Knowledge Is Money

Ray Sully bought his team with a chequebook. I built mine with a memory and a wage cap. On the first Saturday in December they stood on the same grass, and the whole town came to see which was true.

Sully came up to the boardroom before kickoff, because the away chairman is always asked, and Ray Sully likes to stand in a room and put a price on it.

He looked at the portacabin walls, and the one good carpet laid over the join, and the team photographs from 100 years of this club.

"You could have taken my money in the summer," he said. "For the striker. 400 grand. You would have your stand up by now."

"I would have half a stand and no striker," I said. "You would have my best player for a year. And I would be starting the whole thing again from nothing."

"That is the arrangement, Sam. You grow them. I buy them. We each do the part we are built for."

"It is not the same part, Ray."

"It is exactly the same part. You cannot afford my end of it yet."

"One day I will."

"You will grow into a bigger version of the same trap. A bigger wage bill. A bigger stand to pay for. Better players that better men can buy before you can." He said it plainly, the way you read a man the weather.

"The gap does not close as you climb, Sam. It climbs with you."

He turned from the photographs and looked at me instead.

"I have bought promotion 3 times. I know what it costs to the pound, and how long it takes to the week. You are a lovely story. Stories go down the year the man telling them stops paying."

"This one has a wage bill it can carry for 20 years," I said. "Yours needs a cheque from you every month, or it stops being a team by March."

"Then I will write the cheque every month. That is the whole of the difference between us. I can, and you cannot."

He drank Maureen’s tea from the one china cup we own, and he did not argue any further. He had already said the true thing, and we both knew what it was.

Maureen watched him go down the stairs and set the cup in the sink like it had wronged her.

"Their team on that sheet cost 8 million pounds," she said. "I looked it up. Ours cost 90 grand and Wilf’s diesel."

"Then we both know what we are trying to prove today."

"I know what I am trying to prove. I want that man in his big car home before dark, certain he wasted his morning." She dried her hands. "Go and win me a derby, Samuel. I have wanted to beat Shorehaven since before either of us could pay a light bill."

I found Sadler in the tunnel, and I broke my one rule, and I said a thing about his team.

"You have left Gayle on the bench. Against Sully. On derby day."

"I have left Gayle on the bench." He watched his players walk out. He did not look at me. That is how Sadler listens.

"The crowd wants him. He wants himself."

"The crowd wants a great many things." He folded his arms. "Sully’s back 4 have played 40 games together and cost £8 million. They are good, and they are proud, and no one has made them turn and run for an hour in a year."

"So you make them run."

"So I make them run for an hour. Then I send on a quick 21-year-old they have never once had to chase, into the space where their legs used to be." He nodded at the grass. "Whose team is it, Sam?"

"Yours."

"Then go upstairs and watch it work."

Ted Cutler had a grudge against Shorehaven that started long before Ray Sully owned a wallet. He had it ready by the tunnel, in the 1996 scarf, telling it to a lad who had asked him nothing at all.

"We played them in the mud in ’74," he said. "Their centre-half broke our Georgie’s leg and stood over him while he did it. I have hated that club through 3 owners. Sully is only the richest one."

He took hold of my sleeve. "I want this one, Sam. More than I have wanted a game in years. You tell your players an old man asked them."

"Tell them yourself, Ted. They will believe you a long time before they believe me."

Murat had a card taped inside his kiosk window. SHOREHAVEN SUPPORTERS, PAY WHEN SERVED. He was selling their fans the same pies as ours and taking their money with both hands.

"A derby is the one day a year my kiosk earns a month of rent," he told me. "I am glad they came. I will be gladder when they lose."

The ground filled early and loud, with the edge on it that only a neighbour brings. The turnstiles could not swallow the queue fast enough, and the supporters already inside did not wait for a ball to start.

Shorehaven had brought a drum and a few thousand voices, and they used every one of them. "SMALL TOWN, YOU’RE JUST A SMALL TOWN," their corner sang, down at all of us, over a drum going boom... boom... boom.

The Bovril End could not match them for numbers, so it sang the one thing money does not answer. "WE MADE OURS. WE MADE OURS." Slow, and low, and up from under the ground, with the town’s own names in it, older than Sully and older than his money.

Down on the touchline the away bench sat in matching coats that cost more than our kit for the year. Our lads came out in the amber their nans know, into a roar that came up from under the ground as much as down from the stands.

Everybody in the place understood exactly what the afternoon was for.

Peep. Reece rolled it back, and the whole place came up at once, both ends, one wall of sound with a seam of the old hate running down the middle of it.

Shorehaven were everything a fortune like Sully’s builds. They kept the ball, and they moved us from one side to the other, and they made Rowe chase a game he is usually the cleverest man inside.

On 20 minutes their record signing took half a yard and curled one into the top corner that no keeper in our division reaches.

thud. 0-1.

Their corner erupted, the drum hammering, boom-boom-boom-boom, a few thousand of them up and bouncing as one man.

They sang about their money then, loud and long. It is what they have, so it is what they sing.

For 10 minutes after the goal they kept a foot on our throat. Their midfield passed around Rowe like he was a corner flag. Braithwaite saved twice, low and hard, and got up slower each time.

Then the game found its feet, and the feet were a fight. Harker and their big striker went up for everything together and came down heavier every time.

Dodds and their winger fought a private war down the right that had nothing to do with the ball. Nobody gave a yard. A derby is an argument played with studs on.

Harker went through their striker with a tackle you heard up in the box, crunch, clean and hard and legal, and the Bovril End roared at it louder than it had roared all day. In a derby a crowd will cheer a tackle the way it cheers a chance.

I stood at the rail and I did not know if we would answer it. I have not known a result since November. I have stopped promising myself the eye might come back for one more Saturday.

I held the rail with both hands and I watched, the same as every soul in the Bovril End, and my heart went where theirs went.

Then Vardy scored, and a man I had never seen stood up in the seats behind me.

Rowe won a ball in the middle he had no right to reach. Reece pushed it wide first time. Vardy ran 40 yards to arrive on the end of it, and he hit it as it came, low and hard across their keeper and in off the far post.

RRP. 1-1.

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