They were still down when I started walking.
All over the grass, where the whistle had dropped them and walked off and left them. Benatia on his knees in the six-yard box, the shirt hauled up over his face, his back heaving like something was being pulled out of him by the root.
Saiss beside him, head buried in both hands, rocking. En-Nesyri face down in the centre circle with his fists driven into the turf. Sofyan folded over himself on the bench, and the sound coming out from under his towel was one I'd never heard a grown man make.
Bounou flat on his back in his own goal, gloves still on, staring up into the floodlights with nothing behind his eyes at all.
Twenty-odd of mine scattered across that grass, and not one of them able to move.
And I had the worst of it sitting in me like a swallowed stone, the thing not one of them could see and I could never say out loud.
