The whole of the Luzhniki, seventy-eight thousand people from every corner of the earth, up on its feet as one, and it would not let my players go. It got in underneath them and it held them up.
And up in the stands, the people who'd made these men were coming apart.
Benatia found his own before I'd even clocked them, going to the hoarding under the lower tier with both arms up.
A woman in a green shirt had both hands clamped over her mouth, her shoulders heaving, and beside her a little girl was bouncing up and down screaming a word I couldn't hear but could read clean off her lips.
Baba. Baba.
Too young to know why her mum was crying. Old enough to know her dad was down there and the whole world was up on its feet for him.
Benatia reached up and the girl reached down and their fingers couldn't quite meet across the gap, and he stood there on his toes a second with his hand stretched up to his daughter, and I had to look away from it.
