Chapter 209: Deadwood and Loyalty I

Priya made the call to Sheffield at 9 on the Monday, on the little speaker, so I could hear all of it land.

She told them we had heard their number, the entire preposterous length of it, and thanked them for the courtesy of naming it. Then she gave them the line I had handed her at the weekend, that we were still here.

I heard the man on the other end make a small sound, half a laugh at us. click of the line going dead from their end before she had finished being polite.

"They have hung up on us," she said.

"They think that is the end of it. Let them. A man who is certain he has won stops watching the door."

The truth of it was that I could not force the centre-half this week, nor the week after. A signing you cannot win yet is a thing you put in a drawer and leave to ripen, and while it ripens you go and do the work in front of your hands.

And there was a whole half of building a squad that had nothing to do with the men you bring in. It was the other half. The taking away.

Nobody writes a song about that part. There is no tune in it, only a man’s face across a desk when you are the one who has to tell him the level has gone somewhere his legs cannot follow.

Baz Tucker had been at this football club longer than I had.

He was 35, a right-back, and he had moaned his way through every one of those years the way other men breathe. He moaned about the pitch and the pies and the price of diesel to away games. The young lads got it as well, their music, the gloves they wore in September.

He had also never once hidden on a wet Tuesday, never pulled out of a tackle to save himself, and never given me a morning’s trouble that was not about a football match. The moaning was how the man said he loved the place. I had worked that out about him a long time back.

I did not send for Tucker. I went and found him, out on the far pitch after the session, doing his own extra running the way the old pros do when the years start whispering at them. thud of his boots on the turf, heavier than 2 seasons ago, and both of us knew it.

"You have got your serious face on, chairman," he said, hands on his hips, blowing. "I have been in the game long enough to know that face. Go on. Say it before I have to stand here dreading it."

"I am not going to insult you by walking round it, Baz. This division is a yard quicker than the last one. You gave me everything you had in the last one."

"But you cannot carry me up the stairs." He said it for me, so I would not have to. He looked out over the pitch, at the young lads drifting in. scrape of a stray ball he toed back toward the goalmouth.

"I have known since we went up, if I am honest with you. You feel it in the warm-up before you feel it in a game. The lad you are marking gets to the ball half a thought before you do, and half a thought is the whole of it at this level."

"There is a club that wants you," I said. "20 minutes from your front door. Good people, a proper level for you, 2 or 3 years in your legs yet if you drop the one division."

"You have already rung them."

"I rang them Thursday. I would not bring you a maybe, Baz. You are worth a yes off me, and I have got you one."

He was quiet a moment. tick of the sprinklers coming on across the training pitch, and the smell of wet grass came up between us the way it always does at the end of a day.

"Your kids do not change schools," I said. "Your Sharon does not sell the house. And there is a send-off, if you will have one."

"Do not you dare let me go quiet out a side door like I was never here."

"Testimonial. Marsh Road, a Sunday, before the season proper. Your name on the teamsheet one last time, your 2 lads out as mascots, the town in to sing you off." I put my hand out. "You have earned kind, Baz. I mean to see you get it."

He looked at my hand like it had said something daft. Then he took it, and he gripped it too hard, the way men do when the grip is standing in for a thing they cannot say.

"12 years." clap of his other hand onto my shoulder, once, hard. "I came here when we were bottom of the pile and the roof leaked over the away end and nobody in this county could have found us on a map."

"I know it."

"And I am going out the year we are in League One. Do not you tell me that is not something."

"It is the whole of it, Baz."

I walked back in with the deadwood lighter round the squad, and none of it felt like deadwood. That is a word for a ledger. It was never a word for Baz.

Dodds went out on a season’s loan the same week, to get his games. A young lad called Deakin, who was never going to get near this side, I sold to a League Two club for a small fee with a sell-on stitched into it.

I banked the room it made under the wage ceiling and told Margaret to keep it warm.

The subtraction, then. Clean, and kind where I could make it kind.

Then, the same week, a thing came in that was the opposite shape. A man to lend me, for once, instead of one I had to let go.

Wilf laid it on my desk on the Wednesday, a single sheet, and Sid Hollis came up with him, which told me the pair of them had already talked it over and arrived agreeing.

Sid has coached goalkeepers at this club for 19 years. He coached the current one as a boy of 11, in a school car park, with a bag of balls and a wall.

"A big club up in the north-east," Wilf said. "Premier League. They have a keeper on their books, 18, and they rate him like he is made of gold."

"Go on."

"They want him playing men’s football this season to harden him off. They had him in non-league last year and he tore it up. We would be a step up for the lad. A loan, and they pay a chunk of the wages themselves."

"He is the best young goalkeeper I have watched come up in years, Sam," Sid said. "His feet, his hands, the way he talks to a back 4 at 18. You do not see that at his age."

"And."

"And we could have him in for the cost of a few sandwiches, and he would push our lad hard every single day."

I looked at the sheet, and I had no need of the tape.

I knew the lad on it the way I know the turn of the year. Inside a handful of seasons he would be keeping goal for England, on the biggest nights the game can put on, for the better part of a decade.

His hands would win his country matches that other hands would have lost. I could have told Sid every save the boy had not made yet, and the years he would make them in.

And I was going to say no to him, with my eyes wide open, and back the lad Sid taught with a bag of balls and a wall instead.

"What does it do to Braithwaite," I said. "Bring that lad in over his head. The summer he has earned the shirt."

Sid did not answer me straight away.

"It would rock him," he said in the end. "He is young. He would look at a golden boy off a Premier League club and read it one way only. That the chairman does not trust him to keep goal in this division."

"And would he be wrong."

"You would be covering yourself. It is not the same thing."

"It is the same thing to a 22-year-old, Sid. It is exactly the same thing." I slid the sheet back to Wilf. "The answer is no. Thank the club, tell them their boy is going to be a serious keeper."

"That is a special one you are waving off, Sam."

"Then tell them to send their special one somewhere that is not built on a lad who came through our own doors. I know what I am passing on. Better than the tape does."

Wilf folded the sheet without a word. He has watched me turn down players for 2 years and he has stopped flinching at it. Sid took a little longer, and went out shaking his head at a stubbornness he thought he understood.

I went and found Braithwaite myself the next morning, before the others were in. Tom Braithwaite, 22, this town’s own, a lad whose mum still does the half-time teas in the players’ lounge because she likes to be near him on a Saturday.

He was in the goalmouth already, throwing a ball against the stanchion and catching the rebound low, over and over, the way Sid taught him 11 years ago. slap of it into his gloves. thump against the post. slap again.

"You are in early," I said.

"I am always in early. You have to be, when you are the one they will blame first." He caught the ball and held it against his hip and looked at me.

I saw he had heard something, the way a dressing room always hears everything.

"There was a keeper being talked about," he said. "A loan. A good one, they say."

"There was. And I have told them no." I leaned on the post beside him. "You are my number 1, Tom. Not my number 1 until somebody better turns up. My number 1."

"They say he is off a Premier League club."

"I built this side to go up and stay up, and I built it in front of you, on purpose. You are the one I want behind it when it gets ugly in February."

He turned the ball over in his hands. His jaw worked once.

"You could have got him for buttons," he said. "Everyone in the game would have said take him."

"Everyone in the game does not run this football club. I do. A club that sells its own lad short the minute a shinier one waves at it is not a club, it is a shop."