Free Web NovelChapter 49: Kick-Off II
Half-time I didn’t shout. I drew.
I got the board out and I drew the hole. Showed them with magnets, here’s Cal, here’s where he has to be when Kedwell drops, and here’s the grass behind him that nobody’s filling.
"They’ll find it," I said.
"Second half, they’ll stop trying to play through Cal and they’ll start playing round him, into that. So we don’t let Kedwell turn. The second he gets it back to goal, somebody’s touch-tight, no time, no half-yard. We strangle it. We make him play backwards. Forty-five minutes of giving him nothing." I looked at Cal, soaked through, chest going. "You alright?"
"I’m alright, boss."
He wasn’t. But he was the sort who’d die before he said so, and I loved him for it and I was going to have to take him off before it killed him.
On 62 minutes I made the change I’d planned in the kitchen at 6 that morning. Off came one of the runners, on went Big Pete, all 6ft 4in of him, and I grabbed him by the shirt on the touchline.
"I don’t care if you touch it twice," I told him. "You hold it up. We’re under the cosh, we need to get out, you’re the out. Win the header, hold the ball, let us up the pitch and breathe. That’s the job." He nodded like a man being handed a shovel and went to dig.
It bought us 10 minutes. And then, on 71 minutes, the hole opened and Kedwell walked through it.
It was exactly what I’d drawn on the board. They stopped going through Cal. They went round him. A clipped pass into the space behind, the space no one could fill, and Kedwell, CA 138, didn’t need a second invitation. He took it on his chest with his back to goal, rolled the Crayford lad who was 18 and brave and a yard too slow, and finished low across Sid before I’d even got out of my seat.
Thump. The net. Silence where the roar had been.
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[GOAL · 71’] Tilbrook 1-1 Scorer: D. Kedwell · exploited the screen Note: the hole you couldn’t afford to fill.
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It landed exactly the way I’d known it would land. I’d known for a fortnight. I’d known at 6 o’clock that morning, writing three words on a bill. I had the player to fix it in League Two earning £500 a week, and I had £3,000, so I had a goal in my net instead. The gift showed me everything and bought me nothing. That was the deal. That had always been the deal.
I didn’t sulk about it. I stood up and I clapped my hands and I told them it was 1-1 and we had 19 minutes and we were not, under any circumstances, going to lose this football match.
And down by the corner flag, 17 years old, working at a garden centre on Tuesday and Thursday, a local lad who’d never been more than 10 miles from Marsh Road in his life, Bailey Quinn started running at people.
The winner came on 88 minutes and it came from the kid backing himself.
We were hanging on, both teams stretched, the game gone end to end the way tired games do. Bailey got it wide on the left with one man between him and the byline and about 80 yards of nothing to lose. A sensible 17-year-old keeps it, holds it, takes the throw-in, runs the clock.
Bailey isn’t sensible. Bailey is the best footballer at this club by a distance nobody can know about, and he went at his man like the man owed him money.
Tk-tk-tk. Three touches, a drop of the shoulder, and he was gone, past him, into the corner where the Bovril End was howling and two old dockers had gone into the wind back in 1998.
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[BAILEY QUINN · 17 · Winger] CA 71 Pace 16 · Dribbling 13 · Flair 15 · Composure (age) 9 Read: backs himself 1v1. Trust it.
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He got to the byline. He didn’t panic and he didn’t blast it. He looked up, saw the run, and he cut it back along the 6-yard line, low and hard, into the one bit of grass that mattered.
And there was Vardy. Of course there was Vardy. The man you build the team around, arriving on the spot you’d put money on him arriving at, and he didn’t take a touch because there wasn’t time for a touch, he just opened his body and stroked it first time into the bottom corner over the place where two old dockers were scattered in the turf.
ROAR.
I don’t have a sound for what the Bovril End did. I’ve heard bigger crowds. I have never in either of my lives heard a sound that came up out of the ground like that one, 1,100 people who’d watched this club nearly die, on their feet, screaming at a goal in front of the ashes of two men who’d have loved it.
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[GOAL · 88’] Tilbrook 2-1 Assist: Quinn (1v1, byline, cut-back) Scorer: J. Vardy (2) · finish rated 9.6 The break, twice. The plan held.
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3 minutes and stoppage. We saw it out the only way men that tired can, by throwing bodies in front of things. Lenny headed one off the line with his eyes shut. Big Pete won a header in our own box and held the ball in the corner like it was his firstborn. And then the whistle went.
Peeeep. Peeep. Peeeeeeep.
We’d beaten the best team in the league. From minus 10. On day one.
I shook the Wimbledon manager’s hand and meant it. "You’ll go up this year," I told him, and I believed it. "We just weren’t reading the script today."
In the changing room I didn’t let them get carried away, not really, but I let them have it for a minute, the singing and the daft dancing and Sid sat in the corner with 415 appearances now and a grin he was too proud to show. Then I quietened them down.
"One game," I said. "We’re still minus 7. We’ve still got a mountain. But you just did the hard part, which is believe you belong on the same pitch as a side like that. Remember how this felt. We’re going to need it." I clocked Cal Murphy, grey, ice on both knees. "And we’ve still got a hole in the middle of the park that nearly cost us. We’re not fixed. We’re started. There’s a difference."
Maureen had the other results pinned up by the door already, her reading glasses on the end of her nose, 64 and the only person at this club who’d worked harder than me that week.
Crawley had won 4-0. They had money this year, proper money, and they were going to be a problem all season. Luton had drawn.
There were 23 other results on that sheet, 23 other dressing rooms up and down the country either singing or silent, a whole division kicking off at once and a fixture computer that didn’t care we existed and had us at Tamworth next Saturday whether we liked it or not.
I found the table at the bottom of the sheet and made myself look at it.
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[NATIONAL LEAGUE · AFTER MATCHDAY 1] Tilbrook Town P1 W1 D0 L0 · GD +1 · Pts -7 Position: 24th of 24 45 games remaining
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Dead last. Bottom of the whole pile, 24th of 24, on minus 7 points, after a win. That’s what minus 10 looks like on the first day. You can play out of your skin, beat the best team in the league, and a stranger reading the table on Sunday morning sees a club rooted to the bottom and thinks, they’re going down.
Let them think it. I knew what they couldn’t. I knew we’d just gone from minus 10 to minus 7. I knew the kid down the left was going to be worth more than this whole club one day, and that the lad up top broke defences for fun, and that the man who’d built it all out of £3,000 and a beer mat had 40 more years in his head than the table gave him credit for.
I also knew it was the 14th of August. I knew that on the 31st the first proper payment came due, £16,667 with a gate meant to be standing behind it, and there was no crowd at Marsh Road big enough to cover that yet, and a patient man named Ray Sully was sat somewhere across the marshes waiting for me to miss a single one so he could come and take Marsh Road off me for good.
One win down. 45 games and a £400,000 clock to go.
I turned the changing-room light off, and the last thing I heard before the door shut was Murat’s heat lamp still buzzing out in the car park, and the till going one more time.
Ting.
We’d started. There was a difference.
