I carried that 1 ongoing quest round the distribution warehouse all Monday.
It was the last Monday of August 2025, a bank holiday, and the carpet warehouse on the industrial estate had never shut for one yet. Half the day shift had rung in with hangovers they had gone out and bought themselves.
That left 4 of us and 6 lorries. Rolled underlay, rubber matting, wooden crates with the lids nailed down.
The sky out past the loading bay doors was the colour of wet slate. The radio on the packing desk was arguing about Manchester City’s 115 charges, whether the verdict was ever coming, and whether anybody would take a title off them if it did.
The other argument was the transfer window. It shut at 7 o’clock on Monday 1 September, a week tonight, and 2 lads on the packing line had Burnley signing somebody before it did.
I hadn’t rung in. The green line sat under everything I touched.
[Ongoing: Complete a full training session (0/1)]
Every pallet I broke down, every crate I swung onto the roller line, thunk, I was working out what a full training session meant to the thing in my head.
Did 90 minutes under floodlights count? Did I have to run it myself, or was standing on the grass while Lommo blew his chrome whistle enough to tick it off?
It hadn’t said. It had given me a target and a number, and the number was 0.
The ache behind my eyes had gone by the time I woke up. What it left behind was the row at the bottom of the box.
First and final.
I had read that row 30 times in the dark before I got to sleep, and at 6 in the morning I was still reading it, stood in the same spot at the same counter waiting for the kettle.
The shift horn went across the floor at 2. I clocked off at the machine by the fire exit, got out of my steel toes in the locker room, and walked the 3 blocks back to the Moorside.
I stood under the shower until the hot water gave out and scrubbed the cardboard dust out of my knuckles. Then I put on the only shirt I own with a collar.
It is dark blue cotton, bought for a teammate’s wedding 4 years ago, and it sat tight across the shoulders now. 5 years of crates will do that. I zipped the grey fleece over the top so nobody on the street would see how tight.
The bus runs the Sunday timetable on a bank holiday, and the 502 up the valley takes nearly 50 minutes.
I sold the hatchback the year of the hearing, in the 6 months between the brown envelope coming through my door and the room above the function suite in Preston. The bus was cheaper than anything else I could think of on warehouse money.
The carriage was almost empty. Somebody got off at the first village, ding, and then it was me, the driver, and an old lad asleep against the window with his mouth open.
Rain was ticking on the glass, fine and steady, the kind up here that gets into your clothes before you feel it.
I got my cracked phone out and rang Mum. I had promised Robyn I would, and Robyn would ask before the night was out.
It rang twice, brrr, brrr.
"Hiya, love," she said. I could hear her radio on low in the kitchen in Fleetwood. "Are you on a bus?"
"Going up to Ellerby Bridge," I said, with my head against the rattling window, clatter-clack, clatter-clack. "I start tonight."
"Josh says it’s a proper club. He told your dad they’ve got floodlights and a main stand."
"It’s a proper club, Mum. Tier 7."
"Is that a good one?"
"It’s the one I’m at."
"Well." She let that go. "Have you eaten?"
"I’ve eaten, Mum."
"Josh says you had a salad on Saturday."
"Josh brought a salad. I didn’t eat it. I had a steak."
"He means well, love."
"I know he does."
There was a pause. I could hear a game show going in their front room, the little chime it does when somebody gets one right. Then she said, lighter than the rest of it, "Do you want a word with your dad?"
I held the phone harder against my ear.
"Go on, then."
She put the handset down on the formica worktop. I heard her going off down the hallway and her voice in another room, low, and the rain on their bungalow window. It took her 20 seconds to come back.
"He’s out in the garden, love. Checking his green beans before it comes down properly."
"Right."
"He’ll be sorry he missed you."
"Tell him I said hello."
"Tell him yourself one day." She said it the way she would pass on a phone number. "Good luck tonight, Matty. Ring me after."
"I will."
"You won’t."
"I might."
"You won’t. Text me, then. 1 line, and I’ll not ring you back."
"I’ll text you."
I put the phone on my knee and watched a field of wet sheep go past. It went again straight away, bzzt.
Collar on? Stats on the gaffer pls. Doctor’s orders x
I typed Collar’s on, looked at the 2 words of it, deleted them 1 letter at a time, and put the phone back in my fleece.
A joke was what the thing in my head had charged me for. It had charged me for saying it, not for her asking, and 2 words back to her about it would have been leaning on a door I had just been told not to open.
In the bottom corner of my eye the words sat where they had sat since the train on Sunday night, against the wet valley going by.
Reputation: Local.
On Sunday night in the kitchen I had jabbed my finger into the air at that line and thought every word I knew at it, and it had sat there and ignored me. Later, on the sofa, I found out how it wanted to be spoken to.
Its own words. Access, and the name of a page.
I sat back on the blue moquette, shut my eyes and put the 2 words together.
Access Reputation.
Click.
It went off behind my left ear, clean and small, and a panel came down in front of the window like a roller blind.
Player Reputation: Local
Rep Points: 93/1000
Managerial Reputation: Obscure
Rep Points: 4/100
2 of them.
In Touchline Manager you only ever had 1 reputation, the manager’s, with a bronze, silver or gold badge next to it. This had 2 tracks running at once, and they didn’t agree with each other.
The managerial 4 I could account for. Sunday’s session at St Wilfrid’s had paid me Managerial Rep: +4, and 4 was what was sat there. The maths checked to the point.
Where the player’s 93 came from, I didn’t know. My guess was 4 seasons of League One at Beck Road, and 100-odd games in front of a crowd, which has to be worth something even after the back page of the Advertiser had my face on it.
Nothing had come off the managerial line. So Sunday night’s bill, when it lit my kitchen up red for 1 sentence I said out loud, had come off the other one.
Whatever the player line had started at, 93 was what was left of it. There was nothing on that box to show me the first number, and there never would be.
And there was a word on that box I had never seen on a Touchline Manager badge.
Obscure.
It was sat on a managerial line with 4 points, belonging to a man who has never managed anything in his life. So it had to go under Local.