Malacia did not want to climb Wembley’s famous steps with his team-mates, but
Casemiro insisted. “I was like, ‘I’m staying down here and you guys just enjoy it, then I’ll see you in the dressing room’. He was like, ‘Nah, you have to go up there as well’. And if someone with that kind of experience tells you that, you’re listening.”
Because, despite his own reservations, the rest of the squad wanted him there. “They said, ‘At the end of the day, you’re still part of the team’. I’ve been in a dressing room the whole season and seen everything. They know how hard I’ve been working every day to come back to the team and everything, so they said you deserve it as much as we do.”
Casemiro also gave Malacia his FA Cup winner’s medal — a story which was denied in some quarters at the time but that Malacia himself says is true, despite him politely protesting that the former
Real Madrid midfielder should keep it. “Like I said before: if he gives you that, you just listen!”