Chapter 93: Ground Held II
So on the Thursday night I sat in the flat above Erol’s with the chip fryer going underneath me, hiss, and a biro, and I drew what I cannot afford.
A roof on the Bovril End. A stand down the Marsh Road side, seated, two thousand, with a bar under it that takes money on a Wednesday and not just a Saturday. Floodlights that don’t hum.
And then, in the corner, in capitals, the word I have been circling since a milk crate.
ACADEMY.
Because I cannot buy a dynasty. I will never outbid anybody. And a club built on one man’s money dies the day that man does, which is exactly what a barrister in a beige room tried to hang me with, and he was not wrong, he was just early.
So I don’t build a club that needs me. I build one that makes its own. A field that can never be sold, and a machine on it that turns Tilbrook boys into footballers for ever, whether I’m stood here or not.
Bailey was an accident.
The next one won’t be.
I showed the envelope to Stan on the Friday, because Stan has been in that kit room since 1968 and has no reason on earth to be kind to me.
He looked at it for a while. He turned it round. He looked at the back of it, which was blank.
"That’s a lot of drawings for a bloke who owes two hundred grand," he said.
"I know."
"Where’s the money coming from?"
"There isn’t any, Stan."
He handed it back. He didn’t laugh at me, which I had been braced for. He picked up a boot and started working at the studs with a screwdriver.
"Your dad used to draw on the back of his fag packets," he said. "Same thing. Roof on the Bovril End. He had a bar in his an’ all." Scrape of the screwdriver. "Never had a pound to his name neither."
"And what happened?"
"Nowt happened. He died." Stan blew the dust off the sole. "So happen you’d better get further than he did."
Danny Vine was outside the office at nine on the Friday with his notepad and a face on him, and a printout he’d been holding so hard it had gone soft at the corners.
"Mr Mercer, have you seen this?"
Rustle of it. Companies House. Sully had resigned as a director of the Essex development firm that had been coming at this club since October, and he had incorporated a new one nine days ago.
Nine days ago. Before the judgment. Before he knew.
I read the objects clause twice, in the car park, with my breath going up in the cold.
Acquisition and management of sporting and recreational undertakings.
Not land. Not houses. Not a marsh.
Clubs.
"Is it about us?" Danny had his pen ready and everything.
"No," I said, and I meant it, and it was the most frightening word I have said in a month. "It isn’t about us. That’s the point."
He’d already stopped wanting the ground. He’d filed the paperwork for the next thing nine days before a judge told him he’d lost the last one, because a man like that does not wait to be told.
And I asked the thing in my head what he does next, the way you’d flick a light switch in a house with no electric.
Nothing. Grey. Not so much as a shape.
Saturday. Wrexham away, the Racecourse Ground, 5,000 of them and 200 of us, and I stood in a corner of a stand that has held internationals with Bald Tony on one side of me and a hangover that had lasted five days on the other.
Roar of 5,000 Welshmen at our backs. Sadler’s lot did not look eleven feet tall. They looked like a side that had been made to run until they were sick on Wednesday.
We won 2-1.
Thwock, and Bailey made the first with a pass I did not see and had to watch again on Danny’s little camera afterwards.
Vardy got both of them, rrrip, rrrip, twenty-nine and thirty, and after the second one he ran the length of the touchline to stand in front of our 200 with his arms out, and 200 people from an estuary town in a corner of North Wales sang his name at him until they had nothing left.
"MER-CER’S BOY! MER-CER’S BOY!"
They mean Vardy. They have started calling Vardy that.
I didn’t correct them either.
On the coach home I did the other thing I do, which is sit at the back with my forehead on the cold window and look at my players while they sleep.
It comes up whether I ask it to or not now.
[TILBROOK TOWN · SQUAD READ · 40 games played]
Jamie Vardy · 24 · ST · CA 141 ▲ (was 118 in July) · PA 164 30 goals. Match ratings, last six: 8.4, 7.9, 9.1, 7.2, 8.8, 9.3.
Bailey Quinn · 17 · AM · CA 112 ▲▲ (was 70 in July) · PA 161 Since the position change: 3 goals, 7 assists in 9. Average rating 8.1. He has improved more in ten weeks under Sadler than in nine months under you. Forty-nine points of him still to come.
Cal Murphy · 26 · CM · CA 104 ▲ · PA 108 Running 11.3km a game since January. Was running 13.9 when he was doing two men’s jobs. That is not a decline. That is a man who finally has help.
Lenny Marsh · 33 · CB (c) · CA 91 · PA 91 At his ceiling. Has been for three years. Will be at it until his back gives out, and then he will stop, and there is nothing in him you have not already had.
Sid Hollis · 38 · GK · CA 79 ▼ (was 86) · PA 86 Declining. The knee. Ten games left in him this season and perhaps a season after it. You will need a goalkeeper and you have not once thought about it.
Chris Mooney · 27 · CM · CA 98 ▲ · PA 116 Still climbing. Eight more points of him to come and you are not going to be able to pay for them.
One hundred and sixty-one.
I have known that number since a wet Tuesday trial on a public park, and in all the months since, Stan and I have never once said it out loud. Not to each other. Not drunk. Not alone in a kit room at midnight with the boots done and nothing else to do.
We look at each other, when the lad does something. That’s it. That’s the whole conversation and it has been going on for nine months.
Because the second it gets said in a room, it’s real, and it’s out, and there is a man from Fleetwood in my directors’ box with a little book who thinks he is watching a promising winger.
He is watching an England player.
He does not know it. Sadler does not know it. Bailey himself has no idea, and he is seventeen, and he mostly thinks about his moped.
But look at the rest of that panel, because that is my club in six lines and it is not comfortable reading.
My captain is finished growing. My goalkeeper is going. My best midfielder is worth more than I can pay.
And the two who will make this club a fortune, one is 24 and scoring for fun in the fifth tier where somebody will find him by August, and the other is seventeen years old with a number over his head that I would burn this ground down to protect.
Six games. And every single thing I have got is about to be worth more than I can afford to keep.
[BLUE SQUARE BET PREMIER · after 40 games] 2 · Wimbledon ... 81 3 · Luton ....... 78 4 · TILBROOK TOWN · W26 D9 L5 · Pts 77 5 · Wrexham ..... 75 6 · Fleetwood ... 74 Points actually won: 87. The coat is still on. Six games left. [C. Sadler] W13 D2 L0. Fifteen. Still nobody has beaten him.
Fourth. We have gone fourth.
And in a car park in Wrexham, waiting for a coach, Sadler came and stood next to me with his hands in his pockets and looked at the sky and said the longest sentence he has ever said to me.
"Six games," he said. "If we get in them play-offs, and we get to Wembley, and we win it, you know what that is, don’t you? It’s not a trophy.
It’s about a million quid a year through that turnstile, for ever, and a training barn, and them drawings you’ve got in your coat that you think I’ve not seen."
I didn’t say anything.
"So I’ll not be careful," he said. "You told me to go for it."
And he got on the coach, hiss of the door shutting behind him.
Six games.
Two of them against sides above us. One of them, the last one, at home, and I have looked at the fixture list every night this week like a man checking a lock.
If we finish in those five places we go into the play-offs. If we get out of the play-offs we go to Wembley.
And if we win at Wembley, a fifth-tier club on a marsh that a widow gave away in 1923 becomes a Football League club, and the sums that have been sat on my chest since February stop mattering, and I can put a roof on the Bovril End for a man who drew one on a fag packet and never had a pound.
That’s what’s at the end of six games.
[SYSTEM] You cannot buy the dynasty. You have established that. So you will have to go and win it, six games at a time, with an unbeaten manager, a striker on 30, a boy with a redacted ceiling, and a goalkeeper whose knee has ten games left in it. BUILD: still nothing. Come back to me with a promotion and we will talk about bricks.
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