Chapter 95: The Coat II
I told Vardy. You have to. A player has a right to know when there’s a bid.
I found him after training, on his own, doing the finishing he does when everyone else has gone in, because that is the actual secret of James Vardy and nobody who watches him three times ever sees it. Thwock. Thwock. Thwock. Ball after ball into the same six inches of net. Thwock. Thwock.
"Calderwell bid for you," I said. "Championship club. Four hundred grand. I told them no."
He caught the next ball on his laces, killed it dead, and looked at me.
"Did you ask me?"
"No."
"Right." Thwock. Another one in the same six inches. "Good."
"You don’t want to know what higher football’s like? The money?"
He set another ball down. He’s not a talker, Vardy, and when he does talk it costs him something and you can see it cost him.
"You drove to Stocksbridge," he said. "Nobody drove to Stocksbridge. I were finished, I were doing shifts in a factory making splints for people’s legs, and a bloke drove three hours to watch me play Sunday league and told me I were going to play for England." Thwock. "You’ve not been wrong about owt yet."
He wiped his hands on his shorts.
"So when you tell me it’s not time, I reckon it’s not time. And when you tell me it is, I’ll go, and I’ll not look back, and you’ll get your money." He picked his bag up. "But you’ll tell me straight. That’s the deal. You found me, you tell me straight."
"I’ll tell you straight, Jamie."
"Then I don’t care about a fax." And he walked in, and that is the most James Vardy has ever said to me, and I have signed players for money who I trust less than that man with a handshake he gave me next to nobody in a steel town.
Saturday. Forest Green Rovers at home, 4,100 through a gate that held 400 in August.
There were three men with lanyards in the away end who had not come to watch Forest Green. Word gets round when somebody bids four hundred grand for a non-league striker. Everybody wanted another look at the lad now there was a price on him.
I want you to see this one, because it’s the day the whole ground worked out what was at stake without anybody telling them.
Sadler’s shape, the one I’d never have picked. Bailey off the left into the hole. Vardy on the last man. And on 20 minutes it was the two of them, and only the two of them, one move.
Bailey dropped, took it off Lenny’s toe, half-turned in that pocket Sadler built for him, thwock, and slid a thing through the eye of a needle that I did not see leave his foot.
And Vardy was already gone, always already gone, rrrip. It was 1-0 before Forest Green’s back four had finished appealing for an offside that never was.
The Bovril End did the thing.
"HE’S ONE OF OUR OWN, HE’S ONE OF OUR OWN, JAMIE VARDY, HE’S ONE OF OUR OWN."
They know. Somehow the town always knows. The bid had been in the local paper by Wednesday, Danny Vine saw to that, and by Saturday four thousand people were telling anybody with a notepad exactly what they thought of it.
Vardy stood in front of them after the goal with his arms out and his shirt in his fists, saying nothing, the way he does.
Up in the away end one of the men with the lanyards closed his notebook and put it in his pocket, which I chose to read as surrender.
And Bald Tony, two seats down from me, cupped his hands and bellowed "PUT YER LITTLE BOOK AWAY, SON, HE’S NOT FOR SALE" at a man 90 yards away who could not possibly hear him, and four rows of the Marsh Road end fell about.
Bailey got the second, thwock. Vardy got the third, his thirty-first, rrrip, and pointed at the boy who made it.
We won 3-0.
[BLUE SQUARE BET PREMIER · after 41 games] 1 · Crawley ..... 95 2 · Wimbledon ... 82 3 · Luton .... 81 4 · TILBROOK TOWN · W27 D9 L5 · Pts 80 5 · Wrexham ..... 78 6 · Maridon Ath .... 77 7 · Fleetwood ... 75 Points actually won: 90. Take the ten back off a team that started on minus ten and you are second in the country. Second. You are not going to get to say that out loud to anybody, so say it here. [C. Sadler] W14 D2 L0. Sixteen unbeaten. He has now gone longer without losing than you managed in two lifetimes of trying.
Fourth.
Now do the thing I have not let myself do in front of another human being since August, because a chairman who says it out loud sounds like a man making excuses, and I would rather chew glass.
Take the coat off.
Ninety points. If this club had started level with every other club in that division, the way clubs are supposed to, we would be sitting second in the country tonight, behind nobody but Crawley, who have run away with it, and promoted in all but the arithmetic.
We started on minus ten.
In August, before a ball was kicked, a man in a suit took ten points off a team for the crime of nearly dying.
And we have spent nine months climbing back out of that hole. A striker off a beer mat. A boy nobody’s allowed to know about. A manager I hired off a hunch. A whole town with a bucket.
And we have climbed the whole thing.
I do not get to celebrate that. There is no trophy for second-on-merit. There is no banner. The table in the paper says fourth, and fourth is what we are, and I will take fourth, because fourth is the play-offs and the play-offs are Wembley and Wembley is everything.
But I know. Sadler knows.
And somewhere a man in a suit who took ten points off us in August has watched a club he tried to bury finish above the clubs he did not touch, and I hope it is keeping him up at night the way it has kept me up since the day the letter came.
Five games. Maridon away is the last but one.
I said one sentence of that out loud, in the end. Not the whole thing. One sentence, to Ted, in the tunnel after the Forest Green game, because he was stood there in the scarf waiting for me the way he does now.
"We’d be second, Ted. If they’d not docked us. Second in the country."
He didn’t say anything clever. Ted never says anything clever, it is the best thing about him.
He just looked out at the pitch, where the lads were still clapping the Bovril End, and he said, "I were here in August, son. Stood right there.
When that letter come and Maureen read it out and everyone went quiet." He sniffed. "I thought that were it. I thought we were done.
Minus ten, no money, no manager, you in a suit that didn’t fit, talking about beans."
"You remember the beans line."
"I remember thinking, poor lad, he’s cracked." He turned round and he had that look, the one from the day his arms went up outside Carbery’s window. "And now you’re stood here telling me we should be second.
So don’t you tell me about that ten points, Sam. I’ve carried that ten points up every away end in this league on a bad hip. I know exactly where it went."
And he went off to get his coach, and I stood in the tunnel for a minute, because that is the only conversation about the minus ten that I have ever needed to have, and I had needed to have it for nine months.
And on the Sunday, Danny Vine rang me. Not for a quote this time. Just a lad who’d heard a thing off a mate at the county FA and did not know what to do with it.
"Mr Mercer. That new company of Sully’s. The sporting undertakings one." He swallowed. "It’s bought a club. This morning. Took a controlling stake off some businessman who’d run out of patience with it."
"Which club, Danny?"
"Maridon Athletic," he said.
And I sat down on the edge of my own bed, because I know that name off a table I have looked at every night this week like a man checking a lock.
Maridon Athletic. Sixth in our division. Three points behind us. In the play-off race, on the exact rung below the one we are stood on, run for two years by a bloke who was tired of it and looking for a way out.
Sully hadn’t come back for my ground. He’d bought a place in my own race.
He is not going to knock my club down any more. He is going to try to beat it up the table, with money I cannot match, in a play-off that is now the only thing standing between a marsh and the Football League.
"Is that bad?" Danny said.
I looked at the fixture list on my wall. Maridon away. Second to last game of the season.
"Ask me in five games," I said.
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