Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 59: The Homework I

"Do the thing again." Raj took both hands off the wheel at the lights to mime it, a man dealing himself invisible cards.

"The World Cup thing. Sammy. You turned 40 quid into a house deposit in three weeks, and now we’re sat here crying over 16 grand a month. Do the thing."

"Eyes on the road, mate." Tk-tk-tk of the indicator. The light went green and the cab pulled off down the A13 past the refinery, and I looked out the window so he could not see my face do the sum, because the sum was the trouble.

I could do the thing. That was the whole of it. I had a coupon in my head the bookies would shut the shop to keep off the counter.

I knew which big club went down at Old Trafford on Saturday and which one drew a game it had no business drawing, knew the autumn of it, September through to May, sat behind my teeth like a winning slip I was not allowed to hand in.

£40 became £680 became the better part of £9,000 across one June, and it was not luck, and I have never once told Raj why.

"It’s not that simple now," I said.

"It was dead simple in June."

It had been.

In June I was nobody. A bloke off the A13 in a Sportskit polo with a building society book and a tip from God. You can walk into any shop on any high street as that bloke and the girl takes your money and wishes you luck.

I did it for a fortnight, shop to shop so none of them saw the whole picture, chink of pound coins on a dozen counters, and by the World Cup final they’d worked out the picture anyway. The slips started coming back.

Limits dropped to a fiver. A manager in a clip-on tie came round the counter with a sad patient smile and a closed account, twice in one afternoon. They turned Raj away an hour after they’d turned me. A man who only ever wins is not a customer, he’s a leak, and they plug him.

"They know my face in half of Essex," I said. "And the half they don’t, I can’t use."

"Why not?"

Because I’m the chairman of a football club now, Raj, and the manager besides, registered with the Football Association in two columns of ink, and there is a rule older than I am that says a man in the game does not bet on the game, not one quid, not on a match in Bolivia, and if he does they take his club off him and feed it to the wolves.

2Sully would not even have to lift a finger. He’d just have to read the paper. The one edge I’ve got left in the world is fenced off by the exact thing I’m trying to save with it.

I did not say most of that. I said, "Because they’d ban me and I’d lose the club. There’s rules for blokes like what I am now."

Raj chewed on that. He hates a rule. "And the other thing? The internet money?"

"Locked. Can’t touch it till the new year." Which was true, and the truest part, and the part I could least explain, the 37,000 magic beans sat in a wallet that did not know yet that it was a fortune, eight months off being worth lighting a cigar with.

"Eat your apple, Raj."

He ate his apple.

Crunch. We came up on the rec and the team coach idling at the gate, brrm of the diesel, the lads filing on in their club tracksuits with their bags, and the funny thing, the thing that put a hand round my throat for a second, was that in June I’d had the edge and the freedom both and no club to spend it on, and now I had the club and the edge still and not one legal way to put the two together. The gift gives with one hand. Always has.

So there’d be no thing. No coupon, no miracle, no clever Tuesday in a bookies that paid the wolf off for a month.

The only money I was allowed to touch was the money the team made me. Gate money. Kiosk money. A cup run if we got one. The sponsor’s board. £11.40 to the good on a good week, Maureen’s whole green ledger, earned a turnstile click at a time.

Which meant the money and the football were the same thing now. And the football, this Saturday, was Kenilworth Road.

I want you to understand what Luton were. The biggest club in our division by a street, a proper old Football League side that had fallen through the trapdoor and was furious about it, 6,500 through the gate of an afternoon when our whole town turned out 400. They had a budget that could’ve bought my squad twice and had change for the chip van. And they had Ron Maddox.

You’ll not know him. Sixty if he was a day, camel coat, a face like a clenched fist, 2 promotions on his CV and a portrait of himself he was very keen on.

When the team coach pulled in he was out front having a fag, and he watched me climb down with the lads, and you could see him doing his own sum and getting a number he liked.

A kid. They’d sent a kid. I was 24 and I looked it and he’d been in dugouts longer than I’d been alive, and that, more than anything Vardy could do, was what I was going to beat him with.

The System had given me his eleven on the coach down. Names, numbers, the lot, men laid out like a butcher’s chart, the big centre-half at 84, the tricky winger at 79.

[SYSTEM] I can show you the eleven on the grass. I cannot show you the man in the coat. That one’s your homework.

Daft how that landed. I’d known it for weeks, the limit of the thing, learned it the hard way at Wrexham where a gaffer I never thought to study put a big lad on at half-time and beat me 3-2 from 2 down while I was still admiring my own back four.

Knowing the players is not knowing the game. The game lives in the man in the coat, and the man in the coat is not in the System’s gift. He’s in a notebook. So I’d done a notebook.

Three nights of it, a borrowed laptop and Stan’s video tapes and forty years of watching this exact kind of man pace this exact kind of touchline.

Ron Maddox at home, I had written, and underlined it twice the way the last gaffer underlined PUT IT IN THE MIXER, was the most predictable man in England the second things went quiet.

If Luton weren’t ahead by the hour, the crowd got on him, and the crowd getting on Ron Maddox did the same thing every time, ground after ground, year after year. Full-backs shoved high up the pitch.

A second striker, a big one, on for a midfielder. The holding lad sacrificed. Bodies forward, ball in the mixer, the whole thing tipped at you like a lorry shedding its load. It won him a lot of games, because a lot of teams panicked under the lorry.

And it left the two channels behind those high full-backs as wide open as the Thames.

So I did not tell my lads we were going to Luton to attack Luton. I told them the opposite. In the away dressing room, paint peeling, drip somewhere in the pipes, I drew the hour on the whiteboard.