Chapter 289: Lesser Hampden I

On the Saturday morning, the new book had one line in it, in pencil, and a left-back who answered the telephones at Hampden Park was 2 days from signing for Dundee United.

Craig Sadler was on the platform at Euston before me, with a flask under his arm and his cap on.

I had rung him on the Thursday night, the way I told Wilf I would. He listened to all of it without saying a word.

"If I am telling a lad where he stands," he said at the end of it, "I will tell him to his face."

"You did not have to come," I said, on the platform.

"You said Glasgow. I have never been to Glasgow." He looked at the departures board. "I am not going for Glasgow."

We had a table to ourselves in the second carriage. He poured tea out of the flask into the lid, glug, and pushed it across to me. He poured a second cup for himself into a paper cup he had brought for the purpose.

Then he held his hand out.

"Wilf’s notes."

I gave him the 3 pages. Wilf had written them in pencil, in capitals, with arrows. Sadler read them with his cup in his other hand and did not drink from it.

clack, clack under the floor, and the backs of houses going past in the grey.

"Wilf does not waste a word," he said.

"He writes what he saw."

"He does." He turned the page over. "Charlie Rudd is my left-back, Sam."

"He is, and I will not tell you otherwise. If you come home and say no, then it is no."

"He played 38 games for me last season. He lost his place to a loan in April, and he never once came knocking on my door about it. He trains like he still has it." He put the pages down flat on the table. "So why are we on a train?"

"Because Wilf went up there 3 times for him. And because Wilf told me the truth about Kane, when I did not want to hear it."

Sadler drank some tea at last. "You did not ask Wilf about Kane until it was too late. You asked him first this time. I noticed."

"I will not do it the other way again."

"Good." He looked out of the window for a while. "Can we pay him?"

"He gets his wages from what the club earns, like every man we sign this summer. A boy on expenses can live on what we pay a reserve. He fits."

"Then it is a football question."

"It is a football question."

He folded the pages and put them in his inside pocket. "I have not seen him kick a ball."

"The season is over up there."

"Wilf is bringing a bag of them," said Sadler, and looked out of the window till Preston.

Margaret and Wilf were waiting for us under the big clock at Glasgow Central at 20 to 11. Margaret had a folder under her arm. Wilf had his flat cap on and a string bag of footballs over his shoulder, 10 of them, the old kind with the panels stitched.

"10," said Sadler.

"You rang me on Friday night and said bring balls," said Wilf, and shifted the bag. "You did not say how many."

In the taxi Margaret opened the folder on her knee and went through it with me, line by line, the way she goes through everything.

"2 years, with the club’s option on a third. The wage is what we paid Charlie Rudd on his first contract, and a little over."

She turned the page. "And Queen’s Park can claim compensation for the years they trained him. The rules set the figure. We will not make them claim it. I want it in their account the first morning after he signs."

"Did you tell them that?"

"I rang their secretary yesterday afternoon. He was very polite." She closed the folder. "He asked me to say it again, slower, so he could write it down."

The taxi went south over the river and up through streets of tenements, and then the national stadium came up over the roofs, grey and enormous, with nobody in it.

Lesser Hampden, where Queen’s Park’s young ones train, is right beside it, at the west end, in the shadow of the big stand. There is an old farmhouse on one side that has been a pavilion for most of a century, and a small covered stand with a few rows of benches in it.

The grass was wet. A fine rain came and went, the kind that does not seem to fall so much as hang about.

Wilf put the bag of balls down on the touchline and undid the string.

"He is doing an extra shift on the phones till 12," he said. "He said he would come straight round."

He came round the end of the stadium at 10 past, at a jog, with a sports bag on his shoulder. He was slim and quick, in a fleece with the name of the stadium on the chest.

When he saw 4 of us standing in the rain, he slowed down to a walk.

"You will be Wilf," he said. "You told me on the phone just to call you Wilf."

"I did," said Wilf. "This is Mr Mercer, who is the chairman. This is Mr Sadler, who is the manager. And Margaret Bell, who does the papers."

"I am pleased to meet you all." He shook hands with each of us, Margaret first. "I did not know there would be 4 of you."

"There would have been 2," Sadler said. "Then I said I wanted to see you kick a ball. Have you brought your boots?"

"I have."

"Then get them on, son. We have come a long way to watch you."

He changed on the bench in the covered stand, out of the rain, and was on the grass in 3 minutes. Sadler walked him to the left touchline and stood beside him, talking, and pointing up the line and into the middle.

"Run the line," I heard him say. "When I lift my hand, Wilf plays it into the channel in front of you. You put it on the penalty spot without stopping. If you stop, I will see it."

"Yes, Mr Sadler."

Sadler went and stood on the penalty spot himself, with his hands in his coat pockets. Then he took one hand out and lifted it.

The boy went. Wilf knocked the first ball into the channel, low and a little too hard, the way a ball arrives in a match. The boy did not break stride. He met it on the run with his left foot and swung it across. thwack. It came down 2 yards from Sadler’s shoes.

Sadler lifted his hand again.

He went back, and went again, and again. The third one Sadler had to step to. The fourth hit him on the shoulder, and he did not move out of the way. thud.

Margaret had come to stand beside me at the front of the covered stand with her folder over her head.

"Is that good?" she said.

"Watch him before he crosses it."

She watched. On the sixth ball he looked up when the ball was still on its way to him, at the spot and at Sadler, and when it arrived he did not look again. He just hit it, and it went where he had already looked.

I knew that left foot. I had watched it a hundred times on a television, in another life.

In the life before, he signed for Dundee United on the Monday, 2 days from that rain. A year later Hull paid nearly 3 million pounds for him. 3 years after that Liverpool took him.

6 years from that Saturday, to the day, he played the whole of a European Cup final in Madrid and won it, against a Tottenham side with Harry Kane leading their line. By then he was the captain of Scotland.

None of that told me what he would say to us in the morning.

"8 out of 10," Sadler said, and the boy heard him across the wet grass. "Now the other way. Come in off the right and hit it with your left anyway. Let me see how you get it round on to that foot."

He did 10 more. Then Sadler took his coat off and gave it to Wilf.

"I am going to run at you," he said to the boy. "I am slow, and I am wearing the wrong shoes. Stop me anyway."

"Are you sure, Mr Sadler?"

"I will not break."

Wilf rolled him a ball. Sadler pushed it forward and went, in his shirt sleeves, as fast as he could.

The boy stood off him, then went in low and quick from the side and took the ball off his foot clean. Sadler kept going without it, and his foot went on the wet grass, and he sat down hard. thump.

"Craig!" Margaret said.

"I am all right." He got up with the back of his trousers soaked. "Again."