Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 51: Two Up I

Right. Sit back down.

This one’s got the goal in it you’ve been waiting for since I made you stand in the cold and watch us drill it. It’s also got a kick in the teeth I’d pay good money not to have to tell you about.

Both, the same afternoon, ninety minutes apart. That’s football. That’s most of football, if I’m honest with you, and I’ve never been anything else with you.

We went to Wrexham.

You have to understand what that is, for a club like ours.

Wrexham are a fallen giant, a proper old Football League club that dropped through the trapdoor into our division and hated every second of being there, and the Racecourse is a proper old ground, girders and pies and ghosts, and on the Saturday there were 8,000 in it.

Eight thousand.

My lads had played in front of 1,140 and thought that was a wall of noise. We came up out of the tunnel and the Kop end let go a sound that went through your ribs, vroooo, and I watched the colour go out of my 18-year-old left-back’s face like someone had pulled a plug.

And here’s a thing only I knew, walking into that, the kind of thing that lives behind my teeth with all the rest of it.

This club, this gloomy old giant rotting in the fifth tier in 2010, was going to be saved. Not soon.

There’s the better part of a hard, skint decade in front of them yet. But one day a pair of film stars off the telly, Hollywood money, were going to buy this place on a whim and put it in a show watched round the world, and the Racecourse would sell out and the whole planet would learn the name, and grown men in America would cry over a club they’d never heard of in a town they couldn’t find on a map.

I stood in that away end and looked at the rust on the girders and the empty seats up the far end and I knew all of it, and I couldn’t tell a single soul, and I wouldn’t have if I could. Let them have it when it comes.

Wrexham get rescued by movie stars and a camera crew. Tilbrook get me and a galvanised-steel kiosk. Two ways to save a football club. We’ll see whose holds up.

My old man took me to grounds like this.

Not this one, its cousins, the big old sheds up north, in the Cortina with a Wagon Wheel each for the drive and the radio hissing the signal away somewhere past Birmingham, shhhk.

He’d have stood in that away end with his collar up and said nothing for ninety minutes and remembered every one of them till he died. I had a job instead of a memory to make. That’s the difference between a fan and a manager, in the end. The fan’s allowed to enjoy it.

I’d told the lads one thing in the tunnel. "Two up is the most dangerous lead in football. So let’s go and get it, and then let’s be horrible about keeping it." I should have listened to the first half of my own team talk and ignored the part where I thought we’d manage the second.

On 17 minutes, we got the corner. And I lifted one hand, and they knew.

Bailey laid his flat palm on his chest, the swearing-blind signal, going for the big one. And it all happened exactly the way it had happened on the rec in the dark, except this time it was real and 8,000 people were watching it.

Pete and Vardy and Mooney went loud and early to the near post, three big mouths dragging four Wrexham shirts with them, thump thump of bodies going in, and the whole defence leaned that way like a boat taking on water. And Mooney peeled off his man on a run to the front post that pulled one more marker, the run that wasn’t for him, the run that was a lie.

And there, at the back post, arriving late and entirely alone the way I’d promised him he would, was Robbie Doyle.

Bailey hung it on the spot, fffp off the boot. Once in five, Stan said. This was the one. Doyle didn’t even have to jump. He met it with his forehead coming forward, thock, down and across, thwump into the side netting, and it was in before their keeper had finished shouting at the men who’d gone to the wrong post.

[GOAL, 17’] Wrexham 0-1 Tilbrook The Wharf. Quinn delivery. Decoys: Pete, Vardy, Mooney. Finish: Doyle. Drilled in the dark. Scored in the light.

Robbie Doyle, 31 years old, came back from his uncle’s plumbing because a boiler doesn’t know your name, and he ran to our little knot of travelling supporters with both arms out and his face completely gone, because he had not scored a goal he could tell you the date of since before some of my squad were born, and now he had one he’d remember on his deathbed.

I’d told him under the floodlights, the night we built it, to write the date down. He didn’t need to now. It was written on him.

On 43 minutes we got the second, and the second was just Vardy being Vardy. A loose ball in their half, a touch, and then the run, brmm, that getaway-car acceleration that this division had no answer for, and their last man may as well have been wading. He didn’t even look up to finish. Thwack, bottom corner.

2-0.

Two up at the Racecourse. Eight thousand gone quiet. My handful behind the goal making the noise of eight thousand on their own.

And I stood in my technical area with my arms folded and a cold little voice in the back of my head saying the thing I’d said in the tunnel and then stopped believing, two up is the most dangerous lead in football, and I did not listen hard enough to it, and that is on me, and I’ll tell you exactly how.