Chapter 247: Last Cup Tie I

The back half of the season opened by asking how far we could travel, and it meant the question with its boots on. A 5-hour drive north, up motorways that went from brown to grey to black, to one of the great old grounds in the game.

The tie had been frozen off its first date in January, the pitch a sheet of iron, and put back to a Tuesday night in February. So we came to Goodison Park in the dark. A small club should only ever come to a place like that in the dark.

hiss of the coach brakes behind the away end. hum of floodlights already burning, 4 white towers over black slate roofs, the ground wedged into its terraced streets like a tooth in an old jaw.

"Would you look at it," Danny Vine said beside me, notebook already out. He had cadged a lift up on the team coach sooner than drive it alone, and he had his nose to the glass like a boy on a school trip.

"A proper one, Sam. None of your plastic bowls in a retail park. This is where the game actually lives. You can smell the 100 years coming off the brick."

"A club that has done it right for a century," I said. "Run sensibly, punching miles above its money, season after season. If I were copying a model, it would be one cut like this."

"You sound like a supporter, not a chairman."

"I am a supporter, Danny. That is the part everyone keeps forgetting about me."

The dressing room was small and cold and painted a blue a thousand away sides had sat shivering in. Sadler read the sheet out, and the sheet was the argument we had already had that morning, the one he had lost.

Kanté had not even made the trip. Maguire was on the bench. Mahrez was on the bench. Half of what had put the champions out a month before sat in tracksuits or watched on a screen 200 miles south.

"Say it to me one more time," Sadler had asked at breakfast, "so that when the press skin me alive, I can tell them I argued."

"Rest the engine," I had told him. "Rest the men the league cannot do without. Play the fresh ones, play the kids, let them have the night of their lives in a place like that."

"We could beat this lot, Sam. Our best 11, the right night, we could."

I had held his eye, because this is the hard half of the job, and I have never once found it easy.

"We could. And then it is Saturday, and 3 of our best are carrying dead legs into a 6-pointer, and we have swapped a famous night for a hole in May we never climb out of."

"I have watched clubs do that exact thing, Craig. Chase a cup run all the way down into the division below. Not us. The cup is a bonus. The league is the rent, and we pay the rent first."

He had not liked it. He had done it anyway, because he is a professional to his bones, and because under the moaning he knew the arithmetic was right.

So we went out under those old lights with Vardy up top, young Quinn in behind him, and a back line of Stokes and a pair of 19-year-olds either side of him.

BOOM of a drum in the home end, and the old ground did the thing it has done longer than anywhere else in England.

A theme tune off an old television show swelled out of the tannoy, and 30,000 of them rose to it. "IT’S A GRAND OLD TEAM TO PLAY FOR," Goodison sang, every word of it, "IF YOU KNOW YOUR HISTORY."

And in the away corner, 3,000 who had driven 5 hours up a motorway on a work night gave back the only answer they had. "COME ON YOU TOWN," they roared into the cold, over and over. "COME ON YOU TOWN."

shriek of the whistle, and the last cup tie of our season was alive.

They had the better of the start, the way you would expect, knocking it about in front of our young back line to see what it was made of.

"STAY ON YOUR FEET, LADS. STAY ON YOUR FEET," Stokes was roaring, herding the kids either side of him, talking them through every pass a half second before it came. thud of a shot from distance, and Braithwaite down low to hold it clean, smack of glove on wet leather.

"BRAITH-WAITE," our corner sang for the save. "BRAITH-WAITE," while the home crowd hummed along, patient, certain their quality would tell in the end.

It told on 19. A move we could not get a boot near, patient and then sudden, a finish slid low across Braithwaite before our lads had done backing off it. crack of the strike, smack into the side netting. Nil, 1.

"GRAND OLD TEAM," 30,000 sang, settling in happily for a routine night against the plucky amber visitors.

I had come down to the front of the away section by then, where I always stand, among the 3,000 and not up in a glass box with the directors.

Raj had a spot saved for me on the barrier and a flask cup of tea already poured, his breath going up white in the cold.

"10 hours of driving, this, there and back," he said, handing it over. "For a tie you have half thrown with your own team sheet, Sam. My wife thinks I have lost my mind."

"Have you?"

"Course I have. Look at it." He nodded out at the floodlights, the old stands, the whole black-and-blue din of it. "I would not be anywhere else on this earth tonight. Nor would you, or you would be up in the warm with the suits."

And I stood there and watched a young side decline to fold.

Quinn took it on the half-turn, on that stage, and he did not hide from it. A touch that bought him a yard that had not been there a breath before. skip past a lunging boot, and a gap opening in front of him.

"Go on, son," I said, to the cold, to nobody at all.

He did not score it. It was his first night in a cathedral like that one, and the chance ran off his shin into a goalkeeper’s arms. But the away end had seen, and the away end never forgets its own.

"QUINN," they began, low and warm, stretching the name out long. "QUINN. QUINN." I watched the boy put his shoulders back and go hunting the ball again at once. That is the only thing you ever truly need to know about a young footballer.

Half time, nil, 1, closer than the board made it look, and Sadler mended it in the cold little room the way he mends everything, low and flat and without one wasted word.

"They are better than us," he told them. "They are. But they are not 2 goals better, and they have just found that out."

He crouched down to the boys, down to their level, the way he does. "A crowd that came for an easy night is a crowd you can turn quiet. So we go out and we spoil the evening. Bailey. You keep doing the exact thing you have done to them all half."

"Yes, gaffer," Quinn said.

"Say it like a lad who believes it."

"We can turn them," the boy said, and the room, half of it kids and half of it old pros, grinned at the sheer cheek of him.

Mahrez caught me on the way back out, 7 on his back and a coat zipped over it, and he did not quite manage to keep the question in.

"Second half, gaffer? I get their full-back 1 against 1 all night in that mood."

"You get Saturday," I told him. "You and Harry both. 90 minutes with 3 league points riding on it, not 20 cold minutes chasing a cup we have had the best of already."

He is 21, and he wants every blade of grass there is, and that hunger is half of what makes him what he is. "Sit. Watch the kids spoil it. Your turn comes when it matters more than this one."

We spoiled it on 58, and it came from the kid, the way I had half built the night to let it.

Quinn dropped a shoulder on the touchline and slid a pass inside the full-back that a boy his age has no business even seeing, and Vardy was through on it. skid of Vardy’s studs as he set his feet.

Vardy does not miss those. He has never missed those, in this run of his life or the one I once watched him live before it.

CRACK of it, first time, low and hard across the keeper and in off the far hand. 1 each. At Goodison. On a cold Tuesday in February.