Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 113: Owe No Man III

Now the football, because it is July and there is suddenly a great deal of it.

The fixtures had come out three weeks earlier, on the seventeenth of June, and I had not read them.

Think about that for a second, because I am still a bit ashamed of it.

The day the Football League (League 2) published, in black and white, the forty-six games my father’s club would play in its first ever season as one of the ninety-two, I was upstairs in a dark office watching a Japanese website die and I did not so much as glance at it.

Cal Murphy had been on about it for three weeks.

He’d printed a copy at the library the morning it landed and carried it round folded in his back pocket like a wage slip, and every time he’d seen me he’d started with "have you seen who we’ve got first" and every time I’d said not yet, Cal, and he’d said right, and put it away again.

So on the Thursday, with the debt dead and my head finally out of the water, I went and found him on the rec and I said go on then. Show me.

He had it out of his pocket before I’d finished the sentence.

"Crewe," he said. "Away at Crewe. First game."

"Cal."

"CREWE, Sam."

"I know."

"The lot that’s been ringing my mum." He was almost vibrating. "First game of the season. We’re going there. In the LEAGUE."

And that, if you want it, is the whole thing: a grown man on a public recreation ground with a library printout he has carried in his pocket for twenty-one days, waiting for his chairman to have a spare minute to be happy with him.

I read it properly, standing there on the rec. League Two, 2011/12, forty-six games. And there in among Crewe and Bradford and Port Vale and Northampton, clubs with histories and stands and floodlights that work, in the same list, in the same font, no smaller than any of them:

Tilbrook Town.

Ted framed his copy. It is on the wall of the Anchor now, behind the bar, next to a photograph of the 1958 side and a signed Vardy shirt that raised three thousand pounds in a raffle when we were dying.

We got the retained list done that week, which is a phrase that means: I sat in a portakabin with Craig Sadler and decided the futures of about twenty men, most of whom I have drunk with.

Cal Murphy signed a two-year contract on Football League money, and put his pen down, and said, "Can I ring my mum?" and I said yes, and he went outside to do it because he did not want us to hear him.

Tom Braithwaite signed for three years, which his uncle negotiated very badly on his behalf and which I improved twice without being asked, because there is a limit.

And Sid Hollis came in and sat down and did not wait for me to start.

"Don’t," he said. "Don’t do the speech. I’ve seen you doing the speech at people all week and I’ve not got the stomach for it." He put his hands flat on the table.

Big goalkeeper’s hands, thirty-eight years of them. "I know the knee’s gone. I know I’m not playing in that division. I’m not daft, Sam, I’m just old."

"Sid."

"Four hundred and eleven games." He said it quietly. "That’s what it is. I counted them properly, the once. Four hundred and eleven, and not one of them in the Football League, and I’m not going to get one now, am I."

And Craig Sadler, who had not said a word, leaned forward.

"Goalkeeping coach," he said. "Two days a week to start. And you’re on the bench, registered, all season."

Sid looked at him.

"I’m not being carried."

"You’re not being carried, you’re being paid, and badly." Sadler didn’t blink. "That boy out there is going to face eleven-thousand-a-week strikers in November and he’s twenty-one and he’s got nobody who’s ever done it. You’ve done it four hundred and eleven times in front of nobody, which is harder. Teach him that."

Nobody spoke for a bit.

"Registered," said Sid. "So if it all goes wrong in April and you’re desperate."

"If it all goes wrong in April and I’m desperate," Sadler agreed, "you’ll be the second-worst option I’ve got, and I’ll take you."

And Sid Hollis laughed, wetly, and signed.

And then Ray Sully came back, which is the part I want you to remember.

Not in person. Ray does not come to you twice in a fortnight. It was in the Non-League Paper on the Sunday, three paragraphs, page nine, the sort of item you would skim past.

INVESTMENT AT SHOREHAVEN Shorehaven United have confirmed "significant new investment" from a consortium fronted by Essex businessman Ray Sully, who last month ended his involvement at Maridon Athletic. Shorehaven, who finished 14th in League Two last season, have appointed a new head of recruitment and are understood to be planning a substantial summer rebuild. "This is a proper Football League club with proper foundations," Mr Sully said. "That matters to me."

He’d sold up at Maridon.

He had spent a year and a fortune trying to break a fifth-tier club on a marsh, and he had failed, and rather than take the loss and go and buy a boat, he had taken his money up a division and put it into a League Two club that finished fourteenth.

He was not in front of us any more, blocking the door.

He was up there. Waiting on the road we had just climbed onto. With more money than us, a whole division of experience we do not have, and eleven months to spend it before we get to him.

"This is a proper Football League club with proper foundations. That matters to me."

That is a message. That is a man leaning over a fence to tell you exactly what he is going to do to you.

The bid came in on the last Friday of July.

I’d been half expecting it since we went up, and it arrived the way they always arrive, a fax to an office that still has a fax, and Maureen brought it through and put it on the desk and stood there while I read it.

Six hundred thousand pounds for James Vardy.

Half a million more than we paid for him, which was nothing, which was a phone call and a beer mat and a promise about his mum’s kitchen. From a Championship club. Cash, structured over two years, and a sell-on clause they had clearly written expecting a small club to be too dazzled to read it.

Six hundred thousand pounds.

Do you know what that is, to a club like us? It is more than our entire wage bill. It is a new stand. It is an academy built in one go instead of ten years. It is the difference between surviving League Two and attacking it.

And in another life a chairman of Tilbrook Town would have had that fax on the wall in a frame as the day the club got saved.

Maureen said, "Well?"

And I thought about a boy of seventeen, who nobody has counted yet, who does not shoot because he would rather make it for someone else, and who is going to be worth more than this club has ever been worth in its life.

And I thought about a man in a suit up the road at Shorehaven, buying a Football League club with proper foundations, because that matters to him.

And I thought about my dad on the Bovril End, watching a space nobody else could see.

"Bin it," I said.

"That’s six hundred thousand pounds, Sam."

"I know exactly what it is."

Maureen looked at me for a long moment over the top of her glasses.

Then she picked up the fax, held it up so I could see it, and tore it very neatly in half.

"Good," she said. "I’d have thought less of you."

I went down to the ground after she’d gone home.

It was about eight in the evening and still light, that long gold July light you only get for about ten days a year, and the whole place was empty and the grass had been cut that afternoon and the smell of it was everywhere.

I let myself in with my own key and I walked out to the middle and I stood on the centre spot of a football ground that a widow gave to a town in 1923, that a suit declared dead last August, that owes not one penny to any man alive.

Twelve acres. A stand with a wonky white T on the gable that holds three thousand on paper and is not safe for one thousand in fact.

A terrace where my father stood me on a milk crate. And two men in the ground by the penalty spot who were scattered there in 1998 and never saw a day like this one.

Ours. Properly ours. Clear.

There is a lot still to do and I know exactly what it is. There is a squad to build and a division that will try to eat us and a man up the road at Shorehaven with more money than sense and considerably more sense than I would like.

But that is August’s problem.

For one evening in July, on a cut pitch in the last of the light, I stood in the middle of my father’s football club and it did not owe anybody anything, and neither did I.

I have had a lot of good days across two lifetimes.

That one is very near the top.