Chapter 222: Deadline Day II

He was giving away his own shirt with both hands, the old captain, and it cost him more than it would cost anyone, and he did it without a wobble in his voice.

"That boy is the best I have stood next to in 15 years," he said. "I have known it a fortnight. I think you have known it a great deal longer than that."

I had. I could no more tell him how long than I could tell him where the Sheffield money came from. "I have a notion," I said.

"You have more than a notion. You always do." He got the crutches back under him. "Trust the boy. I will be back for the ugly ones in October. Between now and then he does not need my replacement. He needs to find out that he does not need one."

He swung himself out, slow, and he left the best argument anyone made me all fortnight lying on my desk. It had come from the one man in the building it cost the most to make it.

The opportunist came on the Thursday, the day before the window shut, and it came dressed as a favour.

Priya put the call through to me herself, which she does when she wants me to hear a tone before I hear an offer.

"A Championship club," she said. "Their sporting director. Very friendly. He watched us on the opening day, and he says he can see we are stretched, and he would like to help us out."

A beat, and I heard her draw the breath. "He wants to take Mahrez off our wage bill. On loan. For the season. They will pay all of it."

"How kind of him."

"He used the word ’kind’ 3 times." She was enjoying it now. "He thinks the injury has us frightened. He thinks a small club, light at the back, a fortnight into a hard division, will be glad to lighten the load on a raw winger who got kicked off the park on Saturday."

"What did you tell him?"

"That I would pass it on. I wanted you to say the no. I know how much you are going to enjoy it."

I thought about the man on the other end of that line. Doing his sums. Seeing a wounded minnow and a winger the whole league had watched get kicked, and reckoning he could walk off with him for a season’s wages and a smile.

He had done his homework on the wrong page. He had scouted the boy’s Saturday. I had scouted the boy’s decade.

"Ring him back," I said. "Thank him warmly for his concern. Tell him Riyad Mahrez is not available on loan, or permanent, or on any terms his chairman can dream up between now and tomorrow night."

"He will not like it."

"Tell him gently. I want him to remember he asked, and I want him to remember what I said." scratch of my pen striking the name off the pad Priya could not see down the line.

"Because he is going to be back before this is done, with real money and no talk of favours, and I want him to already know the answer."

"You sound very sure, for a man sat 11th."

"I am sure about the boy. The table can say what it likes."

That was the whole of it, said out loud in the only way I was allowed to say it. I was sure about the boy. What I could not tell Priya, or the friendly man doing his sums, was the shape of the thing I was sure of.

A scout guesses at a ceiling. I had stood under the roof of what Riyad Mahrez becomes, in a life nobody in that office could remember, and it was higher than a Championship sporting director had the imagination to bid for on a wet Thursday in August.

Deadline day came, and I did the hardest thing a chairman ever does, which is nothing that looks like anything at all.

The phone went from breakfast. buzz. Terry Brennan from the yard at 10, a forklift beeping behind him, wanting to know who we were signing before the pub did. buzz. Danny Vine at noon, notebook out, wanting the same. 2 more agents with 2 more versions of the same expensive fading man.

Maureen came in twice with the medical still booked and her thumb still over the button, because that is her job and she does it honestly. Sadler sent a one-line text and no more, which for him was a shout. tick of the clock on the wall that nobody in the building could stop watching.

And at 5 in the afternoon, with 6 hours of the window left, I signed a boy nobody in the town had heard of.

A 20-year-old off a Premier League club’s books. A centre-half who had never played a senior game, out on his first loan to find out if he was made for it. Wilf had watched him twice and liked his feet and his quiet.

He cost us a small loan fee and a modest wage. He came knowing he was 4th choice and hungry to prove he should not be. He covered the exact number Sadler needed, and he did it without spending a penny of the room Margaret was guarding.

"That is it?" Maureen said, when I told her the window would shut on that and nothing more. "A hole at the back, and you have filled it with a loan boy nobody has heard of."

"We had a hole for 6 weeks. I filled it for 6 weeks."

"The town wanted a defender."

"The town wanted to feel safe." I closed the drawer on the money I had not spent. "Those are not the same thing, and one of them costs a great deal more than the other."

"Sam."

"We have Maguire, who will be the best in this league by Christmas. We have Prentice, who runs through walls. We have a hungry kid for the nights it goes wrong. And we have every pound of our room still in the bank."

"For what." She was not angry. She was frightened, which is harder to answer. "For when."

"January." I said it before I could weigh whether I should, and then I let it stand, because it was true, and I could give her no more of the reason than the one word.

"The money is worth more to us in January than it is in August. I would put the ground on it."

She gave me the long look, the one she stopped turning into a question a year ago.

"On your head," she said, and went off to cancel a medical she had never wanted to book in the first place.

WHAT I DID NOT SIGN // deadline day, the page only I could read The name they kept offering: a 32-year-old, one honest year left and the wrong half of it, 40 grand a week, the whole cap ceiling gone in August to insure 6 weeks of an injury. The safe signing. The one that buys a chairman a good September headline and a relegation in April. What I signed instead: a hungry loan boy for the numbers. Cost, next to nothing. Room kept, all of it. What the town could not see and I could: the coin I do not touch yet, climbing a road I have already walked, toward a January when the ceiling I refused to spend today buys the thing that keeps us up. You do not empty the well in August because the bucket looks light. Not when you are the only man in the county who knows it rains in the winter.

The town did not take it well, and I would not have thought much of them if they had.

"The forum has decided you have lost your nerve," Priya told me on the Friday night, and she read me a line of it, because she thought I ought to hear how it felt from the terrace.

"Go on."

"’Biggest run of games in years coming up and the board sat on their hands. Same old Tilbrook. Skint and scared.’" rustle of her scrolling. "There are 200 posts. Somebody has started a petition."

"Let them have it. It is a fair thing to feel, on what they can see."

"You do not want a quote out? A bit of reassurance?"

"No." I thought of the friendly man and his sums, and the agent warm as a radiator, and Marsh on his crutches giving his shirt away, and a loan boy driving down the motorway to a club that had decided to believe in the players it already owned.

"Let them be cross," I said. "Cross is what a town is when it cares. In April, when we are still here and half the sides who panicked this month are not, they can decide for themselves whether I lost my nerve or kept it."

The window shut at 11 that night. click of the desk lamp going off in an office where I had, by the whole town’s reckoning, done nothing at all.

The squad was locked now. No more shopping, no more clever, no more of the currency only I could read moving quietly in the dark.

From here it was 44 more Saturdays and a ball I could not see the end of. 11 men, and a boy at the back I had bought the entire club to stand behind.

And on the first of those Saturdays, out of the fixture list and up the road, came the one game the whole summer had been pointed at without a soul but me quite saying so.

Sully’s Shorehaven. The money side, 3rd and scoring for fun. Everything I had refused to become, sat there in blue with a chequebook and a striker who cost more than my ground is insured for. The first time the points would be on it between us.

Ray Sully had told me in a tunnel in July that when the points go up, the money wins. In 8 days I would stand in his ground and we would start to find out whether he was right.

I turned the lamp back on. I sent for Wilf, because there was a game to win now, and not one thing left in the whole world I could buy to help me win it.