Josh came through the front door holding a plastic M&S carrier bag in one hand and a black leather washbag in the other, like he was checking into a boutique hotel instead of a ground-floor flat on the Moorside estate.
"Smells like charcoal," he said, kicking his box-fresh white trainers off against the skirting board. "And damp."
"It’s not damp," I said, coming out of the kitchen with a tray of cheap sausages and a pair of greasy steel tongs. "It’s condensation."
"There’s a brown circle on your hall ceiling the size of a dustbin lid, Matt."
"The fella upstairs," I muttered, heading down the narrow corridor toward the back door. "His bath leaks."
"Has the council been out?"
"Twice. Fella with a clipboard came round, stared at it for three minutes, and said he’d put it on the system. That was April."
"I’ll send you something," Josh said, trailing behind me.
"You sent me something in June."
"So I’ll send you something in September." He said it lightly, but he was watching my face sideways as we stepped out onto the patio.
He’d been doing that ever since the FA Integrity unit pulled my registration seven years ago. Every three or four months, five hundred quid would quietly land in my bank account with the transfer reference Repairs or Maintenance.
I never asked for it.
I spent almost all of it on the rent so the housing association wouldn’t start sending red letters. I hated every penny of it, but pride doesn’t keep a roof over your head when you’re pulling twelve-hour shifts at a distribution warehouse for eleven pounds fifty an hour.
I turned the sausages on the grill spit, spit so I didn’t have to look him in the eye. A burst of fat dropped onto the grey coals and flared up in a quick, yellow flash of flame.
My back garden was fifteen feet of dying grass going yellow around the edges, a rusted rotary washing line with two wooden pegs stuck to the wire, and a ten-pound kettle barbecue I’d bought off a bloke called Ste in the warehouse.
The estate had been built in 1974 out of pale, crumbly brick, and all the blocks backed onto one another in a long, cramped grid.
Every back garden looked straight into three others. Two doors down, someone had left an ancient transistor radio on a windowsill, blaring out middle-of-the-road pop music through a blown speaker.
Josh unzipped the M&S bag and started unloading items onto the plastic garden table I’d salvaged from behind a pub dumpster.
First came two thick sirloin steaks, wrapped in thick black butcher’s plastic. Then a tub of Greek olives. Then a plastic bowl with a green label.
I stopped flipping the sausages and squinted at the label.
"What the fuck is that?" I asked.
"Quinoa," Josh said smoothly. "With roasted butternut squash, pomegranate seeds, and wild rocket."
I stared at him. "You brought a fucking salad to a barbecue."
"It’s good for you. Complex carbs. Good fats."
"Josh, it looks like birdseed. If Dennis from number fourteen looks over the fence and sees me eating pomegranate seeds, he’ll throw a brick through my kitchen window on principle."
"Dennis is seventy-two and wears slippers without socks," Josh said, pulling two cold bottles of lager out of his coat pockets. He popped the caps off using the edge of the brick wall with a clean clink-pop, handed one to me, and sat down on the creaky metal folding chair.
"He’s got bigger things to worry about."
I took his steaks and laid them across the hottest part of the iron grill, right over the glowing heart of the coals.
Tssss.
A plume of rich, savoury smoke billowed up into the damp Lancashire air. I took a slow swig of the cold lager. It hit the back of my throat, sharp and bitter, cutting right through the salt and grease of the warehouse dust I’d been swallowing all week.
Josh sat back, stretching his long legs out over the patchy grass.
At twenty-six, he looked like he’d been engineered in a laboratory specifically to play modern football.
Broad shoulders, lean torso, legs like tree trunks, and the kind of sharp haircut that cost eighty quid every fortnight in a salon down in Manchester.
He was wearing a plain dark hoodie that probably cost more than my monthly food bill, but he moved with that easy, unhurried grace that only comes from knowing you’re earning forty grand a week for kicking a leather ball around a grass pitch.
"Saw your match against Tottenham on Wednesday," I said, watching the steak edges sear and darken. "Right mess."
Josh groaned, leaning his head back against the brick wall. "Don’t start."
"Two-nil didn’t tell the half of it," I continued, pointing the tongs at him. "You lot were lucky it wasn’t four."
"They pressed us high," Josh said, defensiveness creeping into his voice. "Their front four were suffocating us. Every time the keeper rolled it out to the centre-backs, they were on us before we could turn."
"Bollocks," I said flatly.
Josh blinked, looking up at me. "What?"
"It wasn’t their press that beat you," I said, tapping the edge of the barbecue with the tongs. Clack, clack. "It was your own wing-backs."
Josh frowned. "What are you talking about? Dyche wants the wing-backs offering width."
"Width is fine if your midfielders have brains," I said, stepping closer to the table and drawing a quick diagram in the spilled water on the plastic surface with my thumb.
"Look. Every single time your centre-back picked up the ball in your own third, both of your wing-backs bombed forward at the exact same second. They were fifty yards up the pitch before the ball had even left the keeper’s feet."
Josh leaned forward, staring at the wet table.
"So what happens?" I asked him.
"Your two outside centre-backs are forced to split wide to cover the touchlines because the wing-backs are standing on the halfway line. The moment those centre-backs split, a massive, thirty-yard canyon opens up right between them and your central defender. Right in the half-space."
Josh didn’t say anything. He was staring at the water marks on the table.
"Anyone with half a brain and an ounce of timing gets into that gap," I said.
"Tottenham’s number ten was standing in that exact acre of space four times in the first half completely unmarked. He had enough time to stop, pull up a lawn chair, and order a cup of tea before your holding midfielder even realized he was there. You were lucky the lad hit the post twice."
Josh rubbed his hand over his chin. The defensive smirk he usually wore when talking to media people was completely gone.
"And it’s your left wing-back specifically," I added, turning the steaks over.
The meat was caramelized, dark brown with black grill marks, the fat rendering down into the coals with a heavy hiss. Tss-spit.
"He thinks he’s a winger. He’s never home. He’s pushing up into the final third when your back three haven’t even secured possession yet. That’s not getting pressed off the park, Josh. That’s leaving your backdoor wide open and leaving a key under the mat."
Silence settled over the little garden. Two doors down, the transistor radio was playing an old Fleetwood Mac track. Dennis from number fourteen clicked his garden shears twice in the distance.
"So what would you do?" Josh asked quietly.
"Keep your number six deeper," I said without missing a beat.
"He’s running up to press with your two eight-man advanced midfielders, trying to be a hero. He needs to sit his backside down right in front of the back three and screen that half-space. Let Tottenham press you. Let their full-backs push fifty yards up the pitch to squeeze the play."
"And then?"
"And then you don’t play short passes through their midfield trap like an idiot," I said, hitting the grill tongs against the iron rim clack.
"You wait for their full-back to commit, and then you play a single, direct, diagonal ball right over his head into the empty space behind him. Your right-sided ten has got serious pace, hasn’t he?"
"Yeah," Josh murmured. "Rashford-level over twenty yards."
"Right. So you drop the ball into that channel while their full-back is still sprinting back toward his own goal. Your ten catches it on the stride, turns, and he’s clean through on goal with two central defenders scrambling out of position to cover. Three passes. Goal."
I stopped talking. I flipped the sausages one last time, pushing them away from the direct heat to keep them from burning to a crisp.
When I looked up, Josh was staring at me with a strange, crooked smile on his face.
It was the exact same expression he used to wear when he was seven years old, and I was eleven, standing on the patchy patch of turf behind our parents’ house on Cotton Street, showing him how to roll his sole over the ball for a drag-back.
He’d stolen that trick off me in forty-eight hours. He’d stolen every move I ever showed him, practiced it until his ankles bled, and then executed it ten times better than I ever could in front of fifty thousand fans at Goodison Park.
"You’ve still got it," Josh said, his voice quiet.
"It’s just habit," I muttered, shaking my head. "Anyone who watches ninety minutes of football can see that."
"No, they can’t," Josh said sharply.
"Our gaffer’s got three full-time tactical analysts sitting in an air-conditioned office with three screens each, tracking player heatmaps and running computer algorithms. We had a two-hour video review on Thursday morning, and not one of them pointed that out. Not one."
"Then your three analysts are taking money under false pretences," I said, lifting the steaks off the grill and setting them onto a cracked ceramic plate. "Eat your meat before it goes cold."