Chapter 97: The First One II
We lost 2-1 to a team that folds in June.
The whistle went and Sadler stood on the touchline with his hands in his pockets and did not move, and I watched a man take the first defeat of his managerial life, 16 games in, and understood that I had been waiting to see what he was made of and I was about to find out.
He didn’t slam anything. He shook the Rushden manager’s hand, a beaten man shaking a dead man’s hand, and he walked down the tunnel last, behind his own players, with a hand on the back of Sid’s neck the whole way, saying something I couldn’t hear, and Sid was nodding and not looking up.
I came down after. I found him in the little office, the one that used to be mine, and he was writing on the whiteboard, and he did not turn round.
"Say it," he said.
"I wasn’t going to say anything."
"You were going to be kind. Don’t." He capped the pen. "I got Hollis wrong.
He can’t do a Tuesday and a Saturday any more, not both, and I’ve been playing him both because he’s Sid Hollis and I hadn’t the heart. That’s on me.
That’s a goal and maybe a season, and it’s on me, and I’ll not do it again."
"Craig"
"Eastbourne away, Saturday." He turned round. "We win that, we’re fine. We don’t, we’re relying on other people, and I don’t rely on other people."
He looked at me, and there was something under the calm for just a second, and then it was gone. "First one always comes. I’d rather it came now than in a play-off. Go home, Sam. Let me work."
There was a thing Sadler had to do before Eastbourne, and I want to put it in front of you because it’s the hardest thing in this whole Chapter and it happened in a corridor with nobody watching.
He dropped Sid.
He did it on the Thursday, in the treatment room, on his own, no audience, which is the only decent way. I wasn’t in there. Stan told me after.
He said Sadler sat down next to him on the physio bench and told him straight. The knee can’t do two games a week any more, and Saturday’s too big to carry it, so he was starting the young lad.
And that Sid was still his number one, still his captain of goalkeepers, still the man Braithwaite would learn everything off. None of it a sweetener. All of it just true.
And Sid, 38 years old, 400-odd games, said, "Aye. About time. I’ve been robbing you since Christmas." And then he asked if he could still travel, and Sadler said try and stop me taking you, and that was that.
Stan said Sid was in the car park after for a bit on his own. Didn’t tell me what he was doing out there. Didn’t need to.
We went to Eastbourne on the Saturday, all the way down to the south coast, 300 of us on a train and a week’s hangover behind us.
Raj had a coach going too, free again, the meter off again, and Bald Tony leading songs down the aisle before Clapham Junction.
And Sid Hollis sat at the front of the team coach in a club tracksuit with a young keeper next to him, teaching him the away end at a ground the boy had never seen, which corner the sun gets in, which linesman flags early.
Giving away for nothing the only thing he had left to give.
I did not know what was going to happen, and I want you to sit with how strange that sentence is for a man like me.
I did not know.
For the first time in two lives, I went to a football match my club had to win, and I did not know the score, and I found something out that afternoon that the gift had been hiding from me the whole time.
It’s better this way.
It is unbearable, and it is better.
Because a goal is coming in this half, and I do not know it is coming, and when it lands it goes off in me the way it goes off in every other soul in that away end.
All at once. Unplanned. A whole body of people finding out the same thing at the same instant, and you cannot feel that if you already knew it was on its way.
Sadler had dropped Sid. Had to.
Put in the young keeper, Tom Braithwaite, 21, terrified, and told him to catch what he could, kick it long to Vardy, and trust the rest.
And on 24 minutes Braithwaite caught a corner clean, smack into his gloves, first one of his life at this level, and threw it flat and hard to Cal. Cal turned and hit it first time over the top. And Vardy.
Vardy was already gone. Always already gone.
rrrip, top corner, 1-0, and he ran to the away end and slid on his knees on a wet pitch in front of 300 people from Essex who had got up at six in the morning, and they came down the fence at him like water going over a weir.
"MER-CER’S BOY! MER-CER’S BOY!"
Bailey got the second before half time, cutting in off the left onto that right foot nobody remembers he has, and by then Eastbourne had stopped believing and our 300 had started that low, rolling, sold-out-away-end sound that is the best noise in football and you only get it winning on the road.
The third was Vardy again, his 32nd, a tap-in off a Bailey cross he could have scored with his eyes shut, and he didn’t celebrate it, just pointed back up the pitch at the boy who made it, which is the most Vardy thing there is.
70 minutes, 2-0, and Eastbourne had one good spell in them, and it fell to their forward, clean through.
And Tom Braithwaite, 21 years old, first league start, came off his line and made himself enormous. Spread every inch of himself across the goal and took it in the chest, thump, and held it, and did not spill it, and lay on it.
And 300 people from Essex sang a name they had learned that afternoon.
Sid was off the bench and onto his feet before anyone, both arms up, roaring at his own replacement like a proud, furious father. "THAT’S IT, SON. THAT’S HOW YOU DO IT."
Braithwaite kept a clean sheet on his debut and got carried off the pitch by Big Pete, whose idea of gentle it was not, and the first man to him at the whistle was Sid Hollis, who took the boy’s face in both hands and said something nobody else heard.
3-0. And a goalkeeper for the next ten years, made in an afternoon by the one he was replacing.
[BLUE SQUARE BET PREMIER · after 44 games] 1 · Crawley ..... 101 2 · Wimbledon ... 88 3 · Luton .... 86 4 · TILBROOK TOWN · W29 D9 L6 · Pts 86 5 · Maridon Ath .... 86 6 · Wrexham ..... 84 Level on points with Maridon. Ahead on goal difference. By two goals. Two. [C. Sadler] W16 D2 L1. He has lost one. It did not break him. Neither did winning.
Two goals. That is the whole of the gap now between us and the club a man who hates me owns. Not two points. Two goals, on the goal difference, after 44 games and nine months and a bucket and a tribunal.
And it comes down to this.
Two games left. Maridon away, next Saturday, at their place, the one Sully bought. And then the last game of the season at home.
If we win at Maridon, it is very hard for them to catch us.
If we lose at Maridon, Sully will stand in his own directors’ box and watch his money put us out, and there is not one thing my father’s covenant or the whole of my magic can do about it, because you cannot win a football match with a deed.
You have to win it with a team.
Which, it turns out, is the only thing I’ve actually got.
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