Chapter 23: Chapter 23: The Other Side of the Fence
Dinner was in a hall on the ground floor, long tables, food served from a counter at the end, staff eating at their own table by the wall.
Jamie saw the shape of the camp in the first five minutes.
There was a loud table near the windows where the confident ones had collected — boys talking over each other about academies they had left, name-dropping coaches, comparing who had trialled where. A boy called Dylan was holding most of that table’s attention, telling a story that kept getting bigger.
There were quieter tables too. Boys eating with their eyes on their plates. Boys checking phones under the table. Boys listening to conversations they had not been invited into.
Jamie ended up with Miles, a calm midfielder called Tomi who spoke little but never seemed uncomfortable, and a technical-looking kid called Bilal who had opinions about every academy in London and shared most of them before the main course was done.
The conversation was awkward for the first ten minutes, the way it always was — where did you play, what position, who released you, said in the careful tones of boys checking whether the question was safe. Then Dylan’s table erupted at something and the noise of it loosened everyone else, and the talk at Jamie’s table settled into something easier. Tomi had been at a category two academy in the Midlands. Bilal had trialled at four clubs in eighteen months and had a theory about each one. Miles had played for so many teams that the list itself became the joke.
"What about you?" Tomi asked Jamie. "Just Millwal?"
"Just Millwall."
"How long?"
"Four years."
Tomi nodded slowly, like the number meant something. "Long time."
Jamie did not say the rest of it — that four years had ended in a corridor outside an office, with his dad waiting in the car park. He just nodded back and ate.
And then there was the right-back.
Jamie noticed him the way you notice your own position on a team sheet. He was sitting two tables over, seventeen maybe, with the build of someone who had been in a proper gym programme and the stillness of someone with nothing to prove. Bilal followed Jamie’s glance and supplied the information without being asked, the way he supplied everything.
"Reece Mallory. Championship academy until last season. Right-back."
"What happened?"
"Squad cut. Nothing wrong with him, just numbers." Bilal shrugged. "He’ll be top three here, watch."
Reece was not loud. He was not performing. He laughed when his table laughed, said less than the boys around him, and looked like the room fit him.
Jamie looked back at his plate.
Right-back. My position. That is the standard, then.
Near the end of the meal, one of the organisers stood and gave the briefing. He was a grey-haired man with a voice that did not need raising.
"Five days. Tomorrow morning is technical assessment and physical testing. Position work and small-sided games through the week. Trial match Friday." He looked along the tables. "Some of you have been told scouts are coming. Invited club staff are expected later in the week. Nobody in this room has been promised a scout, a trial, or a contract, and nobody will be."
The hall was quiet.
"One more thing. The assessment started when you walked through the gate this morning. We watch how you train, how you listen, how you eat, how you respond when something goes wrong. The match on Friday is one day out of five." He picked up his tray. "Sleep well. You’ll need it."
It was not a motivational speech. It was a set of facts.
Somehow that made it heavier.
The corridor stayed noisy past ten. Doors opening and closing. Someone’s music through a wall. A phone call home being made too loudly two rooms down — a boy telling his mum it was all fine, it was good, honestly, in a voice that did not believe itself.
Miles talked for a while in the dark, about the trials he had been to, the one in Birmingham where the accommodation flooded, the coach at his old club who he swore was the reason he got released. Eventually his sentences got slower, and then it was just his phone screen glowing, and then nothing.
Jamie lay on his back, awake.
He could hear the building settling. He looked at his boots against the wall, side by side where he had put them.
Two weeks ago he had been a released player at a public showcase that nobody watched. Now he was in a camp bed in Salford with a programme number around his neck and a right-back two rooms away who had come out of a Championship academy.
The camp had not even started properly, and he could already feel it measuring him.
He checked the phone one more time. His dad had sent a goodnight message. Nothing new from Garcia.
Rafi’s line was still there.
Body open. First touch out. Forward if it’s there.
Jamie put the phone face-down on the floor and closed his eyes.
He woke before the alarm.
For a few seconds he did not know where he was, and then the wardrobe and the window and Miles’s breathing put it back together. He lay still until the alarm went, because moving first felt like admitting something.
Then the alarm sounded and the room became fast. Socks, kit, boots checked, water bottle filled at the corridor tap, lanyard on. Miles complained through all of it and was still somehow ready first.
Breakfast was different from dinner. Quieter. Less performing. The loud table from last night had gone down several volumes, and most of the hall was chewing and glancing and pretending not to be nervous, which made the nerves easier to see.
Reece Mallory looked exactly as fresh and unbothered as he had the night before.
Jamie noticed, and hated that he noticed.
At half eight they were walked out to the pitches in their groups. The morning was bright and the grass had been cut, and the smell of it hit Jamie somewhere underneath thought, the smell of every trial and every release and every chance he had ever had.
The viewing area sat outside the pitch barrier, a roped stretch along one side where the parents had gathered. Jamie found his dad there in three seconds, standing among the other fathers with his arms folded.
Further along, set apart, Garcia and Rafi.
They were too far away to speak to. Garcia gave him nothing — no wave, no thumbs up, just a steady look that said the paperwork was done and the rest was his. Rafi folded his arms.
Near the far touchline, a few men in club jackets stood talking with the organisers. Not watching the players. Talking to staff, holding coffees, checking sheets. Jamie understood without being told that they were not here for anyone yet.
The head coach gathered the group in the centre circle. Up close he was younger than the organiser from dinner, with a whistle on a lanyard and a voice that carried without strain.
"This morning shows us your starting level. That’s all it is. Warm-up, technical testing, then possession and position work." He looked around the circle of faces. "You will all make mistakes today. We’re less interested in the mistake than in the thirty seconds after it."
The ball bags came open. The cones were already out, laid in grids that stretched across the pitch like a diagram of the week to come.
The coaches split them into groups, calling programme numbers. Jamie’s group took the near grid. Miles was in it. So was Reece Mallory.
Of course he is.
Jamie rolled his shoulders once, the way Rafi had drilled into him before receiving. Body open. First touch out.
TWEET.
The first drill began.
