Chapter 878 - 878: Watford

Elena Vasquez had placed that clip at the very end of an episode about my mother in a Moss Side kitchen, and she had done it deliberately.

Four and a half million people watched it. I didn't see it until Tuesday the twenty-first of August simply because I had stopped the video at forty minutes while on a plane over the Baltic.

I sent Michael Cooke a single message at ten past midnight:

Watched the end of ep 6. You never said you did that interview.

He replied at six the next morning:

I did not think you would ever watch it. Nobody who has been in the room needs to.

Vicarage Road holds 21,000, making it the smallest ground we visit all season.

Watford had won two out of two and started the afternoon above us on goal difference. Javi Gracia had built a side with Doucouré, Deeney, and Hughes that had scored inside forty-seven minutes every week since the eleventh.

Aaron Wan-Bissaka was serving his suspension.

CRYSTAL PALACE: Pope; Hakimi, Tarkowski, Sakho, Chilwell; Højbjerg, Neves, Kirby; Perišić, Benteke, Eze.

Nick Pope returned to the league goal because Tim Krul and Hennessey handle the cups a hierarchy settled in a car park back in July.

Nya Kirby is eighteen years old and only signed his professional contract on the second of August; he started an away Premier League match because James McArthur ran 11.4 kilometres against Liverpool on Monday, and Rebecca put a red line through his name on Friday morning.

Eberechi Eze started ahead of James Rodríguez, who has two World Cups and a Golden Boot to his name, and who took the news on Saturday with a firm handshake. Achraf Hakimi lined up at right-back in a league match for the very first time.

The referee blew the whistle.

Javi Gracia targeted Hakimi immediately, sending Hughes and Femenía down that right flank from the first minute and keeping them there.

Deeney rolled him at the six-minute mark and stood on his foot doing it. At eleven minutes, Hughes dragged him twelve yards inside, allowing Femenía to overlap into the vacant space and whip a cross onto Deeney's head at the back post.

Thump.

Pope got a hand to it. At nineteen minutes, Watford ran the exact same pattern. Pope had to make a low save to his left, and Tarkowski picked himself off the floor, pointed at Hakimi, and barked an order. Hakimi shouted back and pointed at Højbjerg. He was not dragged inside again for the rest of the afternoon.

Then we scored three in twenty-one minutes, ending the match by half-past four.

31 Minutes (0-1): Kirby pinched the ball off Doucouré on the halfway line with a reach he had no right to make. He laid it six yards off to Neves, who dropped a forty-yard pass over the top. Ivan Perišić cut inside Janmaat and struck it left-footed from eighteen yards out.

44 Minutes (0-2): Bray's Routine Four off the near post. Benteke made the front-post run, Tarkowski shadowed behind him, and Eberechi Eze arrived completely unmarked from fourteen yards out.

52 Minutes (0-3): Hakimi surged seventy yards past Femenía who had spent the first quarter-hour dragging him around and wanted no part of him by the third attempt and pulled it back flat, six inches off the grass. Christian Benteke turned it in from eight yards.

"BRING ON THE CHAMPIONS. BRING ON THE CHAMPIONS."

Two thousand nine hundred fans in the away corner made themselves heard at twenty past four on a Sunday.

At seventy-three minutes, Connor Blake replaced Christian Benteke. Blake is nineteen years old.

He led the line for an Under-18 side that won a Youth Cup, scoring nine during that run. In April 2017, his scouting reports listed elite finishing alongside abysmal work rate. He is the third of our three number nines and hadn't played a minute of football all season.

Thirteen days ago, on a Monday morning, I told him he was not getting on the plane to Estonia, and he asked me directly whether he was actually any good.

He put in seventeen minutes and didn't score. He recorded six pressing actions, chased a lost ball deep into the corner in the eighty-ninth minute while 3–0 up, and headed a corner clear out of our six-yard box in the ninety-fourth minute.

I have watched all seventeen of those minutes twice.

Watford 0, Crystal Palace 3.

A supporter named Terry Dolan has held a seat in Block 122 at Selhurst Park since 1979. He lost a shoe at Wembley on the fifth of August. I have never met him, though I have known his name for three weeks.

He was at Vicarage Road on Sunday. Nathan tracked him down in the away end after someone emailed in a photograph: fifty-eight years old, standing on a plastic seat with both arms raised at twenty past four in the afternoon.

Nathan asked him for four words for the club website, and Terry gave him nine:

"I have watched this club since 1979. Look at that table."

Then he added something else, which Nathan put in an email to me and left off the public website:

"I have got a season ticket for a stadium they are knocking down and rebuilding round me, and I am going to be sixty when it opens, and I have got two more years of Wembley first. Tell him I do not care where we play."

Marcus pulled up the standings on his phone before we reached the team coach:

Crystal Palace - 9

Man City - 9

Chelsea - 9

Tottenham - 9

Liverpool - 6

A single goal separated us from second place. Manchester City scored ten goals like us but conceded one more, winning 2–1 at Wolves on Saturday afternoon while we were on a coach up the M1.

Crystal Palace sat top of the Premier League.

Crystal Palace had never been top of the Premier League not for a day, not for an hour, not since the competition began in 1992. Seventeen of the men on that coach were not yet born when the league was formed.

Steve Parish called me from the car park while I was still standing in the tunnel. He didn't say anything for four full seconds.

"Danny."

"Steve."

"We are top of the league," he said. Then the line went dead.

Ron starts a week from Wednesday. He still doesn't know which player has twenty-two goals, and neither does Gary Issott and one of those two men is going to have to find out from the other.

There is one thing I did on Friday morning that nobody in the building knows about except two of us.

It involves an eighteen-year-old goalkeeper, a distribution centre in Croydon, and my signature on a release form from July 2017 that I have no memory of signing.

Michael Steele has twenty-one years of goalkeeper coaching behind him and has asked me for zero favors in fifteen months. I gave him that name without disclosing whose signature was on the release paper. He didn't ask, though I suspect he knew.

"What do you want me to do with it?"

"Nothing. Go and watch him."

"He is not playing, gaffer. It says here he is not playing."

"Then watch him train, or watch him do nothing, or knock on a door in Croydon on a Wednesday and find out whether he still owns a pair of gloves. I am not asking you to sign him. I am asking for somebody from here to have laid eyes on him once in thirteen months."

Michael Steele read the name off that document out loud, the way a man does when he is fixing something permanently in his memory. It was the first time I had ever heard it spoken. Thirteen months, my signature on the line, and I learned how to pronounce his name off a piece of paper at one o'clock on a Tuesday morning.

"I will go Wednesday," he said, folding it into his coat pocket.