Chapter 2: Full Time
In the game, I had a nickname. El Magnífico.
The Magnificent.
In real life, I was a divorced man crying in a Vauxhall Astra outside a vape-sponsored football club with a P45 warming up in the post and a flat I could barely afford the heating in.
Funny old world.
Sixteen years, I’d been chasing it. Sixteen years since I hung up the boots and picked up the clipboard, and what did I have to show for it? A coaching badge I’d paid for in instalments. A shoebox of references from clubs that no longer existed.
And Karen. Ah, Karen. My ex-wife.
God, Karen was so good to me.
The whole five years we lasted, she was good to me, and I’m not going to sit here and be all noble about every bit of it either, because the woman had a backside on her you could have stood a fresh pint on, and I am only human; I noticed, I noticed plenty.
But enough of that. It’s a bit much for a man crying in an Astra.
We never had kids, me and Karen. She always said she’d tell me when she was ready, and I respected that. I never once pushed, because that is how you treat someone you love.
And then one perfectly ordinary Tuesday, she sat me down at the kitchen table, clink went her mug, and she told me what she’d finally decided she was ready for...
A life that didn’t have me in it. She couldn’t waste the rest of hers, she said, waiting on a man who finished first at dreaming and dead last at every single thing that paid a mortgage. Her words. Near enough.
And the worst part? She was right. Look at me. Look where I’d ended up. She’d dodged a bullet and we both knew it.
She took the good telly when she went. I let her have it. Least I could do, really.
I’d had chances. Little ones.
I got Bromley off the bottom and a League Two club rang me, an actual professional club, and I drove three hours for the interview and they gave it to a former Premier League player who’d never coached a session in his life because, and I quote, "the fans know the name, Sam."
The name. Always the name. Nobody ever got excited about the bloke who could look at a kid and tell you, to the decimal point, exactly how good he was going to be in five years.
That was my curse, seeing. I could see it. I could always see it.
The lad everyone else thought was rubbish, I could watch him for ten minutes and go, "That one, him, build everything round him".
And I was right. I was always right. And being right, on its own, with no money and no name and no luck, turns out to be worth precisely nothing.
Drip. Drip.
The rain had started on the windscreen while I sat there. I watched a single drop race another single drop down the glass and lose, and I thought, that’s me, that is. Second. Always second. Beaten by a drop of water with a better surname.
"Pull yourself together, Sam," I said out loud, to nobody. Sniff. "It’s just a job. It’s just another job."
Ping.
A text. From Raj.
Raj: mate
Raj: mate you seen the news
Raj: about Tilbrook Sam
My stomach did something cold. Slow. Like a lift dropping a floor when you weren’t braced for it.
I opened the link. My thumb didn’t want to do it. I made it.
TILBROOK TOWN FC WOUND UP IN HIGH COURT 119 YEARS OF HISTORY ENDS OVER £400,000 TAX DEBT
And just like that, I wasn’t forty anymore. I was eight.
You have to understand something. Tilbrook Town was never just a football club to me. Tilbrook Town was my dad’s team.
It was like a man in a flat cap who drove forklifts down at the docks all week, who came home grey and quiet and aching in the knees, and who turned into a completely different human being for ninety minutes every Saturday.
Somebody with opinions.
Somebody who belonged.
He’d stand me on an upturned milk crate on the terrace at Marsh Road so I could see over the fat bloke in front, and he’d wrap one massive forklift-driver hand round the back of my little neck, and his cup of Bovril would go steam, hiss in the freezing air, and he’d say it.
The thing he always said. The thing that wrecked my entire life, really, in the best possible way.
"Watch the space, son. Don’t watch the ball. Any mug can watch the ball. Watch the space."
That’s where it came from. The eye. The obsession. The genius nobody would ever cut me a cheque for.
He kept a scrapbook, my old man. A bloke who could barely manage a shopping list kept a scrapbook of every single Tilbrook game he ever went to.
Ticket stubs gone soft with age. Line-ups copied out in careful biro. Little notes crammed in the margins in his blocky capitals.
TWO NIL.
ROBBERY.
REF WAS A HOMER.
SAW THE LAD MERCER GET A GOAL, PROUD AS OWT.
That last one was about me. The one season I played for the youth team before my knee folded the wrong way and took the dream with it.
I had that scrapbook in a shoebox in the boot of the Astra, because in fourteen years, I had never once been able to throw it out. And I had never once been able to open it, either.
He died believing they’d be there forever. That’s the thing about clubs like that. They’re supposed to be forever. Pubs board up. Shops shut. Tilbrook Town does not close.
And now some judge in a wig had switched it off like a bedside lamp. Click. Gone. A hundred and nineteen years.
I don’t honestly remember deciding to drive.
I just knew where I was going, the way you know your way home in the dark. Marsh Road. I was going to see it. One last time, before the bailiffs and the padlocks and the developers, before they bulldozed the old Main Stand for a Lidl and a car park.
I wanted to stand on that terrace where my dad used to stand me on a milk crate, and I wanted to say sorry, to him, to the place, to all of it, because a club had died and a part of me genuinely believed that if I’d been somebody, if I’d been a winner, if just once a single thing had broken my way, I might have been the man who saved it.
Stupid. I know. A skint sacked non-league coach saving a club from the High Court. About as likely as me winning the actual Champions League instead of the pretend one.
I just remember the A13, and the rain coming harder, tk... tk... tk-tk-tk-tk on the windscreen, the wipers going thunk, squeak, thunk, squeak, and me talking out loud to a dead man like an absolute lunatic, tears and snot and forty years of nearly, nearly, nearly.
"They’re gone, Dad. They actually let them die. Nobody came. Nobody bloody came."
I should have been watching the space.
The lorry came out of the side junction and its horn went off, this enormous flat blaring wall of noise, HOOOOOOOONK, filling up the whole inside of the car, and the very last thought I had, the genuine final thought in the head of Samuel Mercer, was so pathetic it was almost funny.
Oh. Right. That’s it, then. Forty. Sacked. Skint. Manager of absolutely nothing.
White.
Then nothing.
Then.
...bing.
A sound. Tiny. Clean.
The exact noise a phone makes when a message lands, except it wasn’t coming from any phone, it was coming from inside me, somewhere behind my eyes, somewhere in the dark where there was definitely not supposed to be anything at all. Not now. Not ever again.
And in that dark, three words lit up. Soft. White. Hanging there in the nothing like they had been sitting patiently, waiting for me, my entire stupid wasted life.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONTINUE?
