Knowledge Is Money

Chapter 98: In I

Right. You’re back, and you’ve picked the right day for it, because this is the one where I finally get to stand in Ray Sully’s house and try to pull it down.

Maridon away. Second-to-last game of the season, and everything on it.

Quick, because you came for the football, not the finances: one club goes up automatically and that’s Crawley, gone over the hill on a rich man’s money months ago.

The next four, whoever finishes second to fifth, go into the play-offs. Two-legged semi, then one match, one afternoon, for the single last place in the Football League.

Miss the top five by a spot and the whole nine months was for nothing.

And going in, we were fourth. Maridon were fifth. Level on points, us ahead by two goals across a whole season, the width of one Vardy finish. One of us walks into May alive. The other walks into summer with nothing.

And we were settling it at their place. In front of the man who has spent nine months trying to end us.

Maridon is an hour up the A12 and then some, a town like ours that the sea forgot, and their ground is called Old Meadow and it is exactly as nice as ours is not.

Sully’s money had been in it three weeks and you could already see where it landed. New paint on the turnstiles.

A big vinyl banner over the main stand, MARIDON ATHLETIC, A NEW ERA, with a photograph of Sully on it the size of a house, shaking hands with nobody, looking off at a future only he can see.

Bald Tony stood in the away end and looked up at that banner for a long time.

"He’s put his own face on the stand," he said, wonderingly. "Sam. He’s put his own FACE on it."

"He has, Tony."

"Bill never put his face on nothing."

"No."

"Bill painted the gents himself in 1994 and never told a soul." Tony shook his head at the banner like it had personally wronged him. "I hope we do ’em four."

There were 600 of us.

Six hundred, up the A12 on a Saturday, in a corner of a ground that held a proper crowd now that a rich man wanted it to.

And when our lads came out to warm up the 600 made a noise, ROAR, you’d have sworn was six thousand. That is what a season like this does to people. It turns the volume in them all the way up and snaps the knob off.

And up in the main stand, in the middle of the directors’ box, under his own enormous face, sat Ray Sully in a coat that cost more than our goalkeeper.

He saw me, and lifted one hand, not a wave, just an acknowledgement, one chairman to another, and smiled the smile.

I looked at my own boots like a boy caught scrumping, because the man frightens me and I have never pretended to you that he doesn’t.

Then Sadler put his hand on my shoulder from behind and said, "Stop looking at him. He’s not playing. Watch the ones who are."

So I watched the ones who were.

They came at us from the whistle.

Sully’s three weeks had bought Maridon a centre forward on loan from somewhere in the league above, a big quick lad who did not belong at this level and knew it. He gave Aiden Reece a torrid first 20 minutes. In behind twice. A header, thud, we scrambled off the line.

And Braithwaite, our Braithwaite, 21 years old and a fortnight into being our number one, punching one away with both fists and screaming at his back four in a voice that had not broken all that long ago.

Thud of him landing. "AWAY. AWAY. SOMEBODY PICK UP THE NINE."

And here is where I watched a man earn his wages, because I would have got this wrong.

I’d have shouted. I’d have been off my seat bawling at Aiden to get tighter, get tighter, and Aiden would have got tighter and the quick lad would have spun him and gone, because that is exactly what a striker that good wants a nervous full-back to do.

Sadler didn’t shout. Sadler watched, for eleven minutes, arms folded, saying nothing, while my heart came out through my mouth.

And then he took three steps to the touchline and called not Aiden but Cal, and I couldn’t hear it over the noise but I could read it, because he did it with his hands, flat palm pressing down, drop, then a hook of the finger, tuck in.

Cal Murphy dropped ten yards and pinched in off the middle, and all of a sudden there were two of ours where the loan striker wanted to run, and the ball over the top that had been killing us had nowhere to land.

He hadn’t made Aiden braver. He’d made the space smaller. And the ball over the top, the one that had been a heart attack every time it came, dropped instead onto Lenny Marsh’s head, and Lenny nodded it back where it came from, and did it again two minutes later, and started, at last, to enjoy himself.

Sid was on the bench with a coat over his knees, and every time Braithwaite made one Sid was up before anybody, both arms going, coaching the boy through the back of the net from 40 yards. And the boy could hear him. You could see him hear him. It steadied him.

And slowly, because a rich man’s three weeks cannot teach a team to breathe together, the game came to us.

They had a loan striker and a fortnight of money.

We had nine months, and a man on the touchline who could see.

We had Cal Murphy, who has run 12 kilometres a game since January doing two men’s jobs and has never once asked me for a thing, dropping in and picking their midfield’s pocket and giving it to feet.

We had Lenny Marsh at the back winning everything in the air the way he has won everything in the air since he was a scaffolder playing Sunday league, three kids and a bad back and a jaw set like a man who has queued for this all his life.

We had Bailey.

Oh, we had Bailey.

Thirty-eight minutes. Nil-nil, the away end chewing its own knuckles.

And it started with Braithwaite, of all people, rolling it out to Aiden Reece instead of hoofing it, because that is what Sadler drills, play through the lines, don’t gift it back. Aiden to Doyle. Doyle inside to Cal.

Cal Murphy won the fifty-fifty in the middle that he had no right to win on the legs he had left, off the loan striker’s heavy touch, and rolled it, no drama, no fuss, the way he does everything, to the boy.

Bailey took it in that pocket Sadler built for him, half-turned, and I swear to you the whole ground went quiet for him the way a room goes quiet for a man about to do a card trick.

Because even Maridon’s fans had started to work out, over 38 minutes, that the 17-year-old in the away kit was the best footballer on the pitch by a distance you could measure with a tape.

He didn’t pass it. He glided. Past one, past the second man who came to help the first, into the channel, and I was already up, 600 of us were already up, up, and he squared it. Didn’t shoot. Squared it, unselfish, first time, across the six-yard box.

And Vardy was there.

Vardy is always there. That is the entire secret of him and no scout who watches him three times ever writes it down, because it does not photograph.

He was there, in the exact six inches the ball was going to be, and he did not so much score as accept it, side-foot, rrrip, low into the corner, and the net did the thing, ripple.

1-0.

And I lost my mind in a corner of Old Meadow with 600 people from an estuary town.

And Vardy ran, not to us. He ran to the halfway line and pointed both hands at the boy who made it. At Bailey, seventeen years old, who had just walked through a rich man’s team like they’d left the gate open. And the away end sang the name they always sing.

"MER-CER’S BOY! MER-CER’S BOY!"

I looked up. I couldn’t not.

Sully wasn’t smiling any more. He was writing in a little book, and cold went through me even at 1-0 up and singing, because Ray Sully does not watch a football match. He shops at one.

And he wasn’t watching Vardy.

He was watching the seventeen-year-old.

Half time, 1-0, and I did not go to the dressing room, because I have learned, I have finally learned, and I stood in the away end with Bald Tony and Ted and 600 others and drank a Bovril that Murat had somehow smuggled 60 miles in a flask, and Ted said the thing that I have kept.

He wasn’t watching the pitch. He was watching the banner. Sully’s big vinyl face.

"You know what your dad would’ve said, looking at that?" Ted nodded up at it.

"Go on."

"Nothing." Ted almost smiled. "He’d have said nothing. He’d have just looked at it, and then he’d have looked at the pitch, and he’d have known which one lasts." He took a pull of his tea. "Paint peels, son.

Grass comes back every spring. Your dad knew what he stood on. That fella’s stood on a photograph."

Then he drank his tea and didn’t say anything else, because Ted has never in his life said two clever things in a row, and I love him for it.