On Sunday night I had gone looking for somebody below Local and come up with nobody. Now there was a word for them. Part-timers, trialists nobody has heard of, and an ex-centre-back who spent 7 years pulling pallets.
I had been one of them all along, on the other line.
The bus ground up the next hill in second gear, grrrr. I went through the rest of the Touchline Manager sidebar, 1 page at a time.
Access Squad.
Nothing.
Access Tactics.
Nothing.
Access Training.
[Training Tab: Locked. Complete a full training session.]
Same quest. Tonight, then.
Access Recruitment.
That one was a guess. In the game, Recruitment sat on the left under Squad, and I had spent more hours on that page than on any other screen in 7 years.
Bzzt.
A wide box opened against the dark glass.
[Recruitment]
[Trial Invitations] (0 Pending)
[Agent Inbox] (LOCKED)
[Youth Intake] (LOCKED)
[Transfer Market] (LOCKED: Level 10 Required)
[Scouting] (LOCKED: Level 5 Required)
Under Scouting there was a small grey line. Scout network required.
The Agent Inbox was empty. Trial Invitations had a little template in it for offering a trial and putting a date on it, with nobody in the box to send it to. Every page was there, sat in the dark, like rooms in a big house with the lights off.
Every lock had something behind it I hadn’t got. A level. A scout network, for a man on ￡12.60 an hour.
In 3 different Hallowfield saves I had signed the same man off that page. Neil Rushton, 33, released on a free, a holding midfielder with a first touch and no legs.
2 years, low basic, the appearance bonuses pushed back into the second season. He anchored my midfield for 50 games a season while the young lads ran the channels.
I know what a man of 33 with no club will sign. I learned that off a laptop. I learned it somewhere else first, and I don’t write that part down.
This thing could make me a manager.
First I had to be a coach.
The 502 came over the top of the ridge and Ellerby Bridge was underneath us in the trough of the valley. Black gritstone terraces, wet slate, and on the hillside past the river, 4 lattice floodlight pylons stood up over the rooftops.
I got off at the Mill Lane stop at 25 to 6 and went into the paper shop by the stop for a pocket notebook with a red cover and a biro, because a man who writes things down is a man who has been watching.
The rain had stopped down in the town, and the smell got me before my feet were off the step.
Inside the fence, Stan was riding up and down the pitch on a little green cylinder mower, brrrm, brrrm, leaving dark stripes behind him.
The grass came off the blades in a green spray that hung there as a mist, and the whole ground smelled of it, wet and sharp and sweet.
For 7 years I had crossed the road rather than walk past a park on a Saturday. I had stood at bus stops breathing through my mouth.
I stood at the cold iron gate with both hands on the rail and breathed in through my nose.
My stomach turned over once, hard. Then it settled.
Stan saw me at the end of a stripe, cut the engine and wiped his forehead with the back of a muddy glove.
"Found it this time, then."
"Found it," I said, and came through the gate.
"You’ll want the Gaffer." He nodded his head at the clubhouse. "Don’t let him start you on the drainage. The drainage is mine."
"Right."
"He’ll tell you it wants digging up. It doesn’t want digging up. He doesn’t know a French drain from a gravel trench, that man, and he’s been told."
"I’ll keep out of it."
"You will if you’ve any sense." He pointed the glove at the brick building by the turnstiles. "Office is through the bar. Knock loud. He’s deaf when it suits him."
The clubhouse door went clack behind me.
The bar was dark and cold and empty, and it smelled of stale bitter, damp carpet and yesterday’s onions out of the snack hatch. At the far end, next to the gents, there was a narrow door with a strip of faded masking tape across it.
OFFICE.
I knocked hard, thump, thump.
"Yeah! Door’s open!"
It was a cupboard with a desk shoved into it sideways. There were 5 laminated posters taped to the brick, the tape going brown at the corners, and the big one behind the desk said WINNERS DON’T WAIT. THEY WORK.
The man behind it was in his late 50s, big-framed and pink in the face, in a navy quarter-zip with Pennine Floor & Carpet stitched across the chest in gold thread. Reading glasses pushed up into a mop of grey hair. A blue biro in his right hand that he didn’t put down when I came in.
I looked above his head. I did it without deciding to, the way you check a clock on a wall.
Nothing.
He wasn’t playing and he wasn’t coaching, so whatever the rule is, he sat outside it.
Robyn would have wanted his stats off me. He didn’t have any, and if he had, she would never have heard them. I would have to read him the old way.
"Kershaw." It wasn’t a question. "Sit down."
There was 1 red plastic stacking chair. I sat on it and it went creak under me.
He tapped the biro on his pad between everything he said, tap, tap.
"Goals conceded per game last season, 2.4. I want 1 by Christmas. Training? Harder. Shape? Sorted. Set pieces? Don’t start me on set pieces. We shipped 11 from corners before November."
Corners. Of course it was corners.
"Do you know what 11 is, in this league?"
"It’s about 4 points."
He stopped tapping for a second and looked at me over the top of the pad, and I couldn’t tell whether I had got it right or whether he had never worked it out.
Then he swung his chair round to face me square on.
"You’re here because Craig Lomax swore blind to the committee that we needed a defensive coach. I know who you are, Kershaw. Everybody up this valley over 30 knows who you are."
"I know."
"You mess this up, or you bring trouble to my club, and it’s on your head, not mine. Understood?"
He was watching my hands while he said it, not my face, waiting to see whether the knuckles went or whether I shifted about on the chair. I kept both palms flat on my knees.
"Understood."
He had said training, harder, and I had let it go past me. How hard a squad trains is the head coach’s call, not an assistant’s, and it is not anything a part-time defensive coach can promise a man in a carpet firm’s quarter-zip. I didn’t say that either.
Neither of us had said a word about money. Robyn would have had a figure out of him before her trackie bottoms touched that chair. I didn’t. Not today.
"Any questions?" He tapped the pen once more.
I had one. How much are you paying me.
"No."
"Good." He wrote 1 word on his pad and turned the pad over. "And 1 more thing, before you go out there. If anybody from a paper rings this club about you, you’re finished here that day. I don’t care whose fault it is."
"Nobody’s ringing."
"They rang about somebody else 2 year back, and he’d done nowt."
Then he went back to his papers, and that was the whole interview.
Everybody round Mill Lane called him the Gaffer. I didn’t find out his surname that night.
Out in the car park Lommo was leaning on the bonnet of a faded silver Corsa, jingling his keys. He pushed the passenger door open from the inside, and the car came at me smelling of Deep Heat, old mints and stale crisps.
I got in, and the door shut heavy behind me.
"What did he say?"
"2.4 to 1," I said.
"He said that to me and all." He pulled out onto the lane. "He says it to everybody. He said it to the lad who brings the pies on a Tuesday."
"Is he the chairman?"
"He’s the club. Chairman, treasurer, and he pays for the match balls out of the carpet firm. He’s been the Gaffer since before I got here, and he’s never coached a session in his life."