Free Web NovelChapter 57: Zero Points
On 58 minutes, Kidderminster’s quick front two finally caught us a fraction high, one ball in behind, one finish across Sid, and it was 1-1, thock and silence, their hundred travelling fans tiny and loud in the corner.
The cork I’d watched the whole ground reach for went straight back in the bottle. I could feel 2,340 people deciding this was going to be one of those days a club like ours has, where the lovely thing is shown to you and then taken away.
So I made the one change I had in me.
I pushed Aiden higher, told Mooney to tuck in off the right and give Cal a hand, and I took the shackles half off, because a draw kept us on minus 3 and minus 3 was the floor, and I have not come this far to play for the floor. We threw it at them for half an hour.
Vardy hit the post, donk.
Big Pete came on for the last twenty and stood on their centre-half’s toes and made a nuisance of his enormous self.
And with six minutes left, Pete, doing exactly that, got himself clattered 22 yards out, a fraction left of centre, and the referee’s whistle went, PEEP, and the whole ground turned and looked at one place.
At the boy.
He put the ball down himself. 22 yards. His shift from the garden centre stood up in the Bovril End in their green fleeces. Stan, next to me, said one word, very quietly, the word he always says about Bailey and a dead ball. "Once."
Once in five, is the full saying. Stan reckons the boy hangs a dead ball exactly where he means it once in every five he hits. The other four go in the river. But the one. The one is a thing you build a football club around and never tell the boy you’ve seen it.
He didn’t run up far. Three steps. That magic left foot came across it, thwock, and it went up over their wall and it was still going up when it should have been coming down, and then it came down, late and vicious and dropping, and their keeper got a glove to it and the glove may as well have been a flag in the wind. Fsss of the net.
2-1.
I don’t have the words for the noise, and I’ve been trying to find them for you since.
A whole town that had spent fifteen years watching this club die came up off that fixed Main Stand at once, and the green fleeces in the Bovril End went over the front like a wave, and a 17-year-old who’d stacked compost that morning stood in the corner with his arms out and his head back and his own people pouring down onto the grass to get to him.
I didn’t drill that. You cannot drill that. You can only keep him on through the 8 until the 15 arrives, and trust that it will.
We saw out the six minutes and the four on top of them, every man behind the ball, Lenny heading everything, Cal lying on the ball at one point like he was protecting a child. PEEEP. PEEP PEEP.
And there it was.
NATIONAL LEAGUE: after 5 played Tilbrook Town: P5 · W3 D1 L1 · GF7 GA5 · GD +2 · adjustment −10 · PTS 0
Zero. After the worst start any club in that division has ever been handed, after a 10-point hole dug for us in a courtroom before I’d kicked a ball, we were on zero. The minus sign was gone.
For the first time since the High Court wound us up and spat us back out, Tilbrook Town were not in negative numbers. We’d dug all 10 of those points back out of the ground with our own boots, three wins and a draw across 5 games, and it had carried us exactly as far as nothing at all.
The same nothing every other club in the division had started August on. So we were still bottom. Still 24th of 24, dead last, because zero points after 5 games is the lowest anybody had, and a goal difference of plus 2 buys you not one place in the table when there’s not another club down there on zero to climb above.
Everybody else had banked a point somewhere across August. That evening, on our own, we were still the worst-placed club in the country. We’d just stopped being a club in minus numbers to get there.
The lads knew what zero meant without me telling them.
You don’t play a season from minus 10 without every man in that room carrying the number round like a stone in his boot all day.
Sid Hollis, 38 years old, more games for this club than anyone breathing, the keeper who’d stood in that net through every single year of the dying, went down on his haunches at the edge of his box with his gloves still on, head bowed, and when he came up his eyes were gone and he didn’t care who clocked it.
"Out the minus," he kept saying, to me, to nobody, to the lot of them.
"We’re out the bloody minus."
Cal Murphy started a song, because Cal Murphy would start a song at a funeral, some tuneless thing about being on nowt that scanned like a brick through a window, and inside ten seconds they all had it, Vardy with his shirt half off and Big Pete conducting with both arms like the largest, ugliest choirmaster in Essex, clap-clap, clap-clap-clap coming back off the Bovril End.
Bailey stood in the middle of it being thumped half to death by men twice his size, grinning like the boy he is, compost still under his nails.
And Lenny Marsh came and found me through the whole racket. Captain. Didn’t sing. Shook my hand so hard it hurt, then put his mouth to my ear to get over the noise. "Right. We’ve had that," he said.
"But we’re still dead last, boss. Bottom of the lot. We’ve done nowt yet but stop drowning. Monday we start swimming." And then he let himself grin, the once, and went off to join the song, because a man’s allowed the both of them on a day like this one.
That’s the thing about that dressing room, and it’s the thing I’d never have got off a stat-line if I’d stared at the panels for a year. They could hold two things in the one hand. Out of the minus, and a mountain still in front of them. They felt every inch of the climb still to come. They sang anyway.
24th of 24. Bottom of the whole division, on nothing, same as we’d been since August except the number had no minus in front of it any more. Still skint, with another £16,667 loading itself up for the last day of the month, 26 days off and counting.
I want you clear-eyed about that, same as I was, because the cork coming out of a bottle is a lovely sound but it is not the same sound as safe.
We were not safe. We were not even off the bottom. We were just, at last, out of the hole they’d dug us before we kicked a ball. There’s a difference, and a man who’d run a club into the ground once already knows exactly how big it is.
But out of the hole. My old man used to stand on that terrace and say watch the space, and I spent thirty years not knowing what he meant, and I think I knew it that afternoon, watching a green-fleeced kid get carried off his own pitch by the town he stacks shelves for. He meant the gap that opens when you stop watching the ball and start watching where it’s going to be. He meant this. He meant look up. Look where this is going.
Somewhere out across the marshes a patient man would have heard the noise come up off Marsh Road and turned a page in his calendar and said nothing, because saying nothing is the whole of what Ray Sully does until the day he doesn’t.
He could wait. He’s good at it. But he’d be waiting on a club that wasn’t dying any more. He’d be waiting on a club that had just clawed its way out of the minus in front of two and a half thousand people and a builder he hates, with a 17-year-old’s free kick still rising in everyone’s memory.
[SYSTEM] You started on minus 10. As of 4.52 this afternoon, you start from zero. Everybody else has done that since August. Welcome to the bottom of the ladder. It is still a ladder.
It was still a ladder. And we were finally stood at the foot of it, looking up.
