Knowledge Is Money

How fast can you get to me, Wilf had said.

Fast. The answer was fast.

I’d told Raj chips two minutes before, coat half on, and I’d meant it. Then Wilf’s name came up over the top of him, and I put it to my ear, and that was that.

Now I was doing seventy up the outside lane, rain coming in sideways, wipers losing the fight.

Tk-tk-tk-tk. Losing.

Wilf’s my scout. Eye like a hawk, car like a skip, out on the road since six most mornings for buttons and love. In six years he has never once phoned me from a touchline mid-game.

He phoned me from this one.

So I drove. Three counties, in the dark, away from a squad I already knew was a centre-half short, towards a striker I did not need, because when a man like Wilf uses a voice like that you get in the car and you ask questions later.

Twenty-three days to Crewe. I should have been home with my feet up, running the plan in my head one more time.

And the plan, if you want it straight, is this. I know what’s coming. Not the scorelines any more, that door shut in June. But the shape of the next few years is still in me, going dim but readable, like newsprint left in the sun.

I know which broke club sells a diamond in January because it can’t make payroll. I know the winter the money I sold in the summer craters, so I can buy a slice back at the floor and shut the lid. I know the boys who are going to be worth a fortune before the world’s clever enough to want them.

I’m not building a football team. Any mug with a chequebook can buy one of those. I’m building a machine that grows the players everybody else has to pay through the nose for, and keeps a slice of every pound they ever earn.

That’s the plan. That’s the whole con.

I just hadn’t known, until a wet Thursday, that the next piece of it was a released kid grafting in the Conference for beer money, three counties off.

The satnav took me off the motorway into the sort of town that used to make things and mostly doesn’t now. I was raised in one. I know the smell of it through a car window in the rain.

Past a dead retail park. Past a social club with the shutters down. A lane. A gate on one hinge. And then a football ground you could drive past your whole life and never see.

Fzzt. Tyres on wet gravel. Engine off.

Tap. Tap. Tap, went the rain on the roof.

One stand, if you’re being kind. Railway sleepers under a tin lean-to. A rope round the pitch, gone slack in the wet. Two floodlights on poles, doing what two floodlights can.

I counted the crowd before I’d got the door shut. My dad taught me that. Always count the gate, son, even when you’re the gate.

Nine.

A woman under a golf umbrella with a flask. Two old boys in flat caps, the exact two who stand at every ground in England. A kid doing keepy-ups against the fence, dut, dut, dut. A bloke walking an Alsatian that clearly wanted to be home.

And off on his own, hood up, a shape I’d have known in the dark by the slope of its shoulders.

"Wilf."

"Boss." He didn’t turn. Rain ran off his cap peak in a little rope and he hadn’t noticed. "You made good time."

"You told me to get in the car."

"I did." Slurp, from a flask cup, eyes never leaving the grass. "Number nine. Do us a favour. Don’t watch the ball. Watch him when he hasn’t got it."

So I watched him when he hadn’t got it.

And for a minute I felt like a mug. What my club needs is a centre-half to take the armband off Lenny before Lenny’s knees take it off him. Not another forward. I’ve got Vardy. I drove out half cross about it.

Then the number nine moved without the ball, and I stopped being cross.

He didn’t chase. That’s the first thing. Every other lad on that pitch ran at the ball like it owed them money. This one drifted, half a step, into the patch of grass the ball hadn’t reached yet.

Reading it two passes early. A glance over the shoulder before it came, click, filing where everyone was, gone into the gap before the gap had finished opening.

All shin and appetite. Boots that had seen better clubs than this.

"Where’d you find him."

"I didn’t. I came for their left-back and he’s honest and he’s nothing. Then this started." Wilf looked at me, and his hawk face had a thing on it I don’t see twice a year. "I’ve watched football for you six years, boss. I’ve never phoned you off a touchline. I phoned you off this one."

One of the old boys leaned over. Couldn’t help it. Football men can’t.

"You watchin’ our Andre?" Delighted, gums and all. "Best thing to come through here in twenty year, and every league club in the country’s drove straight past him."

"How’s that happen?"

"Shrewsbury had him. Five year in the academy, first pro deal and all." He tapped his temple. Tap tap. "Couple of runs off the bench, then they let him go. Twenty year old and finished, far as they cared. So he washed up with us." He nodded at the pitch. "Bangs ’em in every week. In front of that."

He waved a hand at the empty bank behind him.

"Waste," he said.

"Waste," I agreed. I did not mean it his way. I meant it the way you mean it about a twenty-pound note lying in the gutter.

Then the world’s own answer came up faint over the boy’s head, and my chest went tight, because lately it comes up wrong.

[ #9 ] striker · non-league CA 79. Rough. Proper rough. PA... 1 ... 6 ... the number juddered, dropped out, came back PA 160.

[ SYSTEM ] sorry. i’m not what i was. but i’d stake the last of me on that one.

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Thank you to Victor_De_Paula for the support.