Chapter 66: The Long Road I
The floodlights at Marsh Road hum for a full minute before they catch, hmmmm building in the dark, and then they come up all at once, fzzt-CLUNK, and the old ground turns from a black field into a green stage, and the 2,900 who came out on a cold Tuesday make the noise a crowd only makes under lights.
There is nothing on this earth like Tuesday-night football. I’ll fight a man who says otherwise.
And out into the middle of it, for the first time in a year and a half, walked Aiden Reece with both feet working.
You have to understand what we’d had off Aiden until now. A rumour.
A left foot everyone swore blind they’d seen do things, wrapped round a lad who couldn’t run on it two games running, nursed through 20 minutes here and a cameo there while the bone decided whether it fancied being a footballer this season. We signed a ten and fielded a limp.
Then, in the warm-up that night, he stood on the centre spot and clipped a ball 50 yards flat onto Sid’s crossbar, clang, dead centre, just to hear it ring. Sid turned and looked at him. Aiden shrugged like a man apologising for a thing he wasn’t remotely sorry about. And I knew, before a whistle blew, we had him back.
[TILBROOK TOWN · UNDER THE LIGHTS · 4-1-4-1] Sid Hollis Baz Tucker · Lenny Marsh (c) · Robbie Doyle · the Crayford kid Cal Murphy Chris Mooney · the new dad · Aiden Reece · Bailey Quinn Jamie Vardy First time all season: 11 fit men, and not one of them borrowed.
Grimsby came down out of the Football League last spring, and they came to Marsh Road like men doing us a favour by getting off the coach. Big lads, proper kit, a manager in a long coat who looked at our leaning white T on the gable and our not-quite-round centre circle like he’d stepped in something.
They were 2,000 people better resourced than us, and they were about to learn it doesn’t help you on grass.
Peep. And we scored on 11 minutes, and it was all Aiden.
Cal Murphy won it in the middle the way Cal wins everything, by standing in the one place two men should have been, and laid it into Aiden’s feet with his back to goal and a Grimsby midfielder up his spine. Aiden did the thing. One touch to kill it, a half-turn off the wrong foot that sent the midfielder to a shop that was shut, and then the left foot, thwock, a pass you could hang a coat on, bending between two centre-halves into the exact yard Vardy was going to be standing in a half-second before Vardy knew he was going there.
Vardy. The man the whole side breaks to. Didn’t check his run, just opened up and stroked it low past the keeper, rrrip, and the ground came up off its feet, and down by the dressing room the barge bell went mad. DONG-DONG-DONG.
1-0. And more than the goal, the sound of it. The sound of a crowd that had watched us get one striker and one hopeful ball forward all autumn, suddenly hearing that we had a passer. That there were two ideas out there now, not one.
Then Grimsby had a go, because Football League sides do, and this is the bit where I tell you about the rest of my eleven, because a team is never only the two who score.
Baz Tucker at right-back is 35 and has not enjoyed a minute of football since roughly 2004, and he moaned his way through 90 magnificent minutes.
Moaned at the linesman, moaned at Bailey for not tracking, moaned at me, and won every single header that came near his old grey head.
Lenny Marsh read their one clever move two passes early, the way he reads the world, stepped across the striker like a man collecting his own post, thd of the interception, and gave it to Doyle. Doyle defended and coached in the same breath, player and gaffer at once, "AWAY, Pete’s not on, squeeze, SQUEEZE."
The Crayford kid at left-back, ankle strapped, 18 and a fortnight ago too frightened to reverse a car, stood their winger up twice and put him in the advertising hoardings once, crunch, flat under Hubble’s undertaker’s board, which got the biggest laugh of the night off the Bovril End.
"HE’S BOOKED HIM IN EARLY, DEREK!"
They levelled anyway. A corner, a scramble, a header flicked back across that Sid got a glove to and couldn’t hold, smack, and their big man stabbed the loose ball in. 1-1. Sid was up off the floor roaring at his own back four before it had finished rippling the net, 38 years old and personally offended, and I love that man for it.
1-1, half an hour gone, and the Tilbrook of August might have folded here.
This one went again.
Mooney got the second, and the whole ground knew what it meant, because the whole ground knew the story.
Chris Mooney, robbed of two careers, one by his knees and one by the drink, stood in the six-yard box on 58 minutes when the new dad, our quiet Crayford midfielder with a three-week-old at home, clipped it across the face on the inside of his boot like he was buttering bread, and Mooney did the last hard thing left in football, which is to be there and not miss.
2-1.
"MOO-NEY. MOO-NEY." A whole stand singing the name of a man they’d have crossed the road from two years back, and Mooney took it with his hands on his head like it hurt him, and I think it did, the good way.
And then, on 74 minutes, we scored the goal I’ll still be describing when I’m Sid’s age.
It started with Sid. A throw, rolled flat to the Crayford kid. Up to Cal, who didn’t even look, back-heeled round the corner to the new dad. New dad to Aiden.
And then it just went. Aiden to Bailey, Bailey inside to Mooney, Mooney a dummy, letting it run, Vardy peeling the back post, and it came across low and Aiden had never stopped running, the ten arriving late in the box like the old days, and he took it first time on that left foot and passed it into the net. rrrip.
3-1.
