Chapter 243: Money Round I

January came in, and by the end of its first week it had brought the champions of England up the A13 to Marsh Road.

They arrived in a coach the size of a small hotel, with a police escort and a sponsor’s name down the side, and they parked it behind the away end where our own lads leave their second-hand runarounds.

Terry Brennan stood with me in the car park and watched it pull in. Terry has hated moneyed football his whole life, so I waited for the curse.

"Would you look at that," he said instead, quiet. "The actual champions. At Marsh Road."

"I know, Terry."

"I put my name on this club when we played grounds with a rope round the pitch and a bloke on a bike for a turnstile." He shook his head slowly. "And now there is a television gantry bolted over my advertising board."

hum of the gallery truck in the corner of the car park. clack of a camera locking onto its mount up on the rig.

"Beat the money, Sam," he said. "Just the once. On the telly, where the whole country can watch it happen. I would die a happy man."

"We will have a go at it. That is the most I can promise you."

The money came first, though, the way it always does with a tie like this. A night like this is money long before it is ever football, and I have taught myself to read both at once.

Maureen had the sums on one sheet, the way she likes them. "The live television fee. A full house, all ticket, no complimentaries I could not defend. The round’s prize money if we win." She slid it across the desk. "One night, Sam, is worth more than whole months of us put together."

"And the next round, if we get there."

"And the next round." She let herself a small smile. From Maureen, that is a brass band and bunting. "I have banked leaner Decembers than this single January night."

I looked at the number, and I did the thing nobody in that office could see me do. I set it beside the other number, the one only I carry, the one the coin is quietly turning into while the rest of the world sleeps on it.

Against that, the biggest payday in the club’s history was a lovely touch. It was not the main event.

I did not say so. To Maureen and Terry and the 8,000 coming that night it was a fortune, and they were right to feel it as one. A man does not sneer at a fortune only because he can see a bigger one coming that he cannot explain to anybody.

Sadler found me at noon with the teamsheet not yet written. For Craig, that means he wants an argument he has already decided to lose.

"We can sit in," he said. "2 banks of 4. Let them have the ball, hit them once on the break. Keep it to nil as long as we can, see if the crowd gets in their heads."

"We could. Is that what you want to do?"

"It is the sensible thing." He turned his cap over in his hands. "It is not what I want to do. What I want to do is terrifying."

"Tell me the terrifying one."

"I want to go at them." He said it like a confession in a quiet church. "Press them high. Make the most expensive midfield on earth try to play football in the rain with our kids snapping at their ankles. I think we could embarrass them for 20 minutes."

"And the other side of it?"

"The other side is they put 5 past us, live, and I am the clown who opened the door."

I had watched this team, older, in another life, walk into the grandest grounds in Europe and press the best there is until the best could not breathe. I knew what this spine becomes on a night it decides not to be afraid.

I could not hand him that. I could only tell him where to stand.

"Go at them," I said. "If we are going down, we go down with the handbrake off. I would sooner lose 5 to 3 having a real go than nil to 1 hiding in our own box."

"You are sure. On the telly."

"Especially on the telly." I leaned on the desk between us. "I kept this midfield when sensible men queued up to tell me to cash it in. I did not keep it to park a bus behind. Pick the brave team, Craig. If it goes wrong, the heat comes to me, not to you."

He put the cap back on his head. For Craig Sadler, that is as near as you get to a signature. "It is your club."

"It is. And tonight I am telling you whose night it is. Theirs. The boys’. Take the lead off them and let them run."

By 7 o’clock Marsh Road did not look like itself. The lights were full on, doubled by the television rigs, and the old ground stood lit up like a place that mattered. For one night, it was one.

Outside, the queue for the turnstiles ran back past Murat’s kiosk and round onto the main road. Murat had sold out of everything an hour before kick-off and was apologising happily to a line of men who did not care what they ate.

The away end filled early, 6,000 of them. They are good at this, the big clubs’ travellers, they do it every week of their lives. boom of a drum. "BLUE MOON," they sang, slow and enormous, and it rolled across the pitch and dared us to answer.

We answered. The covered end took a breath under its new roof and gave the whole of it back. "COME ON YOU TOWN," 8,000 of them, "COME ON YOU TOWN," and Raj was in the thick of it where I had put him, bellowing along with no tune in him at all.

Raj had caught me at the tunnel mouth an hour before, wild in the eyes. "Sam. There are helicopters over the ground. They said our name on the national news. They said Tilbrook, out loud, on the telly."

"Enjoy it, Raj. A night like this does not come round twice."

"But can we win it, though?"

"I have not got the faintest idea," I told him, and it was the whole truth, and it set me loose the way the truth always does. "That is the exact thing that makes it worth watching."

shriek of the whistle, and the champions showed us the gap inside 10 minutes.

They kept the ball the way men keep it when it has never once been scarce in their lives, side to side, patient, each pass dragging one of ours 2 yards out of the place he wanted to be. skid of Kanté sliding across to cover a hole that was not his to fill.

Braithwaite saved the first real one on 8 minutes, down low to his left, smack of glove on wet leather. He held it rather than parry it. "KEEP-ER," the covered end roared, and sang his name before he was off the floor.

We had a moment of our own on 15. Vardy got in behind, one against the goalkeeper, and dragged it the wrong side of the far post. thud of boot, a long groan, and then a roar of pure encouragement, because the town had seen we could get there at all.

They scored on 23, and it was beautiful, and it was cruel. A move of 18 passes, our boys chasing the shadows of men, and a finish off the far post by a player who cost more than my whole team. CRACK of it in off the woodwork. Nil, 1.

"BLUE MOON," the away end roared, "YOU SAW ME STANDING ALONE," and for a minute the whole night tipped toward the nightmare, 5 past us, the country watching us drown.

"HEADS UP," Maguire bawled down the back line, 19 years old and refusing to go under. "AGAIN. WE GO AGAIN. SAME AS WE SAID."

A champion’s money buys a great many things. On a wet January night it could not buy our crowd, and it could not buy what our crowd did next. They did not go quiet at a goal down. They got louder.

"COME ON YOU TOWN," louder losing than they had been at level, the covered end hammering it flat into the rain, and you could watch our kids grow an inch on the sound of it.

Half time came with us a goal down and nobody in blue even breathing hard, and I went down to the tunnel, because there are nights a chairman belongs near his players and this was one of them.

I did not go in. That room is Craig’s, not mine. I stood at the door, and I heard him, low and level, without one ounce of panic in it.

"That," Sadler was saying, "is the best 45 minutes they will give all night. And we are 1 goal down to it. 1. Sit with that a second."

Somebody said something I could not catch.

"No. We do not sit back now. We did not climb this table by hiding, and we are not going to start hiding on the television. We press. The legs that spent that half showing off are the legs that go first in the second. Trust it."

A low rumble of agreement came through the door. Then Vardy’s voice, flat and certain, the voice of a man who has climbed further than any of them and never once brings it up. "They are there for the taking. I have seen scared up close. That back 4 is getting there."

I went back up to my seat, and I believed him, and not for one thing in my head the rest of the ground did not have. For once I was only a supporter who fancied his team.