Chapter 905 - 905: Technical Area

Deano gave me a roll of white tape at seven o'clock on Monday morning and didn't ask what it was for until I had used all of it.

"Is that a box?"

"It's a technical area."

He came out of the kit room door with his tea, stood on the edge of Pitch 2, and looked at it. Four strips of tape on wet grass, pegged at the corners with tent pegs out of his own garage, one metre off the touchline and twelve yards long. I had measured it off the Wembley one and got Bray to hold the other end of the tape measure in the dark.

"Who's it for?"

"Me."

Deano drank his tea. He looked at me over the rim of the mug, then at the tape, and then back at me.

"You're going to stand in that," he said.

"All week."

"In training."

"In training."

"Right," Deano said. He went back inside, and five minutes later he came out again with four more pegs because one of the corners had already come up.

The FA had taken forty minutes on the 10th of October to decide what to do with me. Eight thousand pounds, a one-match touchline ban they put in a drawer until May, and a letter each to both clubs for the fourteen men who came off the two benches. Nathan read it to me in the car park with his engine running.

"Suspended," he said. "That word is the whole letter, boss. Everything else in it is them telling you what they decided not to do."

"What else could they do?"

"Old Trafford." He folded the letter in three. "Give them one more reason and they open the drawer."

Last season, not one player of mine was sent off. Fifteen months, sixty-odd matches, two trophies and a European final, and a referee never once put his hand in that pocket for us. This season, thirteen matches, and Aaron Wan-Bissaka walked off against Liverpool, Scott Dann walked off against Chelsea, and I walked up the tunnel with twenty-two minutes left. Michael Oliver did all three.

Oliver was right about Aaron and right about Scott, and I earned mine. For fifteen months I've fined players a week's wages for a red card.

On Sunday night, I filled in the same form Aaron and Scott had filled in, put my own name at the top and a week of my own wages at the bottom, and signed it without reading it.

Tchk. Tchk.

Marcus had been in since five with a staple gun and two carrier bags of newspaper. By the time I came in off Pitch 2, he had covered the long wall in the canteen from the fire door to the hatch.

Thirteen sections. White tape across the top of each one with the opponent in marker, every match since Wembley on the 5th of August. Underneath them was two weeks of everybody in Europe writing about us while we had nobody to play.

"What is this?"

"Homework." He didn't stop stapling. "Every team we play before May has spent the break reading about us. I wanted to see what they read."

I walked it from the fire door.

The Real Madrid section was the biggest, and most of it was about Real Madrid. Marca had run its list of replacement managers twice more since September. They hadn't scored in four matches, they lost at Alavés in the 95th minute on the 6th, and Marcus had pinned a photograph of Julen Lopetegui with his hand over his mouth next to one of Christian Benteke on his knees in Tallinn.

Southampton was two columns on Routine 4 and a drawing of it that was wrong. Huddersfield was a photograph of Connor Blake with his hands on his head. Newcastle had a diagram: Benítez's block in nine circles and a sixteen-year-old's run round the outside of it in red pen. Dortmund went from the skirting board to the ceiling tiles, German on the left and Sarah's translations stapled underneath.

The Chelsea section had the white tape and the word CHELSEA and nothing under it.

"You ran out of paper."

"I have eleven pieces on Chelsea in a bag and I've read all eleven." Marcus put the gun down. "All of them wrote about the substitution at thirty, the offside, and you going up the tunnel. Not one of them wrote down why Joel Ward was stood on his own six yards out in the 94th minute. The first one who does goes up. Nothing else goes there until then."

"Where's the Mail?"

He looked at me. "Saturday's? The red cards."

"It's in the bag."

"Get it out."

He got it out. Half a page, with the three of us in a row across the top: Aaron with his hands on his hips, Scott with the armband in his fist, me in a coat with a steward's hand on my back. Palace went the whole of last season without a man sent off. In seven weeks of this one, they lost two players and their manager to the same referee. Walsh's side haven't lost a match all season. They've lost three men.

"You want that up," Marcus said.

"I want a section for us."

"Boss, the wall is them. It's what they think of the teams we've beaten."

"It's what the teams we're going to play think of us." I took the staple gun off the table. "Put it at the end. Nearest the door, so everybody walks past it on the way out."

He did it himself in the end, because I put the first staple straight through the side of my own thumb.

Skrrk. Chairs going back.

Sixteen players had stayed at Beckenham through the international break. They came in from eight, and by nine they were three deep in front of that wall with their breakfasts.

Tim Krul found the Telegraph and read it out loud with a coffee in his other hand.

"Nick Pope has made more saves from inside his own six-yard box than any goalkeeper in the division, and he has done it behind a back four his manager rebuilds every week on purpose. Jamie Carragher." Krul lowered the paper. "Nick's in Spain and can't hear this, so on Tuesday I'll read it to him at breakfast, and then at lunch, and then in the car park."

"You could just tell him," Andros Townsend said.

"I could. It sounds better coming from a Scouser with a column."

Nya Kirby had got behind Michael Olise at the Newcastle diagram.

"Is that you? The red one?"

"Yeah."

"They've drawn you in red pen, Mike." Kirby turned round to the room. "Michael Olise is a red pen in the Times."

"It's the Mail."

"He's a red pen in the Mail," Kirby announced. Connor Blake got his phone out. Olise stood there, turning a shade of purple, but didn't take it down.

Christian Benteke was reading his own section in a voice that was nothing like his own until Townsend took the paper off him.

"Benteke has nine goals in eleven matches and is the only centre forward in Europe whose best quality is the space he leaves behind him."

"That's a horrible thing to write," Benteke said.

"It's a beautiful thing to write, Christian."

"It's what you say about a wardrobe."

Mamadou Sakho had to put his tea on the window ledge clonk and two of the kitchen staff came to the hatch to see what the noise was, just as Townsend read them the wardrobe line as well.

Then they got to the end nearest the door.

Kirby started reading the Mail in the same voice he'd used for the red pen, but stopped halfway through the first line.

Scott Dann was sitting at the table directly under it with a bowl of porridge he hadn't touched. He is thirty-one, and his name won't be on the teamsheet at Old Trafford on Sunday because of a foot he put across Eden Hazard forty yards from goal with nothing left in his legs.

He looked up at the photograph of himself with the armband in his fist.

"Who put that up?"

"I did," I said.

"Right." He picked up his spoon. "Fair enough."

"It's up because I'm on it, Scotty."

"I know you are, gaffer. I was there."

Aaron Wan-Bissaka came and sat down opposite him with some toast. He didn't say anything, and then he did.

"Start it four seconds earlier."

Dann looked at him.

"When you watch it back. Start it four seconds before the foul." Aaron took a bite of toast. "Somebody told me that in August. It helps."

At half-past ten, I stood in my box.

Eight against eight on Pitch 2, the sixteen who hadn't flown anywhere. I'd given Bray the whistle and one rule, and he read it out in the centre circle with the bibs draped over his arm.

"Anybody speaks to the referee, it's a free kick to the other lot from wherever you're standing. Anybody. That means appealing, that means asking, that means ref, ref, that means a look. If he thinks you looked at him, it's a free kick." He blew once to show them the whistle worked. Prrrp. "The gaffer stays in that box. If the gaffer comes out of that box, it's a penalty."

"To who?" Kirby said.

"To whoever the gaffer is shouting at."

That got a laugh, and then Scott Dann put his hand up.

"I'll do it."

"Do what?"

"Referee." He was already wearing a yellow bib, and he pulled it off over his head. "I'm suspended, Bray. I'm the one man on this pitch who can't play on Sunday. Give me the whistle."

Bray looked across at me in the box.

I nodded. Scott Dann refereed the first training match of the week the exact way a centre half would. He didn't run with play. He stood in the middle of it and turned, and when Mamadou Sakho went through the back of Jack Grealish on six minutes, Dann blew before Grealish had hit the ground.

Prrrp.

"Free kick."

"Scotty," Sakho said, with both hands open. "Scotty, it's the ball. I touched the ball first, I'm..."

"And that's another one." Dann walked the ball ten yards forward. "You spoke to the referee."

"I'm speaking to you!"

"I'm the referee, Mamadou."

Sakho turned round to me in my box with both arms out. I kept my hands in my pockets and my feet strictly inside the tape. He went back to his mark, talking French at the grass.

[SCOTT DANN. CONDITION 97%. SUSPENDED: 1 MATCH.]

Mateo Kovačić played for the yellows. It was his first full session since August, and Rebecca stood on the halfway line with a stopwatch around her neck. She had written the 24th on a board on the 4th of October, and she made a mark on her card every time he stopped running.

[MATEO KOVAČIĆ. CONDITION 96%. MATCH SHARPNESS 38%.]

He gave it away twice in ten minutes. Once to Axel Tuanzebe, who was so surprised he nearly gave it straight back.

***

Thank you to Sir nameyelus for the support.