Chapter 37: Stocksbridge I
Raj’s Astra came down Carling Street at one minute to five with the headlights off and the small string of Tibetan prayer beads his auntie had given him in 2008 ticking against the inside of the windscreen, tk, tk, tk.
I came down with the rucksack over one shoulder and the kitchen door pulled to behind me.
I got in.
He had the flat cap on.
"You wore the cap, Raj."
"I wore the cap. I am not happy about the cap. I am wearing the cap, Sam, under protest, which is a thing a man is allowed to do in his own car at five in the morning."
"Fair."
"Mate. Where are we going?"
"Sheffield."
A pause. The kind of pause Raj does when he is mentally running through every route to wherever I have just said, the petrol it is going to cost, and what his mother is going to say when he gets in.
"Sheffield, Sam."
"Five hours up the M1, no traffic at this hour, back down by eight tonight, easy."
"Sam. Sheffield is not a place a man drives at five in the morning unless he is moving a body."
"Am I moving a body, Raj?"
"...No. You would not have asked me to come if you were moving a body. You would have asked one of the lads from the cab firm who actually owes you money. So. Why."
"I’ll tell you in the car."
"We are in the car."
"Drive."
He drove. The exhaust scraped on the speed bump at the end of Carling Street, chunk, and he swore at it on his mother’s behalf, which was the way Raj swore at his own car, because the car had been bought eight years ago with money his mother had lent him on the strict understanding that it would be looked after.
He had three things on the dashboard. A bag of Werther’s Originals that had been up there since approximately the Blair government.
A polystyrene cup of tea I knew had come from the all-night counter at the back of the bus station, because the tea from the back of the bus station had a smell you could pick out of a crowd.
A Daily Express folded to the crossword. He had the prayer beads off the rear-view. He had a pine air freshener that had been in the car for so long it now smelled of nothing at all. He drove with the left hand on the wheel and the right elbow out the window.
I told him on the M11. In the order he could take.
"You have bought a football club."
"I have bought a football club."
"And you are now driving up to Sheffield, with me, in this car, at five in the morning, to sign a striker."
"Yes."
"On a beer mat."
"I have got the beer mat in the rucksack."
"...You have got the beer mat in the rucksack."
"It is a Tetley’s. Carbery drew it up yesterday afternoon."
"Carbery. Mr Carbery from above the Greggs. Carbery drew up a beer mat."
"Carbery drew up a beer mat."
He drove half a mile not saying anything.
"...My ma is going to kill me."
"Your ma is not going to kill you."
"My ma is going to kill me because she does not know I am driving to Sheffield. She thinks I am doing the Stansted run. She had a Yorkshire pudding she made specifically for me at half one this morning sat in foil on the side, and now I am going to be eating it at midnight at the earliest. A Yorkshire pudding eaten at midnight, Sam, is not a Yorkshire pudding any more. It is a sad battered cousin of a Yorkshire pudding."
He reached for the bag of Werther’s. He stuck one in his mouth. He passed me one without looking. I unwrapped it, crinkle, and stuck it in my mouth, and we drove north sucking on Werther’s Originals at half five in the morning of a Friday in late July 2010, the prayer beads ticking against the windscreen, the Daily Express crossword half-finished on the dashboard between us.
Somewhere round the third Werther’s, Raj started to laugh.
"You absolute lunatic."
"Yeah."
"You absolute, all-the-way-up-the-M1 lunatic. You. Bought. A football club. And now you are off, at five in the morning, in your best mate’s car, to sign a striker on a beer mat. Carbery drew up. From above a Greggs."
"Yes, Raj."
"...Is this the Bitcoin thing?"
"The Bitcoin thing is separate, Raj."
"There is a Bitcoin thing and a football club thing."
"There is, yes."
"...Right. Right. Okay. We are going to Sheffield."
He drove.
We stopped at Watford Gap at five past eight. Raj had a wee. I had an apple. He came back from the petrol-station fridge with a sausage roll for himself and a banana for me. "I am not having you collapse on the M1 from low blood sugar, mate, my ma has views about that," and he chucked the banana onto my lap and we got back in the car.
Stocksbridge Park Steels played their pre-season friendly on a council pitch up the hill at the back of a council estate outside Sheffield with a row of poplar trees down one side and a clubhouse that was mostly Portakabin and a sign on the gate that said BRIDGE STEELS F.C. with the original BRIDGE STEELS visible underneath where someone had painted PARK over an old logo.
Raj parked. He sat looking through the windscreen.
"You have driven me five hours up the M1 to a council pitch, Sam."
"Yes."
"...All right then."
The friendly kicked off at eleven. Stocksbridge in their borrowed kit. The visitors in something that had been a Doncaster youth-team training top three jobs ago. About forty people in the stand and another twenty stood round the rope down the touchline, smoking. I leaned on the rope. Raj leaned next to me with his hands in his pockets.
There were eleven blokes warming up on the pitch in Stocksbridge kit. Ten of them were panels I had seen in any council park on any Sunday morning of my old life. CA 67. CA 71. CA 58, working on his core to be fair to him.
The number nine was not one of those panels.
The number nine was lean, about five foot ten, sandy hair sticking up at the back of his head the way a man’s hair sticks up when he has slept on it wrong. He was running drills on his own off the side of the warm-up, and three seconds into the first drill you could see the lad knew where the goal was the way some men know where their own front door is.
---
Name: Jamie Vardy Age: 23
"Player": Step 7 (Northern Premier League Division One South)
Current Ability: 121 / 200
Potential Ability: 178 / 200 Finishing 16. Off-the-Ball 17. Determination 19. Pace 17. Anticipation 17.
A late bloomer with a murderous engine. Has been told no by approximately every academy in the north of England. Working a medical splints factory on a fifty-quid-a-week contract.
---
Jamie Vardy. Twenty-three years old, on a council pitch outside Sheffield, in a borrowed kit. Sheffield Wednesday had let him go at sixteen for being too small, and the lad had spent the seven years since dropping out of football by degrees.
On a splints factory on the late shift in Stocksbridge. Playing weekends for fifty quid and a bag of chips. Released by his last club after he punched somebody in a working men’s club at twenty-one.
He was three weeks from the man at Halifax Town ringing him up about a trial.
He was four months from a sale to Halifax for fifteen grand.
He was two years from a sale to Fleetwood for a hundred and fifty.
He was three years from a Saturday morning in May 2012 when a man called Nigel Pearson, at Leicester City, would put a million pounds down on a table in a hotel off the A1 and make Jamie Vardy the most expensive non-league footballer in the history of English football.
He was six years from a Tuesday night in May of 2016 at the King Power Stadium in Leicester with a Premier League winner’s medal round his neck.
He was a name I had said out loud to a TV set in a freezing flat above a kebab shop for fourteen years of my old life, with not one human being in the room who cared enough about a non-league striker on a fifty-quid-a-week contract to stay through to the post-match.
The fifteen per cent sell-on clause on the beer mat in the inside pocket of my jacket had been worked out in Edwin Carbery’s office the previous afternoon against every one of those numbers.
I stood at the rope and did not move.
"You’ve gone a funny colour, Sam."
"I’m all right."
He scored on six minutes. A through ball, a check of the shoulder, one touch out from his feet, low into the bottom corner past a keeper who never got near it. Thump. The forty in the stand made the small oh noise people make when they have seen one.
He scored on twenty-one minutes.
A long ball, a header from a centre-half, the number nine took it on his chest the way you take a phone call you have been expecting, turned, took two steps, hit it on the half-volley over the keeper into the top corner from outside the area.
Thwack. Nobody in the stand made a noise at all. They had given up making noises. They were just looking at him.
The half-time whistle went on forty-three. I turned to Raj.
"Clubhouse, mate."
