Chapter 877 - 877: First Red

I found Aaron on Wednesday morning out on Pitch Three. He was alone with a bag of balls; suspended players still have to train, even when they feel like ghosts to the rest of the squad. He is twenty years old. He had just been sent off for the first time in his life, roughly thirty-six hours earlier.

"Gaffer."

"Sit down."

He sat down on a ball. It rolled out from under him, forcing him to plant a bare hand in the damp grass to steady himself.

"Have you read any of it?"

"Some."

"Right. Then let me get all the way to the end of my piece before you say anything."

He nodded.

"It was a straight red card. Michael Oliver got it right. I would have demanded the exact same call if Salah had done it to you, and I am not about to stand in a press room and claim a referee was wrong just to protect a twenty-year-old's feelings."

"I know it was a red."

"I haven't finished. You did nothing wrong. Both of those facts are true at the exact same time. Every man who has ever played your position understands both of them, and most of the journalists writing about you this week do not. Your sending off is going to be the opening line of every article written about you for a month, and there is nothing either of us can do about it."

"Is that everything?"

"No." I stopped there, because this next part was the only thing that actually mattered. "You ran fifteen yards backwards, Aaron."

"I know."

"No, you don't. You have watched the replay forty times and all you've watched is yourself getting sent off." I sat down on the grass directly in front of him. I have done that maybe twice in fifteen months.

"Watch it again, but start the tape four seconds earlier. Firmino turns Mamadou, the ball goes through, and you are fifteen yards on the wrong side of him. Mohamed Salah is the fastest human being in this division. The play is dead. Every other full-back in England lets that go, jogs back, and gets polite applause from the stands for making an effort."

"I got a toe on it."

"You dispossessed Mohamed Salah at an absolute sprint from fifteen yards behind him. Oliver didn't send you off for the tackle. He gave you a straight red because four-tenths of a second later, your standing leg scythed through the back of his ankles. And it went through them because you were doing twenty miles an hour and physics dictated you couldn't stop."

He pulled up a tuft of grass and dropped it back to the dirt.

"There are maybe three defenders in Europe who can make up that kind of ground," I told him, "and one of them is currently sitting in front of me on a football. They have written that you were taught to cheat. Nobody can be taught what you did on Monday night. You either have the heart to chase a lost cause, or you don't."

"Can I say something now?"

"Go on."

"I haven't been sent off since I was twelve," Aaron said. "I got a red in a district final for arguing with the ref, and my mum didn't speak to me for two days. I haven't been booked more than three times in a single season since. I rang her on Monday night before I spoke to anybody else. She said the exact same thing you just said, and she has never watched a football match in her life."

I couldn't help but laugh. "How does she know?"

"Because she said I've been chasing things I couldn't catch since I was four years old, and it has never once been about being clever. She told me to stop reading the papers and get back to work."

"Your mother is right."

"My mother is always right." He stood up and picked the ball out of the grass. "There is one more thing, gaffer."

"Go on."

"Achraf plays right-back at Watford."

"He does."

"He is better going forward than me." Aaron said it to the empty goal frame behind me, and then turned to look me in the eye.

"He is going to be very good at it, and everybody in the press is going to point it out. I just want you to know today that I already know it today, so nobody has to pull me aside for a gentle conversation about it in three weeks."

Because it was a straight red, he gets a two-match domestic ban. Watford and Southampton. A Premier League red card is served exclusively in Premier League football. It doesn't reach into UEFA competitions, it never has, and about half the pundits screaming about it on Tuesday didn't even know the rules. He is fully available for every minute of the Champions League.

The red card also costs him a week's wages. That rule has been deeply embedded in the club's code of conduct since April 2017; every man in the building signed a contract with that exact line in it. He got fined on Friday for the first sending-off of his life, and he signed the deduction form without even reading it.

TalkSPORT spent three straight hours tearing him apart on Tuesday afternoon.

Emma Hartley was in that exact building the entire time, tucked away in a room off a corridor, prepping for a new show.

She signed her broadcasting contract in August with a strict 'no Crystal Palace' clause. She warned me about it in a dark car park at half-past eleven at night, five days before any of this blew up.

When it goes wrong for you, and it inevitably will, there will be three hours a day of a station tearing your name apart, and I will be sitting in the building it comes out of. I made my peace with that line between my job and yours, and I won't cross it twice. Leave it alone.

Marcus tried to brief me on Thursday about what the station had broadcast, and I stopped him halfway through his second sentence.

Emma rang on Tuesday night at ten. We spent twenty-five minutes talking about her father's bad knee and a broken boiler in a flat in Dulwich. Neither of us mentioned the red card once. We've managed ten months of that careful dance.

Then, right at ten to eleven, she said the one thing that was entirely about the situation without actually being about the situation.

"Have you watched episode six again?"

"I watched it on a plane over the Baltic on the fourteenth."

"I know. But have you watched it again."

"No."

"Watch the end of it," Emma said. "Not the eleven minutes with your mum in it. The bit right after."

I watched the final four minutes of episode six at half-past eleven that night, sitting alone in a front room in Dulwich.

It wasn't the footage of my mother. I haven't been able to stomach those eleven minutes since the Baltic flight. The final four minutes focused entirely on Michael Cooke, our academy director. Elena, the documentary director, had gone down to Beckenham in March, sat him down in the Under-23s office, and asked him what his job actually entailed. He talked for two hours, and they used exactly two hundred words of it.

People think the hard bit is spotting the talent, Cooke had said to the camera. The hard bit is the other thing.

What is the other thing? Elena asked off-screen.

Telling a nineteen-year-old kid that he cannot do the only thing he has ever wanted to do with his life, in a small room with his mother sitting next to him, on a rainy Thursday afternoon in May.

Cooke looked exhausted in the footage. Gary handles the sixteen-year-olds, and I honestly don't know how he gets out of bed in the morning. My lads are worse in a different way. My lads have had three extra years of believing they were actually going to make it.

He has to have that conversation about seven times a year. He has done it for nine years, and he never sleeps during the last week of April.

Do you ever get it wrong? Elena asked him.

And Michael Cooke, the man I had been standing in front of just that morning, looked dead into the lens and said it.

Every single year. I never know which one it is, and I almost never find out. That is the job.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.