Chapter 875 - 875: Forty

[Beckenham. Tuesday 21 August to Sunday 26 August 2018.]

There are 40 names in that folder and 6 of them have my signature on the bottom, and I can remember 4 of the 6.

I read all 40 at 1 in the morning on Tuesday at my own kitchen table.

Sarah had done it properly. Name, date of birth, the date the release was signed off, who signed it, and a column on the right that she had filled in herself and had not been asked to.

Where they are now.

40 lads. June 2016 to August 2018.

Gary Issott signed 18 of them and every one of his is a 16 or 17-year-old scholar. Michael Cooke signed 13 and every one of his is 18 or over. Steve Parish signed 3. I signed 6.

The 2 I cannot remember are a left back from Thornton Heath who was 16 in the summer of 2017, and a goalkeeper.

I have no memory of either form and no memory of being asked. There will have been a Tuesday in a corridor and a clipboard and a man saying these 2 as well, gaffer, and I will have said yes and gone to a session. Nobody is cruel about it. Somebody hands you 8 sheets on a Tuesday, 6 of them are obvious and 2 of them are not, and there is a session at 11.

Sarah's right hand column had something in it for 34 of the 40.

19 are at other clubs. 11 are not playing at all. 4 she could not find. The last 6 she left blank with a question mark against them, which is the most honest thing on the page.

Number 11 on that list is a centre half who went in June 2016, before I was here. He was 16 and he is from Norbury and Sarah has put Sutton United, 34 appearances last season next to him.

He is 18 now and he plays men's football 9 miles from the pitch I stand on every morning, and nobody from this club has watched him do it once. Sarah found that on a laptop in about 90 seconds. It took 26 months for anybody here to spend the 90 seconds.

I got to 26 and stopped.

A goalkeeper, released in July 2017, my signature, and in Sarah's right hand column it says not playing, working at a distribution centre in Croydon.

He was at this club from 9 years old to 17. He has not played a competitive match since a Tuesday in the summer of 2017, and he is 18, and he packs boxes 4 miles from Selhurst Park, and I could not pick him out of a photograph of 6 people.

Then 33. A left sided forward Michael Cooke released in May 2017, a year before he released Ellis Cartwright.

Hampton and Richmond Borough. National League South. 22 goals in 41 matches.

He had 4 for our under 23s the season we let him go and Cooke's note on the file says not physically ready for men's football, and that was true in May and stopped being true somewhere around the following October. He went 12 miles up the road to a league nobody here watches and got physically ready on his own and scored 22, and the only reason anybody at Crystal Palace knows it is that a 27-year-old analyst built a database in 2016 for a job that had nothing to do with any of this and could not sleep on a Monday night.

Bzz.

MARCUS. 01:14.

Boss I know you are awake because you opened the door fob log at 22:40 and the alarm has not been set

I built that release database in 2016 and I have not opened your folder and I do not want to know what is in it

But if it is 40 names then 1 of them scored 22 in the National League South last season and he is 19 and he plays on the left

You have not asked me anything and I have not told you anything

Go to sleep

I did not go to sleep. I was still at that table at 20 past 2 with a pen and a piece of A4 and 3 things written on it, and the first 2 do not matter.

The third one said: who watches them after.

When a boy goes out of that gate, nobody in that building has a job that involves him again. Not Michael Cooke, not Gary Issott, not me. There is no list. There is no diary note at 12 months. Nobody's Tuesday has that lad in it. Nobody here looks again, because there is no job that makes a man look again, and there has not been one for the 15 months I have been running the place.

It is my building, so I wrote it myself, and it was on 1 side of A4 by 3 in the morning. Every boy released going back to June 2016.

3 dates against each name instead of 1, at 6 months and 12 and 24, because a lad who has just gone is homesick and will tell you anything you want to hear, and at 24 months he is a different footballer wearing the same face.

A member of staff whose job it is in writing, with a telephone and 3 afternoons a year. And a door at the end of it, or the whole thing is a spreadsheet that makes us feel better.

The last line took an hour.

Nobody goes and watches a boy whose release form he signed.

I gave it to Michael Cooke at 9.

He read it twice. He had a flat cap on that desk and he picked it up and turned it round in his hands, once, and then again.

"I have wanted this for 4 years," he said.

"Then why have I not had it in an email?"

"Because it makes me look like a man who thinks he gets it wrong."

Tk. He put the cap down.

"I do get it wrong. I released Ellis Cartwright in May and I was correct to release him on everything in front of me, and I have gone over it about 40 times since he scored a penalty in Pennsylvania.

He was a League One footballer in April and there are 4 coaches' reports saying so in 4 sets of handwriting.

His attitude marks were the best in that building and had been for 3 years, and those are on paper too, and those 2 things have never been worth anything to me together because I have never had a way of knowing which one wins. So I went with what he was. What he might become is a guess, and I have got 22 lads in that age group and 4 contracts to hand out."

"And then he came in at 7 in the morning for 6 weeks."

"And then he came in at 7 in the morning for 6 weeks," Cooke said, "and there is not a line in any process we have got that captures it. He was not our player when he did it."

Nobody paid him for those 6 weeks and no coach was told to watch him, and this football club has 1 witness to any of it, and the witness works a barrier.

"Who does the telephoning, then?" Cooke said. "Because it cannot be me and you have just written that down."

"Ron."

He looked at me.

"He has had that barrier since 1999. He has watched every one of those 40 lads walk out of it, and their mothers stop the car and talk to him, and they do not stop the car and talk to you or me. He signed nothing and he judged nobody."

Michael Cooke sat back and put the cap on his head.

"Ask him what he did before the gate. And take that sheet to Gary before somebody else does."

Gary Issott read it standing up, in the corridor, and did not sit down for any of what came after.

"18," he said. "You have put 18 of these next to my name."

"You signed 18 of them."

"I signed 18 forms for boys who were 16 and 17 and I sat in a room with 18 mothers to do it, and there are 4 more that Michael would have had at 18 if I had kept them on another year, so make it 22 if you are counting." He put the sheet flat against the wall and tapped the last line with 2 fingers. "And this says I am the 1 man in England who is not allowed to go and look at them."

"It says the man who signed the form does not go."

"Because I will lie to myself."

"Because everybody would."

"Right." He handed it back.

"Then I will say the part you have not written down, and you can do what you want with it. That list will find you 2. Maybe 3. And the day you sign 1 of them back off Sutton United, every paper in this country writes the same sentence, and it is not Crystal Palace have built something clever. It is Crystal Palace let him go in the first place."

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.