Chapter 67: The Long Road II
3-1
17 passes. I ran it back off the tape three times that night. 17 passes and not a single hoof among them, a Tilbrook Town side keeping the ball off a Football League club until it walked into the goal, under our own lights, on our own wonky pitch. The bell rang and rang.
For a few seconds nobody in blue and white knew what to do with themselves. Aiden went down under a pile of 10 men by the corner flag with Cal Murphy screaming into his ear.
Lenny, 33, a captain and a scaffolder with 3 kids, cleared the advertising boards to celebrate with the Bovril End like a boy of 15. Maureen was up out of her seat in the directors’ box with both fists in the air. Stan stood on the touchline with his hands on his head, laughing at the sky.
"WHERE WAS THAT IN AUGUST?"
"DO IT AGAIN, GO ON!"
"BEST THING I’VE SEEN ON THIS PITCH IN THIRTY YEAR!"
I didn’t celebrate. I never do, on the touchline. I stood in it and let it come down over me, and I thought, plain as anything, I get to do this. Whatever the 30th does to me every month, I get to stand here and watch that. Not many men get a second go at a single thing. I got one at the whole of it.
Big Pete came on for the last 10 to a roar of his own, all six foot four of him, and headed everything Grimsby launched back where it came from, delighted, useless in possession, exactly what we needed. That’s the whole team, near enough. The two who scored, the nine who made it possible, and Pete off the bench to nod it clear and grin.
Bailey Quinn, 17, stood in the middle of the noise with his arms wide, and I had to look away from him, because there is a number I know about that boy that I am not allowed to say out loud, and on nights like this it sits behind my teeth and glows.
3-1. Full time. Peep-peep-peep.
In the tunnel their manager stopped me. Long coat, been round the block, League caps as a player a lifetime ago.
"Who’s your gaffer, son. Want a word. That was a proper football team out there."
"I’m the gaffer."
He looked at me. Actually stopped and looked, the way they all do, the first time.
"You’re the chairman. I read it in the programme."
"I’m that as well."
The crowd noise came through the breeze blocks in the pause.
"How old are you?"
"24."
He laughed, not unkind, shook his head, and said the thing I’ve now heard in six different accents. "That’s not right, that. That’s not a normal thing for a man to be doing." Then he shook my hand and went to find his coach, and I heard him say it again, low, "twenty-four, and he runs the whole club," the way you’d report a light in the sky.
He’s not wrong. It isn’t a normal thing to be doing. Some mornings I stand in the cellar with 103 years of Tilbrook’s paper and feel every one of the 40 years I’m secretly carrying. Other mornings I catch myself in the changing-room mirror and I’m a boy, doing a dead man’s job in a dead man’s town and somehow keeping it breathing. Both are true. I’ve stopped trying to make them shake hands.
Here’s where we stood when the dust came off October.
[NATIONAL LEAGUE · AFTER 13 PLAYED] 15 · Kettering Town .... P14 · Pts 19 16 · TILBROOK TOWN ..... P13 · W8 D4 L1 · GD +10 · Pts 18 17 · Histon ... P14 · Pts 17 ... 20 · Hayes & Yeading ... P14 · Pts 14 21 · Eastbourne Boro ... P14 · Pts 13 (drop zone) 24 · Southport ... P14 · Pts 7
16th of 24. Five clear of the drop, a game in hand, and one defeat all season, the one at Wrexham back in August when we led 2-0 and I hadn’t yet learned what I was doing.
Look at that record and then remember the number we opened on. 28 points earned in 13 games. Minus 10 carried in from a courtroom. On the run of play we were a top-four side, and the only thing on God’s earth keeping us out of the top four was the hole a judge dug for us in July. Some nights I do that sum for the sheer devilment of it.
And winning did what I’d promised Maureen it would, back when it was a sketch on a raffle pad. It made money. A 2,900 gate is a different beast to a 400 one. Founder memberships went past 500. The brewery that had spent two years pretending we didn’t exist, the one Sully leaned on, rang up wanting to talk about putting a bar back in the boarded room behind the Bovril End, now there was a thirst worth pouring for. I made payment 4 on the 31st of October out of the takings, in daylight, and my stomach didn’t turn over once.
The regional paper put me on the front of the sport pages that week. THE BOY WHO RUNS TILBROOK, over a photo of me looking about 12 beside the leaning white T. I bought 6 copies for Maureen and told her to burn 5, because attention is a bill you pay later, and there is a patient man across the marshes who reads the local paper the same as everyone else.
I did the quiet thing too, the one nobody in that roaring ground saw.
Gone midnight in Maureen’s office I put a sell-on clause into a young lad’s new terms, a boy I happen to know, from a life I’ve not lived yet, is going to be worth more than a National League club could dream.
Nobody will clock that clause for years. When they do, it’ll buy a stand. That’s the job as well. Building on a Tuesday the thing that saves the club on some Tuesday ten years gone.
Stan found me still there at one in the morning, coat on, not leaving.
He didn’t mention the football. He’d loved it as much as me. He just stood in the doorway under Maureen’s bad strip light, looked at me a moment, and whatever it was he saw, he chose to sit on it for now.
"Go home, Sam." Not gaffer. Sam.
"In a minute."
"You said that an hour back."
I went, in the end. And walking down Marsh Road in the cold, past the dark bulk of the stand and the leaning white T, I could still hear it going round. 17 passes. The bell. A whole town making the only noise it makes under lights.
[SYSTEM] 17 passes. I can only count them. I could not have told you they’d be beautiful. Well played, the pair of you: the boy and the man.
The boy and the man.
Both of us walked home.
