The meeting room. Twenty players seated. Staff lining the walls. The whiteboard ready. I walked in, read the team sheet Hennessey, Wan-Bissaka, Konaté, Sakho, Chilwell, Neves, Milivojević, Navas, Rodríguez, Zaha, Benteke and then I stopped.
The room waited. They were used to the speech. The speech was the ritual. The system, the identity, the we-are-Crystal-Palace declaration that preceded every match like a prayer before a meal.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came.
And then Sakho stood up.
Nobody asked him to. Nobody signalled. The big Frenchman just rose from his seat, looked around the room, and spoke.
"I have played in World Cups," he said, his deep voice filling the room, his accented English carrying the weight of a man who chose his words carefully because he had learned them in a second language and refused to waste any of them.
