Chapter 210: Deadwood and Loyalty II

I pushed off the post.

"You are going to have a hard Saturday somewhere this season. Everyone in that shirt does. When you do, remember I looked at the shiny one and I picked you anyway. Carry that into the bad afternoon. It is worth a save or 2, that is."

He nodded, and he did not trust his voice for a second, so he threw the ball back against the post instead. thump. slap.

"Then you had best let me get on," he said, "if I am keeping this town up on my own."

"You are not on your own. But you are first. Get on."

I walked in knowing a thing I could tell no one in that building. That I had held a future in my hands on a single sheet of paper, a lad who would one day stand under his country’s crossbar and be roared at by 80,000.

And I had slid it back and kept faith with a boy whose mother pours the teas.

THE TUESDAY PHONE-IN // BBC Essex, drive-time Caller, Dave from Tilbrook: "...and my one worry, and I will say it out loud, is between the sticks. Braithwaite is our own, a lovely lad, we all want him to be the one. But this is League One now. You would think, with the chairman throwing money up north at a centre-half he cannot even land, he would bring in a seasoned number 1 just to be safe." Host: "There was a young keeper on offer, I hear. Off a big club. Tilbrook said no to him." Caller: "Said no! You take the insurance, do you not. Sentiment is grand in May. It will not claw one out of the top corner in February."

The caller was right that a hard February would come. He had no way of knowing I had already looked the insurance in the face, and picked our own lad over it, with my eyes open.

That was one lad, and one shirt. The bigger version of the same idea was sat in the academy portacabin, and it had a rulebook circling it like a gull round a bag of chips.

Robbie Doyle runs our academy. He was a player here once, a hard midfielder with a soft eye for a young one, and when his knees went I gave him the boys to look after. It turned out to be the best signing I never paid for.

He was waiting in my office on the Friday with a letter in his hand and a face like a wet weekend.

"Another one," he said, and put it on the desk. "A Category 1 academy. Same as June. They are asking after our boy again. The clever one, the one in the hole."

I had no need to read the letter to know the name it did not quite say. Bailey Quinn. 17 years old that summer. I had watched him since he was a slip of a thing of 7, playing 3 age groups up because nobody his own size could get near him.

"They cannot just take him," I said.

"They can come close to it, and you know they can." Doyle sat down heavy. "The way the rules are written, a big-category club can put a fixed price on a boy who has not signed with us proper."

"Compensation."

"That is the word for it. A tribunal number, and the tribunal number for a boy his age is a few tens of thousands. Pocket money."

He turned his cap in his hands.

"They can buy the best 17-year-old this club has produced in 30 years for the price of a used car, and there is not a thing in the book I can wave to stop them. Unless."

"Unless he is tied to us proper."

"He turned 17 in the summer. He can sign a professional contract now, a real one, the longest the rules will let a lad his age put his name to." Doyle looked at me.

"Do that, and the cheap price goes away. He is ours, and anyone who wants him has to buy him off us at what he is worth."

Maureen came up while he was still talking, green book under her arm, because she had known this was the Friday it landed.

"I have done the money on it," she said, sitting, opening the book to the page. "The wage on a boy of 17 is not the thing that frightens me. The thing that frightens me is the other column."

"Say it."

"If we let him walk for a tribunal number, we lose him for tens of thousands." tap of her nail on the figure. "If we keep him, and he is a tenth of what Doyle here says he is, he is worth more to this club than the ground we play on."

"You cannot write that in the book."

"I cannot write it, because it has not happened. But I can write that letting him go cheap would be the worst piece of business I have watched this club nearly do in 19 years."

I sat with the 2 of them, and I did the sum none of their columns could carry.

I knew what Bailey Quinn became. I knew it the way I knew the coin sat on my laptop was going to be worth a training ground by spring and a small fortune by the winter after.

I had watched the boy grow into a player whose name would mean something a long way from Marsh Road, in seasons that had not started yet. I could no more set his true number down on paper than I could tell the 2 of them where the money for Sheffield was coming from.

"Get the boy in," I said. "And his mum. This afternoon. We are not losing him for pocket money. We are tying him to this club for as long as the rulebook lets me hold a pen."

WHAT LOYALTY COSTS // WHAT IT KEEPS Baz Tucker. Cost: a wage carried a year too long, and the hard morning where I had to be the man who ended it. Keeps: a testimonial, a soft landing 20 minutes from his door, and a club its old servants leave standing up. That is worth more than a wage to the next man deciding whether to give you 12 years. The keeper on the sheet. Cost: I passed on a boy who will keep goal for his country, for the length of a decade, on nights the whole nation stops to watch. The one time in all this business the price was a thing only I could see. Keeps: a 22-year-old off our own training pitch who now knows, in his hands, that his club chose him over the shiny one. Worth a save or 2 in February, and worth everything to the boys behind him watching how their club treats its own. Bailey Quinn. Cost: a professional wage on a 17-year-old, and a fight with a rulebook the big clubs wrote to strip the small ones bare. Keeps: the best boy this town has made in 30 years, tied down before the men who take these boys for buttons could get their price in. And a word, to every mother in this town with a gifted lad, that here they do not sell your son off cheap.

Quinn came in at 4 with his mum in her good coat and his own hands shoved in his pockets, all elbows and cheekbones and 17 years of not knowing yet how good he was going to be.

I did not tell him. That was the one thing I would not do, not to him, not to his mother, not to Doyle sat proud in the corner.

You do not put that weight on a lad of 17. You let him find out the size of himself a season at a time, the honest way.

"Your boy," I said to his mum, "has been at this club since he was 7. I have watched every year of it. I am not going to sit here and blow smoke at you about what he might be. You have heard enough of that off enough clubs this summer to last you."

"We have," she said, careful, a woman who had been circled by sharper men than me all July. "Big ones. With big cars in the car park."

"I have got a Vauxhall and a leaky stand." I slid the contract to the boy. "What I have got that they have not is that I have not once, in 2 years, been wrong about a footballer when it mattered."

"That is a large thing to say to a mother."

"It is. And I would not have said it otherwise." I tapped the paper. "I want him here. Not for a season. For the years that matter."

The boy looked at the length of the deal and then up at me.

"This is the longest one the rules let me put in front of a lad your age," I told him. "I am putting it there because I would sooner build this club around you than sell you to buy 3 of somebody else’s."

Quinn looked at his mum. His mum looked at me, and then at Doyle, who gave her the smallest nod, the nod of a man who had sat in her kitchen and meant every word he said there.

"Read it, Bailey," she told him. "Read all of it. Then sign your name."

He read it. He signed it. scratch of the pen, slow, a boy writing his name on the first real thing he had ever been offered.

And I watched a Category 1 academy’s cheap price turn to smoke over the desk, and I kept most of what I felt to myself.

"There is a bigger thing behind this," Maureen said, once the boy and his mum had gone floating down the corridor. "You know there is. We can hold this one. We cannot hold the next one, or the one after, not one at a time, not for ever. They will keep coming with their letters."

"Then we raise the academy," I said. "The category. We climb it, the same as the team climbs, over 3 years."

"With money we do not have."