Chapter 89: The People’s Ground II
Ruth asked her one open question and got out of the way, same as she’d done with Ted.
"Miss Farrow. What does a Sunday morning look like for you?"
"My boy’s nine," she said. "He plays on that grass Sunday mornings. Junior side."
"And if the club relocated, Mrs Farrow?"
"It’s Miss. And where to?" She looked straight at Pemberton. "Nearest other pitch is Corringham. That’s two buses. That’s four pound sixty, there and back, times two, because I’ve got to go with him, he’s nine."
Pemberton, who I do not think has caught a bus since 1985, said nothing.
"So he wouldn’t play football, sir. He’d play nothing. He’d sit in the flat." She shrugged, and her voice went, just slightly. "You asked what it’s worth. That’s what it’s worth. It’s worth my Sunday mornings."
She sat down.
"That’s it, really," she said, to nobody. "That’s my whole thing. Sorry."
And then the big docker stood up. The one I have seen at that ground a hundred times and whose name, to my shame, I did not know.
He was too big for the box. He held his cap in one fist, and Ruth gave him the same gift she’d given the other two, which was room.
"Take your time. Why does that pitch matter to you?"
"My dad’s in that pitch," he said.
The Member looked up.
"Beg pardon?"
"My dad. And me uncle Trevor. Their ashes. By the penalty spot, ninety-eight. We done it at night because you’re not supposed to." He said it flat, like a man reading a docket. "So I’d like to know, sir, and I’m asking respectful, what I’m meant to do about that. If there’s houses on it."
Nobody said anything.
"Do I dig ’em up?" he said. "Do I ask the fella who buys the flat?"
He put his cap back on, remembered where he was, took it off again, and sat down.
Forty-one witness statements in Maureen’s folder. They didn’t need forty-one. They needed those three.
And then Ruth Ellory got to her feet and called Ray Sully.
I have waited two lifetimes to watch someone do to that man what she did next, and she did it without raising her voice once.
She didn’t argue about the covenant. She asked him about February.
"Mr Sully. In February of this year, did you purchase the outstanding debt of Tilbrook Town Football Club?"
"I did."
"Why?"
"It was a sound commercial opportunity."
"A loan of some £283,000, to a fifth-tier football club with, by your own counsel’s account, no assets and no future." She let that hang. "What return did you anticipate?"
"That is commercially confidential." Click of a pen at the Member’s bench.
"I’m sure. Mr Sully, is it correct that the loan contained an acceleration clause, whereby a single missed monthly payment would render the entire balance immediately due?"
"Most loans of that type do."
"And had that balance been called in, the club would have been wound up. And a wound-up club plays no football.
And a field on which no football is played," and here she turned, very slightly, to the Member, "ceases to be used for the purpose the 1923 deed protects. At which point the restriction becomes, in my learned friend’s word, obsolete."
Silence.
"Mr Sully, did you buy that debt in order to manufacture the very obsolescence you are asking this tribunal to find?"
Sully took a moment. Not a long one. Long enough.
And then he smiled, and said, "That’s a very good question."
Now watch the room, because this is where the day turned.
Pemberton’s head came round to his own client, fast, and there was a thing on his face for about a quarter of a second that I would pay money to see again.
The Gazette lad stopped writing.
And the Member, who had not moved his face in three hours, wrote something down and underlined it. Twice. I watched his hand do it.
Sully never answered the question. He didn’t have to. Everybody in that warm, buzzing, badly-chaired room had heard him not answer it, and one of them had a biro.
But here’s the bit I’ll keep.
When Sully stepped down, he had to come past our row, and he knows every man in it, because he grew up on those streets and he has never once pretended otherwise.
And he stopped, for half a second, at Raj.
Raj Sandhu, who has known Ray Sully since they were both seven years old, who has driven him to the station, who went to his mother’s funeral.
Raj looked up at him. He didn’t shout. He didn’t even look angry.
"Ray," he said. "Your mum used to take you the Bovril End."
Sully’s face did something. It was gone before it finished.
"She did, Raj," he said, and kept walking.
Ruth Ellory closed in eleven minutes. I could not repeat it to you properly.
The gist was that a restriction securing to a whole town its only recreation ground, in active weekly use by a football club, a junior side and a community, is by definition a practical benefit of substantial value.
And that a tribunal might look very hard indeed at a developer who strangles a thing and then complains it looks unwell.
The Member took his glasses off and put them in a case, snap, and said the case would be reserved. Judgment in writing. In due course.
I asked Carbery, on the pavement, what "in due course" meant.
"Anything from three weeks to three months."
Three months.
And that’s the thing nobody tells you about a fight like this. There’s no whistle. Nobody blows a whistle and tells you it’s over and you’ve won.
You just stand on a wet pavement off Chancery Lane in a suit that doesn’t fit, hiss of traffic on the wet road, watching 30 people from your town get back on a coach, with absolutely no idea whether you’ve saved the thing or lost it, and a season to go and play.
Sully came past me on the way to his car. He stopped. He wasn’t angry. That’s what I want you to understand about him, because it’s the frightening part.
"That was a good day’s work, Sam," he said. "The scrapbook. That was well judged."
"It wasn’t judged. It’s my dad’s."
"Even better." He looked up at the sky, checking for rain, and he said the thing I have not been able to get out of my head since. "You know that if you win, you’re stuck with it?
A ground that can never be sold, never be borrowed against, never be worth a penny to anybody. Chained to a marsh for the rest of your life."
He got his keys out.
"I’ll be all right whichever way he goes. That’s the difference between us. I’ve got other fields." Chunk of a car door. "Will you be all right, Sam?"
I didn’t answer him. I have thought about it every night since.
Saturday, and thank God for it, because a football match is a thing that ends when a man blows a whistle and tells you.
Fleetwood Town came to Marsh Road, and if you don’t know that name yet you will, because they’re the other lot climbing out of nowhere with a rich man behind them, fifth, hunting the same play-off place we’re hunting.
3,300 in, roar of them when the teams came out. Sadler put Bailey inside again, in the hole, where he’s played him since Kingston.
We won 3-1 and the boy scored two of them.
The second was the one. He picked it up 30 yards out with his back to goal, and instead of laying it off he spun, thwock, and went at them, and Marsh Road came up off its feet the way it does when it knows before you do.
"GO ON, SON! GO ON!"
He beat one, went through the second, and put it in the far corner with the outside of his boot, rrrip, 17 years old, and the barge bell nearly came off its bracket, DONG-DONG-DONG.
Vardy got the third and pointed at Bailey both times.
[BLUE SQUARE BET PREMIER · after 35 games] 1 · Crawley .... 84 · 2 · Wimbledon .... 70 · 3 · Luton .... 68 4 · Wrexham .... 66 · 5 · Fleetwood .... 65 6 · TILBROOK TOWN · W22 D8 L5 · 64 Points won: 74. Take the coat off and that is 2nd. Play-off places: 2nd to 5th. You are 6th. One point off Fleetwood. Eleven games left. [C. Sadler] W9 D1 L0. Still unbeaten. Still hasn’t thanked you.
One point. Eleven games.
After, in the tunnel, a big fella in a Fleetwood coat with a lanyard stopped me. Very friendly. Said congratulations. Said what a lovely little ground.
Then he nodded down at the pitch, where Vardy was booting a ball into an empty net for a laugh with two kids who’d got over the wall.
"Your number nine," he said. "What’s the story with him, then?"
And I looked at a man whose club, in a life that hasn’t happened, signs Jamie Vardy in five months’ time and rides him all the way to the Football League.
"He’s not for sale," I said.
He laughed like I’d made a joke.
They always laugh, the first time.
Three weeks went by. Nothing.
The season ran. We won at Bath, drew at Darlington, beat Hayes and Yeading 4-0 with Vardy scoring a hat-trick in 19 minutes. The town talked about nothing but the play-offs, and I let them, because the alternative was talking about the other thing.
Every morning I came up those stairs, scuff, scuff, and looked at Maureen, and every morning she shook her head before I got a word out.
And the thing in my head, which once told me who’d win a World Cup, gave me a flat grey wall.
Then, on a Tuesday, the phone went at half past nine in the morning, brrring, and it was Carbery, and he did not say hello.
"Sam. It’s come."
