Owen Pilling, 27, neat beard, and he hadn’t said a word to me yet.
He read it early and he held his feet. 4 reps, and he didn’t go to ground in any of them. His standing tackle was the tidiest thing I had seen all session, and he had nothing at all over the first 10 yards.
I gave mine a couple of minutes at the bottles. Owen put his down, wiped his mouth and looked up at me.
"I can play left as well," he said. "If you need it."
"Both feet?"
"Left’s not as good. It’ll do a job."
"Have you told him that?"
"He’s never asked."
"Anything else I should know about you?"
He thought about it longer than the question needed.
"I finish at 5 and I’ve got 2 lads to get to bed before I come out," he said. "I’ve never been late yet."
It was the most he had said since he got out of his car, so I put him on the left for the next 4 and sent Kyle at him.
He didn’t leave his feet once. He stood Kyle up, showed him the outside the way I had spent 20 minutes trying to get into Deano, and when the cross came he got across and put it out with his left off the side of his boot. Not pretty, but it was out.
"That’ll do a job," I said.
"Told you."
Name: Owen Pilling
Age: 27
Position: D (RL) | Full Back
Best Role: Full-Back ?☆☆☆☆
Standout: Positioning 124
Decisions: 88
Composure: 115
88 and 115. He had been stood on the wrong side of a pitch for 2 seasons because nobody had asked him.
I wrote Owen, both sides and underlined it twice.
The third one was Gaz Mellor, 20, the other lad up from the Sunday league, tall and pale, with a yellow hi-vis vest tucked into his trackie bottoms under his training top.
"Where do you want me?"
"There," I said, and pointed at the cone.
He went and stood on the cone. When the ball went past him he stayed where he was and looked over at me to see if he should move.
"Gaz. When it goes past you, you go with it. You don’t have to ask me."
"Right. Sorry." He pulled at the hi-vis under his collar. "At work they go mad if you move off your spot without being told."
"Where’s work?"
"Distribution place on the bypass. I came straight from my shift."
"Which shift?"
"6 till 2."
"Crates?"
"Boxes. Kitchen units, mostly." He looked at me properly for the first time. "Why?"
"No reason."
That made two of us on that pitch who had spent the day moving boxes, and only one of us was going to say so.
The next ball that went past him he went with, 20 yards of it, and left his own cone behind him empty.
"Not that one," Swarbrick said. "That one’s the middle’s."
Gaz stopped dead and looked at me.
"He’s right," I said. "Yours is the outside one. I’ll write you a list."
"A list would help," Gaz said, and he wasn’t being funny.
Name: Gaz Mellor
Age: 20
Position: D (R) | Right Back
Best Role: Full-Back ?☆☆☆☆
Standout: Stamina 112
Decisions: 52
Composure: 49
Every rep he had run so far had come in at the speed of the first one. 112, and he could go up and down that line until the lights went off.
3 of them for one shirt. Kyle wanted me to watch him run, Gaz wanted a list, and Owen had asked for the left side of the pitch and nothing else.
That left the left-back.
Ryan Ashworth, 21, short, heavy through the thighs, and the only natural left-footer among them.
He was slow over his first 3 yards.
I put Gaz on the ball at the halfway line and told him to knock it down the line for a runner, and I gave the run to Kyle. By then Kyle had run at everybody else, and I wanted to see what a man with no pace does about a man with all of it.
First one, Ash went with Kyle and Kyle was gone by the time the ball got there.
Second one, he didn’t go with him at all. He set off a yard before Gaz kicked it, at an angle that had nothing to do with Kyle, and he was stood in the line the ball had to travel down while Gaz’s foot was still going back. Gaz had to play it square instead.
Name: Ryan Ashworth
Age: 21
Position: D (L) | Left Back
Best Role: Full-Back ?☆☆☆☆
Standout: Crossing 121
Decisions: 93
Composure: 80
His legs were slow and his head got there first.
I turned the drill round so he was the one going forward with it.
"Is it right you played for Hallowfield, Matt?" he said, while we were dragging the cones out.
"4 seasons."
"My dad had a season ticket in the Beck Road End. He used to take me when I was 14." He straightened a cone with his instep. "Freezing, that end. He used to put me in front of him out of the wind."
I stood there with a cone in each hand and waited for the rest of it: the corners, the ￡5,000 each, the back page of the Advertiser with my face on it and the word they had used in the headline.
It didn’t come. He picked up the last cone, jogged back to his mark and looked up.
"Early ball, or wait for the overlap?"
"What’s the overlap give you?"
"Winger comes round the outside of me, I give it him, he’s got a yard."
"And what’s your left winger doing tonight?"
He looked over at the far half, where Lommo’s lot were stood in a bunch, and didn’t answer.
"Early ball, then." I walked out and stood in it. "The corridor. From the front of the 6-yard box to the penalty spot, so 6 yards off his line out to 12. Between their keeper and their centre-halves, where the keeper has to come and cannot."
"And if I miss it?"
"2 yards nearer his goal and he comes out and claims it. 2 yards further out and their centre-half heads it into the stand. In between, nobody owns it, and whoever runs into it first gets a free header."
"So the corridor’s about a yard."
"About a yard."
He took 2 steps, opened his hips, and whipped it in off the outside of his left foot, whump.
It came through the rain under the lights, dipped late, and dropped in the grass between the penalty spot and the 6-yard box, at the height where a big centre-forward does not have to break stride.
He hit it in a drizzle, with nobody watching but 6 tired defenders and a camera on a stick.
I knew that yard of grass. I spent 4 seasons with my head in it, coming the other way, against men who were paid to put the ball there.
And for 2 of those seasons I was paid ￡5,000 a time to give somebody a corner so they could have a go at it.
A slip in the 86th minute, the ball behind for one, and a minute after that I was stood in that same yard with my hands on my knees, like a man who had got it wrong.
Ash’s dad was in the Beck Road End for some of those, with his son stood in front of him out of the wind.
I wrote Ash, left foot, build round it, and put 2 lines under it.
At the other end Lommo’s lot were going through their own shape, and a lad with a big voice kept shouting "Man on! Man on!" at people with nobody within 3 yards of them.
The rain had thinned out to nothing. The floodlights had the wet 3G shining like a road.
Phweet. Lommo blew for the last drink of the night.
***
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