Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 39: Trial Day I

Trial day came up out of the dark at six in the morning, and Maureen Tully was already standing in the middle of it.

She had the folding table up at the gate before I’d got the Astra parked. Box file open on it. Registration forms squared off in one pile, medical waivers in another, a margarine tub of biros she’d been quietly collecting off the office windowsill since the day I walked in. A clipboard.

And down the clipboard, in that small upright hand, a running order timed to the quarter-hour: warm-up at nine, small-sided at half past, position groups at ten, finishing at eleven, done and dusted by twelve.

She had taken forty-three names over the office phone across the week, in among the rates and the brewery and the supplier she rang every Tuesday to put off another fortnight, and she had written every one on a list with a column for the position and a column for the last club, and she had not, at any point, mentioned she was doing it, because Maureen Tully did not announce a job she had simply decided to get on with.

I had brought a stepladder and a sheet of A3.

"And what," she said, without looking up, "is that."

"Sign-in sheet. For the wall. So a lad can see his name’s down."

"His name’s down because I put it down, Samuel. But you stick your sheet up if it makes you feel like the manager."

I stuck my sheet up. Schrr of the masking tape, off the roll that had lived in her bottom drawer since about 1996. Five columns in marker pen.

NAME. DATE OF BIRTH. POSITION. PHONE. RECENT CLUBS.

I came back down the ladder, tk, tk, tk on the lino, and through the clubhouse window the first set of headlights swung in off the road and bumped up onto the forecourt.

"Sixty by nine," she said.

"Forty-three signed, the rest turn up on the day, they always do. Sixty grown men, one council pitch, fourteen shirts going begging, and the fourteenth of August coming down the road at us like a bus with no brakes. So you go and find me some footballers in that lot, lad. I’ve done the part I can do. The part you can do starts at nine."

"You’re a marvel, Maureen."

"I’m a woman with a clipboard who didn’t fancy watching you run this off the back of a fag packet on your own. Go and put the urn on."

The first lad was through the gate at twenty past seven. Creak of the side gate on its hinge. An old Cavalier ticking on the forecourt, tk, tk, tk, driven down through the night from Brighton on the last of a twenty-pound note, and the lad standing in the clubhouse doorway had not, by the look of him, eaten since the Friday.

I knew the look. I had worn the look. It is the look of a man who has had one more no than he’d budgeted for and has come a long way on a rumour because the other option was to sit at home and say the word out loud to himself.

Right-back. CA 51 PA 58. Grafter. Told no by half of League Two three years running.

Not enough. Nowhere near. A good lad on a low ceiling, and I knew it before his boots were out of the bag. You do not, however, say that to a man at twenty past seven on the last of his money.

"Urn’s going on, son. Boots on, get yourself warm. We start at nine, and there’s a bacon sandwich coming at eleven with a fella in a flat cap, so you make sure you’re still standing on that pitch at eleven. What’s your name?"

"Tomlin. Danny Tomlin."

"You drove up on your own in the dark from Brighton to stand on a council pitch in Essex on the off-chance, Danny Tomlin. Whatever happens at nine, you’re the sort that does that. There’s a lot of lads with better feet than you still tucked up in bed this morning."

He went off across to the rec with his bag on his shoulder and his back gone half an inch straighter than it came in, and I wrote him on the A3. First line. Tomlin, D. RB.

By nine the rec was loud.

Sixty-odd men in odd kit, studs tearing the dew up off the turf, tk-tk-tk-tk, sorted into the five warm-up groups Lenny had set out before he left for a half-shift at the Lakeside, and Stan in the thick of it in his bib and his flat cap, whistle going like a man thirty years younger than the one who’d wept into an envelope of his own back wages in front of a room of creditors a fortnight before.

TWEET.

"Two lines! TWO of them! You’re not queuing for chips! Move!"

I stood on the rope with the dew still grey on the grass and a system panel hanging quiet over the head of every man on the pitch, and I’ll tell you the part nobody warns you about. The panels do not lie. And the trouble with a thing that doesn’t lie to you is that it makes you the man who has to say no to forty blokes who got out of bed in the dark.

THWACK. A big lad from Dagenham caught a half-volley on the turn in the warm-up, clean off the laces, top corner past Sid before Sid had moved, and the little crowd on the rope went up.

"OHHH!" "Go on, son!"

For half a second I let myself hope. Then Stan sent them on a lap, and I watched the same lad try to run forty yards, and the panel told me exactly what the forty yards told me.

Forward. CA 58 PA 61. Lovely strike. No engine. One goal a month, nothing in the eighty-seventh.

The touch of a number nine and the lungs of a milkman. He’d score me one a month and give me nothing at all in the corner at Wrexham with my centre-halves screaming for a man to chase a lost ball. Thunk of a header off the bar. Tk of a touch run too heavy. A small dot on the clipboard. A real shame, because by God the lad could strike it.

"OI!" Stan, right across the pitch, at a winger who’d come in late and gone straight into the drill.

"YOU! The jewellery! This is a football trial, not a night out in Romford! Earrings OUT or you’re off my pitch!"

The lad came jogging over, sheepish, earrings in his palm, Christ’s sake under his breath, and went back on.

And then, two minutes later, he did the thing I had not, in the grey carpet hours of the Thursday night, let myself expect to see on a council pitch in Tilbrook in 2010. He took the right-back on the outside, tk-tk-tk, burned him, whipped it across.

"Again!" I called to Stan. "Put him up against the Brighton lad! Tomlin! He’s the best defender on this pitch! Let’s see it twice!"

So they ran it again, the winger against Danny Tomlin, who was a better full-back than anything else on the park and got taken on the inside this time anyway, just to show the first one had been a choice and not an accident.

Left wing. CA 73 PA 102. Beats his man. Beats him again to prove it.

"Eyyy!" went the rope. Three ticks on the clipboard, hard, the pen nearly through the page.