A director of his father’s company, which also earns him a salary of over two million pounds per annum, Scott Manson was a talented schoolboy footballer and played for Northampton Town while still attending the local grammar school. He was a member of the side that won the 1986–7 Fourth Division Championship with a record 99 points.
Choosing a university degree in modern languages at Birmingham University instead of a career in football, Manson played for and coached his university side and was a part-time player for Stafford Rangers, where he was scouted by the famous John Griffin and, upon graduation, joined Crystal Palace as a centre back in 1995 under Dave Bassett. After an unsuccessful season in the Premier League, Palace were relegated and Manson was sold to Southampton where he scored sixteen goals under Glenn Hoddle, and then Gordon Strachan. Southampton did well in the 2001–2 season, and even better the year after when the twenty-seven-year-old Manson was sold to Arsenal. But his career as a player ended when, in 2004, he was wrongly convicted of raping a woman at a service station off the A414 in the London Borough of Brent. Manson served eighteen months of an eight-year sentence before his conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal, since which time he has been working his way slowly up the ladder of football management as a trainee coach at Barcelona and then Bayern Munich.
Zarco had managed La Braga and the Brazilian side Atletico Mineiro before his first spell at London City, but he was sacked in 2006 after a disagreement with the billionaire club owner Viktor Sokolnikov, and went on to manage AS Monaco before his return to London City in 2013, with Scott Manson as his assistant manager. Manson has a German mother and speaks the language fluently; he also speaks Spanish, French, Italian and Russian, which would be one reason why he might get on well with Ukrainian-born Sokolnikov. Manson, who has an MBA from INSEAD, the international business school in Paris, is generally held to be one of the smartest men in football and shares a luxury flat in Chelsea with Sonia Dalek, who is a consultant psychiatrist specialising in the field of eating disorders, and the author of several books on the subject.
Zarco’s death marks the end of a tragic month in English football; two weeks ago saw the suicide of Matt Drennan, the troubled ex-England star who was a close friend of Scott Manson and formerly his team mate at Arsenal.
Sonia Dalek was actually Sonja Halek — her nickname at school had been the Dalek Queen, and I knew she wasn’t overly fond of this common misspelling, so I guessed she wasn’t going to be pleased to be reminded of that. I was aged forty, not thirty-nine, and I’d scored only fourteen goals while I was at Southampton. I didn’t speak a word of Russian, although I’d often wanted to learn. My MBA was from the London Business School and I didn’t earn a salary from Pedila, I had a yearly dividend that was very much less than two million pounds. And the Russian company Konkurentsiya had actually offered a billion quid for Pedila after buying a twenty-seven per cent share in the company.
Apart from all that, the story in the newspaper was one hundred per cent correct.
The press were outside the gate at Hangman’s Wood, too, but the entrance to the club’s training facility was so far away from the low-rise buildings that it hardly seemed worth coming and I almost felt sorry for the bastards. I knew most of the players had already arrived, since the car park looked like the Geneva Motor Show.
We drove up to the entrance where the team coach had just arrived to take us all to Silvertown Dock. I got out of the car; for a moment I looked through the glass wall of the indoor pitch where some of the reserves were having an informal kick-about.
They looked very young — too young to pit against a side of thugs like West Ham — and I was gambling that in spite of being close to the bottom of the table, the Hammers manager would make the same decision as I had: I figured they needed the money from surviving in the Premier League even more than we did.
One player quickly caught my eye — the sixteen-year-old Belgian midfielder, Zénobe Schuermans, who we’d bought in the summer from Club Brugge for a million quid. I’d seen him on video in a friendly against Hamburg when he’d scored direct from a corner kick. It was no wonder that Simon Page rated Schuermans as the most talented sixteen-year-old he’d seen since Jack Wilshere. As I watched he suddenly turned on a performance of skills that properly belonged in a Nike freestyle football commercial; it was mesmerising — the best thing I’d seen since watching Zlatan Ibrahimović play keepy-uppy with a piece of chewing-gum — and for a moment I started to dream about what a kid like him might do for us.
The next second I almost had a heart attack as a stray ball hit the glass wall in front of my face. The impact broke only my chain of thoughts; I turned and walked through the front door.
22
Several of the older players were waiting patiently inside the entrance and fell silent as I walked in the door. They all looked suitably sombre. A few were already wearing black or sporting black armbands. Simon Page tossed aside the Mail on Sunday and jumped up off the waiting area sofa to greet me; Maurice, too. But I couldn’t have felt less like the real manager of London City if I’d been carrying a lacrosse stick. I don’t think there was anyone who wasn’t aware of the fact that the last time we had done this as a team Zarco had still been alive.
It was then that I noticed a Roman Catholic priest was standing beside Ken Okri.
‘Is everyone here?’ I asked, one eye on the priest.
‘Yes, boss,’ said Simon.
As soon as I had everyone’s attention I told them what they all probably knew, which was that I had accepted Viktor’s offer of the manager’s job.
‘That’s really all I have to say for now,’ I told them. ‘You’ll hear plenty from me soon enough. Which reminds me: if you must tweet, then keep it sweet. Right then, let’s get everyone on the bus. The quicker we get there the quicker we can go home. And by the way, no headphones or Skullcandy, please. This is the saddest day in the club’s history so please, let’s make sure that when we get to the dock we look like we recognise that fact.’
‘Boss,’ said Ken, ‘this is Father Armfield from St John’s Church in Woolwich. Before we get on the bus, if it’s all right with you, the lads would like him to say a short prayer for Mr Zarco. It is a Sunday, you know.’
‘Of course,’ I replied and bowed my head in prayer, wishing I’d had the nous to think of inviting a priest along that morning. Zarco had been a staunch Roman Catholic, and so was I. It was being a Catholic that helped get me through prison. At least that’s what I told myself. The priest was a welcome surprise. But there was more to come when we got on the bus: to my surprise all the lads started to sing the FA Cup hymn, ‘Abide with Me’. I was surprised that they knew the words — many of them were foreigners, after all — only until I saw that they had downloaded the words onto their smartphones. I might have joined in myself but couldn’t because I was so choked with emotion and, for a moment, I was transported to Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium in 2003 and the only FA Cup Final I ever played in. I was hugely impressed with this show of loyalty to Zarco and wished only that Matt Drennan could have been here to hear it, as no one loved the hymn more than he had.