Chapter 86: The Upper Tribunal I
You’ll want to be sitting for this one, and not on a terrace. There isn’t a terrace where I’m taking you.
Last we spoke, a cream envelope had come through the door with Sully’s argument inside it, and it said the thing I have never said out loud to a living soul. That the ground only lives because of me. That I am a thing that ends.
I read that line about 40 times over one weekend. Then I put on the suit and went to London to hear a man say it to a judge.
The Upper Tribunal, Lands Chamber, sits in a building off Chancery Lane that looks like a dentist’s and smells like a school. No wigs. No oak. A strip-lit room with a beige carpet, a jug of water, and 30 chairs.
The 30 chairs were not enough.
They came down on a coach the trust had hired. A coach. At seven in the morning.
They filled every seat and lined the back wall, until a clerk in a lanyard went pink and told them the room had a capacity.
"So’s the ground, love," said Bald Tony. "And he’s trying to take that an’ all."
Ripple of laughter. The clerk gave up and let them stand.
Ted, in the 1996 scarf. Murat, who shut the kiosk on a matchday, which he has not done in 20 years. Raj. Three dockers. A woman with a pushchair. Maureen with a folder on her knees like a shield.
And across the aisle, on his own, in a coat worth more than my car, Ray Sully. He nodded at me. Pleasant. Like we’d met at a wedding.
Tap-tap. The Member came in, a man of about 60 with reading glasses and a biro, and everybody stood, and it began.
Sully’s silk was called Pemberton and he was very, very good, and I hated every beautiful minute of him.
"Sir, this is not an application against a football club. It is an application against a restriction, imposed in 1923, by a woman who could not have conceived of the world outside that door." Click of the projector.
A photograph of Marsh Road, taken in the week, from an angle I’d never have allowed. The rust on the turnstiles. The weeds through the cinder. The leaning white T looking not like a crest but like something falling down.
"The character of this neighbourhood has changed beyond recognition. The docks that the covenant served are gone. The barge works are gone. The community it was drawn to protect is, with respect, a memory."
He let that sit. He didn’t sneer. That’s what made it lethal.
"And ground (aa). The restriction impedes a reasonable use of the land. Twelve acres of riverside, sir, in the south-east of England, in 2011, in a borough with a housing waiting list of 4,000 families. Four thousand. That land could hold homes for a great many of them."
I watched the Member write that number down. 4,000. He underlined it.
I’d like to tell you I was calm.
What I actually did was sit very still while my whole body tried to stand up and coach.
There is no touchline in a tribunal. No substitution I can make. Not one useful thing a man like me can do in a room like that, except sit on his hands and let somebody else fight for the only thing he has.
I have never been so useless in my life. And I’d been useless all weekend, because my football club had played 12 miles up the road from me and I did not see a minute of it.
Because that’s the joke of the 14th of March. It fell on a Monday. And on the Saturday before it, Craig Sadler took Tilbrook Town to AFC Wimbledon.
Kingston. Twelve miles from the room I was sat in.
I had the fixture in my head from the day it came out. I could have been at Kingsmeadow in 40 minutes on a District line train, in a coat, at the back, nobody any the wiser.
I said as much to Ruth Ellory on the Friday night, casual, like a man mentioning the weather.
She put down her pen. "You are on the stand on Monday morning, Mr Mercer, and my learned friend intends to take you apart.
So on Saturday you will be in this room, with me, going over your statement until you can say it in your sleep." She picked the pen back up.
"You may go to a football match, or you may keep your football ground. You do not have time for both."
So that’s the day I had. A hotel room off Chancery Lane, a witness statement, and a woman making me say the same 400 words until they stopped sounding like a lie.
Wimbledon. Second in the country. Of all the grounds in England to be sent to on the weekend a man tries to take yours off you, they sent us to the one a town built for itself out of nothing after a man in a suit took theirs.
I got it in pieces, the way you get anything when you’re not there. Stan rang at half-time. He didn’t say hello.
"He’s changed the shape," Stan said, and I could hear the Kingsmeadow crowd behind him, that proper noise a fan-built ground makes. "Sam, he’s took Bailey off the line and stuck him inside. In the hole. Behind Vardy."
"He’s what?"
"I said the same. I said the lad’s a winger, Craig." Stan made a noise. "He looked at me like I’d told him the sky were green. He says, ’He’s not a winger, Stanley, he’s a footballer. And their right-back eats wingers for his tea. So I’m not giving him one.’"
Two videos. That’s all he’d watched. And he’d taken the flaw he’d spotted in the boy’s shoulders in January and turned it into a position.
I sat on a hotel bed in a tie and laughed at the ceiling like a mad man, because I’d hired the right one, and because I would not have thought of it in a hundred years.
"What’s it at?" I said.
"Nil-nil. But Sam." A pause. "The lad’s running the game."
There’s no telly for this division. There’s a man in a hotel room with a phone in his hand.
I sat on the end of a Travelodge bed in my tie with my thumbs going.
The updates came in from Maureen at the ground, who was getting them off Yasmin, who was getting them off her cousin Kemal who’d gone on the coach. Which is exactly how football news has travelled in that town since before I was born.
Nine months I stood on that touchline in the rain. I know the smell of that dressing room.
I know which of them is sick before a big one and which one goes quiet, and I could not tell you a single thing about the most important away day of the season except what a kiosk girl’s cousin was thumbing into a phone at Kingsmeadow.
That’s the trade I made. I keep having to look at it.
Buzz. 62 mins. GOAL. VARDY.
Buzz. Bailey assist. Maureen adds: STAN SAYS THE BOY IS A MAN NOW.
Buzz. 78. Wimbledon equalise. Set piece. Sid got a hand on it.
Buzz. 90+3. Doyle. Corner. HEAD. 2-1. WE HAVE WON AT WIMBLEDON.
I stood up on my own in a Travelodge in the middle of London, in a barrister’s-fee suit, and punched the air so hard I hit the light fitting, clunk, and shouted a word I’ll not write down.
Then I sat back on the bed and put my face in my hands.
I still don’t know, to this day, which of the two things I was feeling.
Because he’d done it without me. My club had gone to the second-best side in the country and won, on the road, with a shape I did not pick, a boy in a role I did not see, and a goal from a corner I did not drill.
A good coach, they said. Just not a winner.
They were half right and the half they got wrong is the half I bought.
He rang me that night. Sadler. One sentence a time, the way he does.
"Your boy in the hole," he said. "That’s where he plays now. I’ll not be moving him back."
"I know."
"You didn’t see it."
There’s no dressing that up, so I didn’t try. "No. I didn’t."
A pause on the line. Not a gloating one. He was working out whether to say the next thing to a man who signs his cheques, and then he said it anyway, which is the whole reason he’s got the job.
"You’re a good judge of a player, Sam. Best I’ve met." Click of a lighter, a long drag. "You’re not much of a coach. You’re too fond of them to be." Another drag. "Win your court thing. Leave the football alone."
And he hung up, and I sat in the dark of a Travelodge with the phone still at my ear, grinning like an idiot at the worst compliment of my life.
[TILBROOK TOWN · after 34 games] W21 D8 L5 · GD +28 · 71 points won On the board after the coat: 61. 6th. On merit: 2nd. The play-off places are in your hands. [MANAGER · C. Sadler · 38] Since he took the keys: W8 D1 L0 Unbeaten. Not one defeat, Sam. Sit down in the beige room and let the man work.
That was Saturday.
