My 7 came in off the cones, and somebody had a phone going on the bench with the sport on, a man saying the City verdict still hadn’t landed and nobody could tell him when it would.
"2 years they’ve been at it," Deano said, with his bottle up.
"They’ll get nowt," Swarbrick said. "They never do."
"You know who does get something?" That was Kyle. "Arsenal. Did you see the corners? They’ve got a bloke whose whole job is corners. Jover. That’s all he does all week."
"A whole man for corners," Blocky said.
"They score more off corners than we score all season. It’s a job, that."
"It’s a job," Swarbrick said. "And we shipped 11 from ours before November."
I said nothing at all. The mesh rattled behind me in the wind coming off the hill, hmmm.
￡5,000 a corner, whenever the text came on a Friday, for 2 years.
My 7 got the cones into the bag, clack, clack, and went after the balls that had ended up against the fence, clang.
Lommo came over the halfway line wiping his forehead with the back of his sleeve, his hood up and his oversized club coat dripping on the crumb. I hadn’t seen him arrive. He had been stood there a while, then.
"Well?"
"Functional," I said. "Lopsided."
"Go on, then. Swarbs?"
"Your best reader. Slow across, steady as a rock, reads it before it’s kicked. The moaning’s a habit, don’t cure it."
"Always has been. Deano?"
"Goes too early. Every time. Clean tackles, bad clock. Blocky’s the opposite; he never goes at all."
"Kyle?"
"Quick. Forgets to come home."
Lommo snorted. "Owen and Gaz?"
"Owen reads it and he can play either side, and he’s been waiting for somebody to ask him. Gaz does exactly what he’s told and nothing else yet. Point him and he’ll run all night."
"Ash?"
"Best left foot at this club. Slow, but he thinks quicker than he runs."
"And what do I do with Deano?"
"Keep him. Put him next to Swarbs. Swarbs reads it, Deano goes and heads it, as long as Swarbs tells him when before the ball’s kicked."
"Swarbs only talks after."
"Then we teach him to talk before. He did it twice tonight. He’ll keep doing it if it’s his job and not a favour."
Lommo looked at my hand. "So what’s your little book say about shape?"
I had the whole back line in a book the size of my hand, and I still couldn’t tell him the thing he was asking for.
I shut it and put it in my pocket, and the biro went click.
"Can’t say yet. I’ve only seen the back 4. I can tell you what the back 4 can’t do. I can’t tell you what to build round them till I’ve seen your midfield and your forwards, or I’m guessing, and you’ll know I’m guessing by Thursday."
He grinned at that, the crooked one.
"Fair shout. I’ll give you 2 weeks of mine for free, then."
He pointed at his lot, stood in a bunch round the water.
"Declan Royle, gold boots, right wing. He always wants to come inside onto his left. Always."
"Who’ve you got on the left?"
"A lad who thinks he’s a full-back. He won’t cross halfway unless I shout at him."
"And in the middle?"
"Tatts plays off the striker and keeps drifting out right to get on the ball. And Marcus Hibbert up top isn’t quick, but he wins everything in the air. Everything."
I stood there and put it together on the wet grass in front of me: Declan coming inside off the right, Tatts drifting out to that same side to fill the space he left, and a left winger who never leaves home.
"So your right side plays," I said, "and your left side guards."
He was quiet for a second.
"Tilted 4-4-1-1," he said. "Right side plays, left side guards."
"Your sheet says 4-4-2."
"My sheet says a lot of things." He said it like a man who had been waiting a fortnight for somebody else to say it out loud first. "Sharp. For a bloke who’s been pulling pallets 7 years."
"Just what I saw in 5 minutes."
"Well, don’t stop seeing it." He dug his hands in his coat.
"I don’t want you buried in back-line drills when you’ve got an eye for shape. Send me what you think about the midfield as well. Shape, how we build it, when to go and hunt it, and where the second ball goes, the one that comes loose after the first challenge. Doesn’t mean I’ll use any of it. I’ll listen."
"Right."
"First job, though." He put a finger up. "A defensive programme for that back line. Something they can run every Monday and Thursday till they do it in their sleep. You build that, and I’ll fit the rest of the sessions round it."
He nodded at the right-hand touchline.
"And I’ll run the right side through some rotations Thursday. Test your theory."
"Our theory."
"Our theory. Thursday, 7 o’clock. Bring your little book."
He put a hand on my shoulder, heavy, and left it there a second longer than he needed to.
"Good eye, Matt. Don’t let it talk you into thinking you’ve cracked non-league football in one night."
"I won’t."
He clapped his gloves, pap, zipped his coat to the chin, zzzip, and went back across the halfway line shouting at somebody about a water bottle on the grass.
I stood at the edge of the 3G in the wind with my 7 packing up behind me.
Blocky was carrying 3 bags of balls at once because nobody had told him to put any of them down. Swarbrick had Deano by the elbow, showing him something about where his feet go when he heads it.
Kyle was sat on the bench on his own with his boot off and his hand round the back of his leg, pressing at the hamstring and letting go and pressing it again.
He had gone flat out on the last sprint with me stood watching him.
"You alright?"
"Tight," he said. "It’ll be right by Thursday."
His hand was back on it before he finished the sentence. I wrote Kyle: hamstring.
Out by the penalty spot, Ash was hitting the cross again on his own into an empty box, whump, and it dropped in the same yard of grass it had dropped in before.
Then the boxes came up over the wet turf.
[Quest Completed: Complete a full training session]
Reward: 25 EXP, Training Tab Unlocked
[Training Session Reward]
EXP: 4
Managerial Reputation: +2
I stood and read them twice with the rain coming back on.
Stan came past with the tripod over his shoulder and the camera under his arm, the light off now.
"Good session, that," he said. "You had them talking to each other. They’ve not done that since March."
"They talked. I just told them when."
"Aye, well." He stopped and got a better hold of it. "It’s all on there, you know. Every yard of it, from the halfway line. A year, they keep it."
He went off towards the clubhouse with it, and I stood there in the wind and thought about a camera that had been running the whole time I was telling 7 men things I should not have been able to see.
The floodlights over St Wilfrid’s were still humming when they went out, one bank at a time, clunk, clunk, and the valley came back black behind them.
I had a page in my head I hadn’t opened, and a programme to build by Thursday.
I put my hood up and left them to lock the gate.