2 down, with ten men, you gamble everything. I keep him in the middle. I protect myself."

He walked away, took three heavy steps, and spun back around.

"Every match now. For ten years. Somebody will try to do this to your boy." He shrugged with his entire upper body. "You teach them. I am sorry."

I received the scouting sheet at twenty to seven while the car park was still jammed.

[RÚBEN NEVES. CA 171. PA 186.]

He was a 168 on the 15th of August.

Twenty-six touches, zero assists, zero shots. A pundit on Sky Sports told three million people Neves had a quiet afternoon. I sat alone in a sterile analysts' room, staring at a metric nobody else in England possesses, with absolutely no one to share the triumph with.

Nathan rang me at nine on Sunday morning before I even opened the car door.

"The referee's report is in. It is strictly factual, you know it is factual, and I refuse to have an argument with you about it." I heard a door slam and heavy traffic roaring past his phone. "The charge is official. The hearing is Wednesday of the break. Those are your three realities."

"And Old Trafford?"

"Eleven." A bus hissed past him. "Eleven journalists have asked me that exact question since eight o'clock this morning. I told them I lack that information eleven times, and eleven of them wrote down that Crystal Palace refused to comment."