Wednesday. Match day.
God, the quiet.
That is what I remember of that morning. Not the nerves. The quiet. A hotel room at 5am with the heating ticking, tk... tk... tk, and my phone face down on the pillow beside me going off every 40 seconds and me not touching it.
Bzz. Bzz. All night. A whole continent that could not sleep, telling me so, one buzz at a time.
I did not sleep. I have not slept the night before a game since I was 27 years old and I have stopped expecting to, and this was not a normal game, so I did not even lie down and pretend.
I sat up in that hotel room with the curtains open and the Moscow dark going grey at the edges, and I made the hardest team sheet of my life, and I made it 3 times, and the third time I tore up the first two.
Because here is the thing nobody outside that treatment room knew.
I could not pick my team. My team was in bits.
