Chapter 294: The Coach II

On the other half Doyle had a whistle round his neck and used it. peep. “WIDE! GET WIDE, SON! WIDER THAN THAT!”

Liam had not touched the ball once.

Joe stopped Liam’s game.

“New rule,” he said. “A goal counts double if everybody on your team has touched the ball first. Everybody. Liam as well.”

“That is not fair,” said the tall girl.

“Why not?”

“Because he cannot pass it.”

“Teach him,” said Joe. “You can read it better than anybody here. I watched you. Show me you can read Liam.”

She stood with her hair in her face and her arms folded. Then she let them drop, went and stood next to Liam, and told him where to go.

Beside me, Sadler put his hands on his knees.

The game started again. The ball went round all 5 of them, slowly, with the tall girl pointing, and the last pass was Liam’s. It rolled to her off his shin and she scored. thump of the ball between the cones and into the fence behind.

Joe went down on one knee, the good one, and held up 2 fingers to the boy.

“Double,” he said. “That is double, Liam.”

Liam stood in the middle of the pitch with his arms straight up in the air. His mother was at the fence with her hand over her mouth, and the father beside her had stopped talking into his phone.

Sadler did not say a word for the rest of the hour. Joe moved the cones twice and changed the teams once. Every few minutes he stopped a game with a question. “Where was the space? Who saw it? Amy, did you see it? Liam, did you see it?”

At 7 the scheme handed out squash and biscuits, and the parents came through the gate to collect their children. Liam went past us at a run with his mother, telling her about the double.

Joe was stooping by the far goal, picking up cones.

“Go and get him,” Sadler said to me. “I want 5 minutes.”

Joe came back across the pitch with his bag in his hand and sat on the bench when Sadler pointed at it. Sadler stayed standing. I stood a little way off, by the corner flag, where I could hear.

“What did you see?” said Sadler.

“The girl is better than every boy out there, and nobody has told her what to do with it yet.” Joe put the bag down between his feet. “The round lad will be a keeper. He dived at everything and caught nothing and wanted the next one. And you watched me from the first minute.”

“When I am wrong, what do you do?”

“I tell you, in your office with the door shut. I will never do it on the grass in front of the players.”

“And when they are wrong?”

“I ask them what they saw. After that I tell them.”

“I tell them,” said Sadler. “I do not ask.”

“I watched your side at Wembley on the television.” Joe looked up at him. “Before the penalties you went out to the centre circle with a sheet of paper, and you did not ask anybody anything. Was there one name on it you were not sure of?”

Sadler did not answer that. Somewhere behind the clubhouse a car started, and went.

“Monday the 1st of July,” he said. “8 o’clock. You start then. Bring those cones. Ours are split.” He took his car keys out of his trouser pocket. “Dev will look at that knee on the first morning.”

He walked off up the path towards the car park.

Joe sat on the bench and rubbed the knee with the heel of his hand, and looked at the empty pitch.

“He did not ask me what I wanted paying,” he said.

“Margaret will. Tomorrow morning, in her office, with the contract.”

“Is she hard?”

“She is fair. She put you in with the players’ wages this afternoon, before he had even met you.”

Joe nodded. He zipped the bag shut and went down the pitch to help Doyle with the balls. Doyle met him halfway, and I could hear every word from where I was.

“WHERE DID YOU GET THAT DOUBLE RULE?”

“I made it up tonight,” said Joe.

“I AM HAVING IT,” said Doyle, and gave him a bag of balls to carry.

Sadler was waiting by my car when I came up the path, with his car door open and his arm along the top of it. The evening was still bright over the estuary, and the roofs of the cars were warm from the day.

“Where did you find him?” he said.

“I drove up to watch his under-18s in the winter.”

“In the winter.” He looked back towards the far pitch. “You had him for my job.”

“Until Wembley. I was going to tell you tonight, once you had seen him. I wanted you to see him before you knew.”

“Does he know?”

“I told him at 5, on the path down to the pitch. He asked me straight out.”

Sadler said nothing. Down on the far pitch Doyle was bellowing at somebody to bring the balls in.

“So the coach knew before the manager,” he said.

Joe had guessed it. I could have said that, and it would have been true, and it would have let me off. Craig had not forgotten March, and nor had I.

“Yes. That was wrong of me, Craig.”

“Next time there is a name against my job, I hear it from you before anybody.”

“You will.”

He got into the car. “He gave the game to the girl and kept his eyes on the lad in the socks,” he said, through the open door. “For the whole hour.”

“I saw.”

“Same pot as the players, tell Margaret. If he costs me a centre-forward in October, I will live with it.”

“She has him there already.”

He nodded once and pulled the door shut. crunch of his tyres on the gravel, all the way to the gate.

Joe signed on the Tuesday, in Margaret’s office, with the Wembley cup on the desk between them. He read every page before he put his name to it, and asked her 2 questions about the knee clause.

Sadler had told him to stay for the fixtures, so he stayed.

They came out at 9 o’clock on the Wednesday morning. Priya printed them in her office, chunk, chunk, chunk of the old printer, and by 5 past she had 3 sheets laid out in a row on the boardroom table.

Across the top of the first she had copied the opening games out large, for anybody at the back.

TILBROOK TOWN · 2013-14 · THE FIRST 5 GAMES Sat 3 Aug · Millwall · A Tue 6 Aug · Southend United · A · League Cup, round 1 Sat 10 Aug · Birmingham City · H Sat 17 Aug · Burnley · A Sat 24 Aug · Derby County · H

Half the club was round the table. There were 11 days left on the June line, and Maureen had the green book open at page 1.

Downstairs the phone in the ticket office had started and not stopped. brrr-brrr, brrr-brrr, every time the girl put it down. Most of the callers wanted Millwall. The rest wanted to know whether a season ticket covered Derby, and the girl told every one of them that it did.

“Millwall away first,” said Margaret. “The police will want to talk to us about that. I will ring them this morning, before they ring me.”

“How many supporters’ coaches?” said Maureen.

“6,” said Priya. “Maybe 8. I want the first game full. And Southend on the Tuesday after, so that is 2 away trips in the first week. I want coaches for both.”

“6,” said Maureen. “We will see about the rest.”

Kieran had come in from the pitch with grass on his knees. He put a finger on Derby.

“Derby, boss. On my grass, in August.” He grinned. “I done the lines every week last season. Them ones for Derby I am doing proper.”

Sadler came in at 10 past, with Joe a step behind him, and stood at the head of the table. Joe stopped beside Kieran on the way round.

“Are you Kieran?”

“Yes, boss.”

“I walked your training pitches on Monday,” said Joe. “That is the best grass I have stood on in 6 years.”

Kieran did not say anything, for once. He went back out to his pitch whistling.

Maureen looked up from the end of the table.

“Mr Tredwell. You are on page 2 of my book,” she said. “First-team wages, with the players.”

“That is where I want to be,” said Joe. He leaned over the first sheet. “Burnley away, third game. That will tell us something.”

“Fourth,” said Stan. He had come up from the kit room with an armful of training tops. “Fourth game, son. The cup on the Tuesday is a game. My kit gets washed after it, same as the others.”

“Fourth,” said Joe. “Thank you, Stan.” He took a small notebook out of his back pocket and wrote a 4 in it.

“Find me the Leicester games,” said Sadler.

Priya ran her finger down the first sheet. Everybody waited.

“Tuesday the 1st of October,” she said. “Here, under the lights. And at theirs in March.” She looked across the table at me. “I could put 5 pounds on that one. Against them, it will sell itself.”

“Same price as every other league game,” I said. “It is a Tuesday night, and people have work in the morning. The price holds, and it holds for Leicester.”

“It holds,” said Priya, and left it.

“That is the lot that tried to take Jamie off us,” said Stan.

“They can come and look at him,” said Sadler. “From the other dugout.”

In the life before, Leicester won that division by a distance, with 102 points, and Burnley came second with 93. Jamie Vardy scored 16 of Leicester’s league goals.

The room emptied a few at a time. Priya went down to help the girl with the phones. Stan took his training tops back to the kit room, and Joe went with him to ask where the cones lived. Margaret went to ring the police.

Sadler stayed at the head of the table, and I stayed by the door. He had one finger on the line that said Leicester.

“They will not wait till October,” he said, without looking up. “They will come for him before the summer is out.”