Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 102: The Steps I

You come over the last rise on the motorway, tired and stiff and five hours from home, and there it is.

The stadium.

It sits in the grey of east Manchester like something that landed, a great blue-lit bowl of a thing, and every man on our coach who’d been asleep was suddenly not asleep.

Bald Tony stood up in the aisle without knowing he’d done it, and said, in a small voice I’d never heard him use, "That’s never it.

That’s never where we’re playing."

That’s where we were playing.

I should tell you where, because it matters and because a marsh club does not end up in a place like this by accident.

The play-off final is one match, winner up, at a big neutral ground, and the year we got there the famous one, the one you’re all picturing with the arch, was busy that month with the European Cup final.

So they sent us north instead, to the City of Manchester Stadium, the one the locals still call Eastlands, where City play. Forty-odd thousand seats of it.

Half our coach spent the last hour arguing about whether it was the blue one or the red one across the city, Old Trafford, and I let them argue, because the truth is I did not care which it was.

I had spent my whole life, both of my lives, in grounds where you can hear the one bloke behind the goal telling the linesman he needs glasses.

We were going somewhere with a roof that curved.

Ted didn’t argue. Ted sat by the window with his cap in his lap and looked up at that blue bowl coming closer and said, "Wembley." Just that.

And I did not correct him, not that day, not any day, because Ted has followed this club for sixty-one years and it was the biggest place he would ever see them play, and that is exactly what the word Wembley means.

I let him have it.

I could not speak for the last mile. I want to be honest about that. There was a coach full of my dead father coming up that motorway, he was in every seat, and I could not get a word past what was in my throat.

Four thousand.

I need you to sit with that number, because you have been with this club since it drew four hundred on a wet Tuesday, since the gate money was counted in a biscuit tin, since a good home crowd was five hundred and half of them were there for the pie.

Four thousand people came to Manchester.

From a town that fits five hundred into Marsh Road.

Six hundred had come to Luton and I’d thought that was the miracle. Then four thousand of them poured up eleven coaches and a car park’s worth of cars, blue and white the whole length of the outside lane.

And stood outside a Premier League stadium in the afternoon sun like they’d been let into somewhere they weren’t sure they were allowed.

And the other lot came too, and I have to tell you about them, because if I don’t you’ll think there was a villain in this and there wasn’t.

We were playing Wimbledon.

Not the old one you might remember, the one that got picked up and carried sixty miles up the road to a new town by men who owned it and didn’t love it.

This was the club the fans built out of the wreckage, from nine divisions down, owned by its own supporters, clawed all the way back to one game from the League by refusing, exactly like us, to die when they were told to.

A club the people built, against a club the town kept. Both of us the same story wearing different colours. And one of us was going home with our heart cut out.

There is no villain in that. There is only the cruelty of it. I stood in that car park and I loved them, the enemy, and I have never wanted to beat anyone more.

And then the turnstiles took us, and the stadium took us, and there was no more time to be afraid.

You come up a grey concrete tunnel from the concourse, up a slope, towards a square of light, and the noise reaches you before the light does, a low rolling thunder you feel in the wall you’re touching, in the floor, in your own chest, and then the tunnel ends and the whole thing opens over you all at once.

The green.

I have never seen green like it. Our pitch is brown in the goalmouths and bald down the middle and there is a wonky painted centre circle that Stan does by eye.

This was a snooker table the size of a field, lit up under a roof, greener than anything has a right to be, and above it climbed the stands, up and up, blue seats into the Manchester evening, and the sound came down off all of it and hit us like weather.

Bald Tony sat straight down on a plastic seat.

"I’ve got to have a minute, Sam," he said. "I’ve got to have a minute." And he had his minute, hand over his mouth, and nobody took the mick, because half of them were having their minute too.

Our end was already filling. Four thousand in blue and white pouring into one whole corner and stand of a Premier League ground, and when the first of them saw the pitch a song went up, ragged, then together, then enormous:

"WE ARE TIL-BROOK. WE ARE TIL-BROOK. WE ARE TIL-BROOK."

Four thousand voices in a bowl built to hold the sound and throw it back, and it did not sound like Marsh Road, it sounded like a proper club, it sounded like somebody.

"LOOK AT IT," somebody bawled behind me, to nobody, to everybody. "LOOK AT THE STATE OF US. LOOK AT US!"

And I watched Ted Cutler hear his club sound like somebody for the first time in sixty-one years, and I had to look at my shoes.

Murat had got a flag in. God knows how.

FREE CHIPS FOR TED, it said, from some in-joke of a season ago, and he hung it over the advertising hoardings of a Premier League stadium and stood back with his arms folded like a man who’d planted a flag on the moon.

Raj was three rows back, meter off, having driven a carful up the M6 for nothing again. Dennis Coyle stood with his cap off. It was all of them.

The whole marsh, in the sky, in Manchester.

And then, an hour before kick-off, they came and found me in all that noise, because there was one part of the day I had forgotten I’d have to do.

I am the chairman. And the chairman gets taken up, before the game, to the directors’ box. Somebody has to shake the other club’s board’s hands and drink the tea and be a suit for twenty minutes, and that is the chairman’s job, so up I went.

And it was another world.

Carpet. Actual carpet, on the stairs. Glass along the front. Padded seats with backs to them and a little brass number on each. A woman came round with a tray.

Below and around, that green, that enormous lit green, from up high now, the whole geometry of it, forty thousand seats built to make people feel exactly the way I was feeling, which was small.

I thought about my own directors’ box.

We do not have one.

We have four plastic bucket seats bolted to the front of a Main Stand that holds three thousand on paper and is not safe for one thousand in fact, with a leaning white T at the gable that has been wonky since before I was born and that the whole town calls the crest without irony.

That is my boardroom. Bald Tony’s stool at the Anchor has more of a roof.

And standing there, in a rich club’s glass box, with a cup of somebody else’s tea going cold in my hand, I made myself a promise. I am not embarrassed to tell you.

I looked out at that impossible green and all that steel and I thought: I am going to build my club up to belong somewhere like this. Not this, not forty thousand, we are not mad.

But a proper stand. A roof that doesn’t leak. A place my dad would have walked into and gone quiet.

He drew one once, you know. On the back of a fag packet, a stand with a roof on it, more than the club ever had. Stan kept it.

My dad drew a roof he never got to build, and I stood in a Premier League directors’ box a hundred and three years into this club’s life and promised him I’d get further than he did.

Then I put the tea down, and I left the carpet and the glass and the cold cup behind me, and I went down to find my seat among the four thousand, because whatever else I am, I was not watching this one from behind glass.

And then they kicked off, and I will give it to you straight and slow, because you have come a hundred and three years for it.

We started like a club that did not belong there, and for twenty minutes it was awful.

Wimbledon were calm and we were not. They kept the ball and moved us round that huge pitch until our legs were full of it, and on twelve minutes their forward got in and Braithwaite got down and held it, thump, and four thousand people breathed out at once, a great sighing wave rolling back down a beach.

Sadler didn’t panic. He was down on his haunches at the edge of his box, still as a heron, and I have learned that Sadler still means Sadler thinking, and on twenty-two minutes he stood, cupped his hands, and moved Bailey off the wing into the pocket in the middle.

Like turning a tap.

Suddenly the ball stuck. Suddenly the seventeen-year-old was getting it between their lines with his head up, and the game tilted, and four thousand people felt it tilt and found their voice.

"COME ON YOU DOCKERS. COME ON YOU DOCKERS."

Thirty-one minutes. Bailey in the pocket, turned, and slid Vardy through the one gap in the world, and Vardy, who is always already gone, was gone.

One on one. A hundred and three years on the outside of his right boot.

rrrip.

"YESSS. YES. YES! GET IN! GET INNN!"

1-0.

And a whole end of a Premier League stadium, four thousand strong, came off its feet as one animal, and the noise came down out of that blue bowl and I did not hear it so much as get hit by it, in the chest, in the teeth.

"MER-CER’S BOY. MER-CER’S BOY."

Thirty-seven goals. One season. Fifth tier. Off a beer mat.

Next to me a man I’d never met had both hands in my coat and was shouting into my face with tears on his and I was shouting back, and neither of us knew or cared what the other was saying.

They did not fold.

They are not built to fold, that is the whole point of them, and on forty-four minutes they came back and got it. A cross we didn’t clear, thock, their lad arriving at the back post.

"NO. NO. NO, DON’T."

The groan came out of four thousand of us at once, a great gut-punched ohhh that fell out of the sky and died, and away across the pitch their end went up like ours had, a great wall of yellow and blue noise from the far side.

Right on half-time, the cruellest time. We went in level and I could not feel my hands.

Half-time. 1-1.