Chapter 22: The Team I
Seventeen, all knees and elbows, swimming in a training top three sizes too big, and he got the ball on the half-turn with a spaniel barking at him and a defender climbing up his back, and he just... went.
Drop of the shoulder, swish, gone, the kind of movement you cannot coach into a person, the kind that makes the air go quiet, and then he tried an outrageous nutmeg that didn’t come off and went flat on his backside in the mud and everyone howled and he laughed too, this great daft delighted laugh.
I held my breath. And the panel opened.
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Name: Bailey Quinn ·
Age: 17 ·
Winger / Forward CA: 70 · PA: 161 Raw as a butcher’s window. Can’t cross, can’t defend, falls over his own feet roughly once a minute. Local lad. Works weekends at the garden centre. PA: 161. Do not, under any circumstances, let this boy out of your sight.
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I had to put my hand on the fence.
A hundred and sixty-one.
I need you to understand what that number meant, stood on a balding council rec in Essex in the summer of 2010. That was not a non-league number. That was not a League Two number, or a League One number, or even a Championship number.
A hundred and sixty-one, grown into and properly coached, was a man who walked out in the Premier League and did not look remotely out of place.
A hundred and sixty-one was an England shirt.
A hundred and sixty-one was the single most valuable thing on that field, on that road, very probably in the entire postcode, and he was seventeen years old, falling over in the mud, working weekends shifting bags of compost, about to be released into absolutely nothing because his football club had been killed in a courtroom he’d never set foot in.
And I had never, in sixteen years of grey lower-league coaching, heard that name in my entire life.
I stood there with my hand on the fence and I rummaged my own head, hard, the way you check every pocket of a coat you’ve just realised has got a hole in it. Premier League watch lists.
Championship loanees.
Under-21 squads, FA Cup giant-killers, late-developer non-league heroes, the Jamie Vardy Sunday morning miracles, every YouTube compilation a sad coach in a portacabin had ever played at four in the morning in another life when he couldn’t sleep.
Bailey Quinn. Bailey Quinn. Bailey Quinn.
Nothing came back. Not a teamsheet. Not a youth squad photo. Not a substitute appearance in a Trophy tie at a ground I could half remember being cold at.
Not a single one of the lower-league grounds I had personally trooped round for sixteen years either, places where the bigger clubs sent the boys they didn’t quite want but might one day need, where I had run the rule over every promising lad with a left foot from Maidstone to Macclesfield.
Anywhere.
Any division.
Any country.
In the entire run of the years between this rec and a lorry on the A13, he had never, not once, surfaced.
Which meant Bailey Quinn, in the version of the world I had lived through the first time round, had been let go by Tilbrook in the survival year because there was no money for academy wages.
Had gone full time on the compost bags. Had played his Saturday football for the Anchor Reserves until the knees went. Had married a girl from down the road. Had a couple of kids.
A council flat.
A story he told at weddings about how he’d once been on the books at the Dockers when he was a lad. And that was the lot. He had not, in the years between this rec and the lorry, kicked a football for actual money again.
He had been, in the other life, exactly the kind of player I had been myself. The wasted kind. The one with the gift in his right foot and nobody, anywhere, pointing at him from a touchline and going son.
And I was... stood on a balding council rec on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon in the middle of an ordinary east-of-England nothing, the only living human being on God’s green earth who knew about him.
I knew about him before his own dad did. I knew about him before he did.
The system had given me his name. Of course it had. Bailey Quinn mattered. He mattered more than almost anyone I’d laid eyes on since I woke up in this life, and not one single soul on that pitch, not Lenny, not Sid, not the boy himself, had the faintest idea.
That, right there, was the entire reason the universe had bothered to send me back.
And looking down that line of sweat-stained tracksuits, skint and still turning up for nothing, I tried to do the cold honest maths of the box we were about to climb into.
Twenty-four clubs in the National League, that was the shape of it. Forty-six fixtures, Saturday and the odd Tuesday from August clear through to April.
One automatic up at the top into the Football League proper, a four-club play-off scrap for the second ticket, and four straight-down trapdoors at the bottom into the regional sixth tier and goodnight.
Three points for a win, the same as everywhere else in the world.
A season that, by the published fixture list I’d already half-memorised at three in the morning, kicked off on Saturday the fourteenth of August.
Three weeks and change from where I was stood.
That was the box.
And in it, on current form, the best player I had was Lenny.
Ninety-one for ninety-one, no ceiling left to chase, a thirty-three-year-old scaffolder centre-half playing every inch of what he was ever going to be. Sid was the heart.
Bailey, that quiet shy garden-centre boy still picking himself up out of the mud at the far end of the line, was the entire future.
And Mooney was the bomb buried under the floor, ticking away at eighty-three out of a hundred and sixteen, waiting for somebody to come down with a screwdriver and a kind word and defuse him into the player he was always meant to be.
What I did not have, looking down that line, was a manager.
The last gaffer had walked the morning the wages dried up; Maureen had told me on the way over. Slipped out the side of the Main Stand without so much as a note, taken a coaching gig at Boreham Wood the week after, and that was that.
Dugout empty.
Chalkboard empty.
Tactics file in the office a single yellowing scrap of paper that had, in biro and underlined twice, the words PUT IT IN THE MIXER.
And the men I’d just asked to give me nine days of their lives were going to need someone to tell them, soon, who was going to be stood in that technical area come the second Saturday of August.
I knew, stood there with my hand still on the fence and my heart still kicking from Bailey Quinn’s stat line, that there was only one honest answer to that question.
It was going to have to be me.
In another life I’d spent sixteen years coaching for somebody else’s bad chairman.
This time round, it looked very much like the bad chairman was going to have to learn to share a dressing room with the gaffer.
Mostly on account of them being the same skint twenty-four-year-old, and the budget not running to two.
"Oi!" Lenny Marsh had clocked me.
He came jogging over, sweat on him, suspicion all over his face, and planted himself square between me and his team like the centre-half he was.
"Help you, mate? This is a private session."
"It’s a public rec, Lenny," called Baz, "technically," and got told where to go.
"Sam Mercer," I said, and stuck my hand out.
He didn’t take it. "And?"
