Free Web NovelChapter 50: The Wharf
Right. You’re back. Good. Pull up a chair, because the week I want to tell you about is the week I stopped trying to fix the thing that was broken and started building a thing that wasn’t.
The hole at the back. You remember the hole.
Cal Murphy in the middle on his own, having to be two men, and no money to buy a third.
I’d lain awake over it the night after Wimbledon, and somewhere around 4 in the morning, with the 42 bus hissing at the stop across the road, pssht, I gave up on it. Not gave up.
Put it down. Because you cannot fix a hole you can’t afford, and a manager who spends all week staring at what he hasn’t got is no use to the men he has.
So I turned the problem round. If I can’t stop them scoring, I score more. If I can’t buy a wall, I build a gun.
And the gun was already at the club. I just hadn’t picked it up.
It was Bailey.
Tuesday, under the floodlights on the rec, the ones that hum and drop a third of the pitch into shadow, bzzzt, and I had him standing over a dead ball while I went and put cones at the back post.
I wasn’t expecting much. The lad can’t cross to save his life on the run, the System’s told me as much.
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[BAILEY QUINN, 17] Crossing (open play): 8 / Delivery (dead ball): 15
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Eight and fifteen. Seven apart on the same boy.
Nobody had ever stood him still and let him swing at a ball that wasn’t moving, because nobody had ever bothered to teach this lot a routine.
Bill would’ve loved that, by the way, a thing that worked because somebody finally took the time. He kept everything I ever did in a scrapbook, my old man, PROUD AS OWT in biro over a goal I scored at fifteen, and he’d have had this pinned in there by Wednesday.
Bailey put the first one on the cone from 40 yards. Thock off the laces, tk off the cone. Then the next. Then one a yard wide, then three on the spot.
Stan watched with his arms folded and his bag at his feet. "Once in five he’ll do that in a game," he said, which from Stan is a standing ovation. Once in five is plenty. Once in five wins you a season at this level if you get enough corners.
Here’s the routine. I’ll give it you quick because you’ll see it work soon enough. Bailey takes the dead ball, and the signal he’s going for the big one is a flat hand laid on his chest, like a man swearing he never.
Pete and Vardy and Mooney all go loud and early to the near post, three big mouths and six big boots, and they drag the markers with them because markers follow noise.
And Doyle, quiet Robbie Doyle, 31 years old and never scored a goal he could tell you the date of, starts the move out by the edge of the box looking like he’s there to defend, and then arrives late and alone at the back post where the ball’s already coming down.
Nobody marks the centre-half. That’s the whole secret. Everyone tracks the strikers. The dangerous man is the boring one.
We drilled it till they could run it in their sleep, and one of the lads read the chalk box I’d drawn at the back post and called it the Wharf, on account of everything at this club ends up named after the docks, and the ball comes in and ties up at the back post like a boat at the wharf wall. By Thursday nobody called it anything else. They liked having a thing that was theirs.
The clock didn’t care. The 31st was coming, £16,667 of it, the first one with a gate meant to stand behind it, and one home crowd of 1,140 and Murat’s 20p in the pound does not make £16,667. Maureen had the brown envelope on the desk under the dead three-bar fire and didn’t open it. "The order," she said. "You ring the brewery before they ring you." I’m learning the order. Slowly.
So we went to Tamworth on the Saturday needing the point more than the show.
I’ll not give you the whole 90 minutes. There’s nothing in a 0-0 at Tamworth that the highlights would keep, and I’d be lying if I dressed it up. The pitch was grease over concrete, a wind came down it sideways, skhhh, and their plan walked up to Vardy in the tunnel and introduced itself.
Kearns. Their centre-half, built like a wardrobe with the doors still on, and he put himself on Jamie from the first whistle and stayed there. Touch-tight, all afternoon, a hand always on him. "Be a shame," I heard him say, friendly as you like, "if you never got a kick all day." And he meant it, and for half an hour he made it true.
So I did the thing the gun teaches you. If they put their best man on yours, your man stops being a striker and starts being a door you hold open for someone else. I had a word at the break, told Vardy to keep dragging Kearns into the corners, take him for a walk, take him to the hot-dog van if he’d go, and leave the middle empty.
He went. And into the empty middle walked Mooney.
Chris Mooney, who a fortnight ago wouldn’t meet my eye. He hit the bar on the hour, clang, the whole away end of 70 up off their feet and back down again groaning. He hit it again on 78, clang, closer, a coat of paint.
Two off the woodwork in one afternoon from a man the game had thrown away. He didn’t score. But he played like a footballer for 90 minutes, which a year ago he could not have done, and on the coach I told him so and he looked at me like I’d handed him something.
0-0. Peep, peep. A point. The most boring, valuable thing I’d taken all season. Minus 7 to minus 6.
There was a fella behind the dugout I clocked twice. Sports coat, notebook, the wrong shoes for a National League terrace. Watching Vardy. Not Mooney, not Bailey, Vardy, and I knew exactly what that was.
Jamie had scored on Conference Roundup the week before, ten seconds of grainy footage, and somewhere a club had run it back and sent a man with a notebook four months earlier than the timeline ever ran him. The bigger clubs waking up. I felt it go cold down the back of my neck, that one, and I filed it, and I said nothing.
They can come and watch. Watching isn’t getting. I learned that one off them.
Maureen read the results off the crackling radio on the way home, skrr, flat over the seat-backs, the diesel growling under us, brrm, while Mick took us down the A5 in the dark. Crawley won again, proper money, a problem all year.
Wrexham, who we had next, came from behind to nick one, which told me they’d a bit of devil in them and I’d want eyes on them all week. And then the table. She didn’t need to read me that one. I could see it without looking.
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[NATIONAL LEAGUE, AFTER MATCHDAY 2]
22 · Histon ... P2 W0 D1 L1 · Pts 1
· Eastbourne Boro .... P2 W0 D0 L2 · Pts 0
24 · TILBROOK TOWN ... P2 W1 D1 L0 · Pts -6
Earned this season: 4. Carried in from the court: -10.
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Read it slow, because it’s the whole story in three lines. Two clubs sit above us. One of them has drawn one and lost one. The other has played two, lost the pair, won nothing at all, and it is still a country mile clear of the only side in the division that hasn’t been beaten. That’s what minus 10 is. It isn’t a number on a points column. It’s a stone they hang round your neck and then ask you, politely, to swim.
Let a stranger read that and weep. I knew what they didn’t. I had a striker two clubs were too early to sign and would never get to keep me from, a kid who could hang a ball on a sixpence once in five, and a quiet centre-half about to score the most important goals of his boring life.
You can only mark one of them, see. Kearns marked Vardy all day and it cost him two off the bar.
[SYSTEM] They marked the man. You always had a third.
I always had a third.
