Free Web NovelChapter 60: The Homework II
"They’ll come at us from the off," I said.
"Soak it. Stay in your shape, don’t dive in, let Lenny and Doyle head it and Sid catch it. Cal, you do not leave that hole, I don’t care if your nan’s on fire by the corner flag. We are going to be the most boring team Kenilworth Road has seen all year, and they are going to hate us, and on about the hour their gaffer is going to lose his rag and throw the whole front of the house at us."
I tapped the two channels. "And when he does, these open up. Vardy. That’s where you live. Bailey, when it springs, you don’t beat your man, you hit it first time. Mooney, you make the run we’ve done 40 times. We don’t need three chances. We need one."
Lenny looked at the board for a long moment, the way he does, reading it 2 seconds before everyone else. "So we sit in," he said, "and let a kid with a camel coat hang himself."
"Captain," I said, "you’ve got it exactly."
Knock on the door. We were on.
It was as horrible as I’d promised them. Kenilworth Road is a tight old ground, the crowd right on top of you, 6,000 of them roaring before we’d kicked off, ROAR coming down off that main stand like weather. Luton came at us in a wave.
The tricky winger had a go at the Crayford lad early, 18 years old on his hardest day, and beat him once, thd of the cross, and Lenny was there to head it away because Lenny is always there.
Sid took two crosses clean out of the air, thwump into his chest, 38 years old and roaring at his back four like a man 20 years younger. Vardy spent the half on his own up top, chasing nothing, a one-man decoy, doing the loneliest job on the pitch without a word of thanks.
Nil-nil at the half. The crowd, who’d come to watch a thrashing, didn’t like it one bit.
Second half, same shape, same boredom. And on 58 minutes I heard it start, the low groan rolling round the stands, 6,000 people who’d paid to see Luton win and were watching them not. I looked across at the other dugout. Maddox was up out of his seat, jaw working, and a big lad was peeling his tracksuit off by the fourth official.
"Here it comes," I said, to nobody, to Stan, to my dad if he was listening. Watch the space, son. Bill never had a flutter he couldn’t pay for and never trusted a tip in his life, a crane driver’s caution, and he’d have stood on that away terrace with his arms folded loving every boring minute of this.
The board went up. The big striker came on. A midfielder came off. And both Luton full-backs, like clockwork, like a notebook, took 10 yards up the pitch.
"NOW," I shouted. "Cal, push on. Bailey, wake up."
You wait three nights and forty years for a thing and then it comes in fifteen seconds. Luton won a corner on 62 minutes, the whole lorry tipped forward, even their centre-halves up in our box.
Bailey took the near post on Sid’s shout and headed it out, tunk, dropping at Cal’s feet on the edge of our area, and Cal did the one thing he is brilliant at, which is not panic. He looked up. 4 blue shirts against 2 retreating Luton lads, all that lovely empty grass where two full-backs used to be.
He found Vardy.
Vardy ran. God, he ran. Into the right channel where the high full-back wasn’t, 40 yards of nobody, thp-thp-thp of his boots and the whole ground going from a groan to a gasp. Their last man came across and Vardy didn’t even look at goal, slid it left into Bailey’s path, and Bailey, 17, garden-centre Bailey, did exactly what we’d drilled. He didn’t take a touch. He didn’t beat the man. He hit it first time, an early ball off the laces, hung on a sixpence to the back stick.
And Mooney was there.
The run we’d done 40 times on a wet Tuesday on the rec, the run nobody marks because nobody believes a number 9 will keep making it. Chris Mooney, 29, two cruciates and a drink behind him and a town that had written him off, arrived at the back post dead on time and headed it down into the net. Thwup. 1-0.
The away corner went up like a chip pan. 200 Dockers who’d got a coach up the M1 on a Saturday, and Mooney ran to them, not to us, to them, sliding on his knees in front of the people who used to boo him, and I let him, because that goal was three years in the making and the System never wrote a line of it.
[Mooney, C. / match rating climbing]
Then we had to survive it, and that’s its own Chapter. Maddox, raging now, threw a third forward on and went route one, the mixer, the lorry, everything. The last 20 minutes Luton laid siege and we hung on by our fingernails. Sid made one save I’ll see when I’m old, down to his right, 38-year-old knees and all, parsh of his palm on the post. Lenny headed everything. Cal ran till he was two men and then a third. The Crayford kid, who’d been beaten in the first minute, threw himself in front of a shot in the last and came up with a bootprint on his chest and a grin like Christmas.
6 minutes of added time. Hrrr of my own breathing. A long throw, a header, Sid claims it. The whistle.
PHWEEET.
Luton 0, Tilbrook 1. At Kenilworth Road. The kid in the dugout out-thought the man in the coat, and the man in the coat knew it, and he shook my hand at the end with a face that had eaten something sour and said, "Sat in and nicked it," like an insult, and I said, "Cheers, Ron, learned it off you," which was the truth and landed like a slap.
On the coach home I did the only maths I’m allowed to do anymore. 4 wins, 1 draw, 1 defeat. 13 points earned off 6 games, a mid-table side’s haul, a promotion-chaser’s September.
And 3 of them on the board, because the other 10 went to the league office back in August in a brown envelope and are never coming home.
The minus was paid off, the deduction just a tax we’d finally cleared, and what sat under it when the tide went out was 3 honest points.
I checked the table somewhere up the M1 in the dark, and the club that had propped up the whole division since the first Saturday of the season had gone and lost again, and that meant, for the first time since any of this began, we weren’t bottom. 23rd. Not safe. Not within a postcode of safe. But not last. A rung. The first rung.
3 points doesn’t pay £16,667. It doesn’t pay a penny of it. But 3 points fills a turnstile, and a full turnstile is the only coupon I’m allowed to cash now, and we’d find out what it was worth next Saturday with the gates open and the kiosk on and the board up.
The bookies could keep their counter. I had a better edge than a coupon. I had a team that had just learned it could go to the biggest club in the league and win on homework.
[SYSTEM] I showed you eleven men. You found the twelfth, the one in the coat, and you beat him with a pencil. I keep telling you. I do not win these. You do.
I do. Off the bottom, and on the back of the M1, I let myself believe the honest road might just be long enough.
