Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 40: Trial Day II

Down the other end there was a keeper of nineteen who’d been driven over from Stevenage by a sister who sat in the car the whole morning with the window down and a magazine she never once turned a page of.

SLAP of his gloves on a low one, clean, gathered into the chest. Then a better one, full stretch, fingertips, THWACK off the post and away.

"KEEPER’S!" he roared, at men who weren’t even his yet, and the rope murmured, and Sid Hollis, thirty-eight years old and not famous for warmth, had drifted over to the goalmouth and was showing the lad something with his hands about where his feet wanted to be, low and quiet, between every drill, for reasons Sid did not explain to a living soul.

Goalkeeper. CA 64 PA 91. Hands. Mouth on him. Wants it.

Two ticks. Then, watching Sid watch him, three.

And there was a midfielder of twenty-six from Crayford who told me what he was in the first ten seconds, flat out, no edit.

"Little one due in October, gaffer, so I’ll be straight with you, I’m not here to muck about, I’m here for the twenty quid a game and a reason to keep playing." A panel that did not, on paper, set the world alight.

Central midfield. CA 76 PA 79. What you see. But watch the feet.

I watched the feet. On the finishing drill at quarter to twelve he stood twenty yards out and hit three balls with the inside of his boot the way men hit them who’ve been hitting them on the inside of their boot since they were five years old.

THUMP. Top corner. THUMP. Bottom corner. THUMP. The far postage stamp, Sid going nowhere near the third one, getting up off the deck and turning round to look at me with a face on. "OHHHH!" went the whole rec. Somebody actually clapped. Three ticks.

By half eleven I had three lads on three ticks, one on two, one on a single, and thirty-eight on a small, polite dot.

Brrm of the Astra into the forecourt. Clunk of a door. Raj, with two big urns of tea off Maria’s and a half-tray of bacon sandwiches under cling film, crinkle of it as he shouldered through the office door.

"Sundays are sacred, mate."

"Cheers, Raj."

"For the record, I’m on the books at Maria’s this morning. She’s been on the phone to my ma about it since seven. I am, as far as my mother is concerned, at Maria’s. I’m in fact at a football trial in Tilbrook watching my best mate sign nobody for free."

"Three, actually."

"Three lads. At zero pounds. Out the door. On a Sunday. Brilliant. Genuinely." He pushed a sandwich into my hand. "Eat. You’ve gone a funny colour."

I signed the three at the folding table at twenty past twelve. The keeper of nineteen, the winger with the earrings, the Crayford midfielder.

Fifty a week, twenty a match-day, season-long, the same deal as every other man in the changing huts.

The keeper rang his sister from the forecourt and cried down the phone a full minute before she could get out of the car to fetch him, and when she did she held him by the back of the head with one hand the way you hold a kid who’s finally got the thing he’d stopped letting himself ask for, and Sid watched the pair of them through the office window and said, to nobody in particular, "He’ll do," and went off to coil a net.

Three. A keeper, a winger, a midfielder. The three bodies I’d promised myself on the Friday night, signed and smiling.

But not the full-back. And not the centre-half. There hadn’t been a right-back on that pitch who’d survive a wet Tuesday at Mansfield, and not one centre-half in sixty men who’d head a ball out of his own box in the Conference and still be standing in April.

The spine of the back four still had a hole in it the exact size and shape of a man, and I knew, stood in the doorway eating Raj’s bacon sandwich, that I wasn’t going to find that man at a trial.

That man I’d have to go and dig out somewhere else, somewhere older, somewhere with a longer memory than a council pitch full of lads still chasing a thing most of them had already lost. But that was a job for the week. Today there were forty men with their boots in their hands waiting on me down the touchline.

I gave them their twenty seconds each, one at a time, boots in one hand and a bacon sandwich in the other, down the rope. This was the bit I’d practised in the mirror, same as the FA meeting, and the practising didn’t make it any easier, because forty is forty.

"Cheers for coming, lad."

"No worries, gaffer."

"You’ve got something. The motor on you. I’ll keep you on the file. You don’t hear from us by the end of October, you ring this number and ask for Maureen."

Each of them the same card. Tilbrook Town F.C. M. Tully, Secretary. Each of them my hand on theirs. Each of them told, when they asked, that the no was on me and not on them, and that they should be proud they’d driven their old cars halfway across the country to a council pitch in Essex on a Sunday morning in late July.

Danny Tomlin was last but four. He took the card. He looked at it. He looked at me.

"Straight answer, gaffer."

"Always."

"Am I done? Football. The whole thing. You’ve got that telly on you that sees more than the rest of them, everyone can tell. So. Am I done."

The panel said one thing. The man in front of me had driven through the night on twenty quid. There’s a version of this job where you tell a man a soft lie to get him off your touchline. I wasn’t going to be that chairman. I wasn’t going to be the other one either, the one who lets a man keep chasing a thing that’s already gone.

"You’re done going up as a player, Danny. You’re not done with the game. You’ve got a coach’s eyes, the way you had those lads sorted into a shape in the warm-up that none of them had asked you for. You’re twenty-eight. Go and get your badges. Ring me in two years and I’ll give you a Tuesday night with my youth lads, and I’ll pay you for it, and you’ll be better at it than half the men drawing a wage for it now. That’s not a no. That’s a different door."

He stood there a second.

"...Right," he said. "Right. Cheers, gaffer. That’s the first straight one I’ve had in three years." And he put the card in his back pocket, properly, the way you keep a thing, not the way you pocket it to bin later, and he drove off south in the Cavalier, and I have a feeling about Danny Tomlin I’ll tell you about another time.

I knew, walking back across to the office at half one, that I’d probably just said no to a future Brentford left-back, a future Salford keeper, and one lad who was four seasons off a contract at MK Dons. I’d had no room for any of them. That’s the other thing the panels do. They tell you who’s good. They don’t hand you the money to sign all of them.

I sat down at the desk at quarter past one with a cup of Maureen’s tea and the Sunday Non-League Paper I’d bought on the way in. Crinkle of it opening flat. Raj had gone home to face his mother.

Maureen was squaring the registration forms and going down them with the staple gun, ka-chunk, ka-chunk. Out on the rec, Lenny was back off his half-shift and putting the new keeper through some basics in the last of the afternoon light, faint thwack of a goal kick going up and coming down.

I opened the paper at the back, the way my dad opened a paper, back to front, because the front is other people’s business and the back is yours.

Page seventeen. The non-league round-up. Small column on the right.

POOLE TOWN’S AUSTIN HITS BRACE IN FRIENDLY

I read the column.

I put the tea down.

I read it again.

Charlie Austin. Twenty-one.

A name I’d said out loud to a television set in a freezing flat for ten years of my old life.

And there it was in three column inches on page seventeen of the Non-League Paper, a bricklayer out of West Berkshire who’d come off the bench and scored twice in a pre-season friendly at Weymouth the day before, and who was down to play another one at the Poole ground this very afternoon, four o’clock, today, Sunday, two hundred-odd miles down the A-roads.

I looked at the clock on Maureen’s wall.

Quarter past one.

I reached for the phone.