Chapter 234: Turn II

2-0 at the break, and I went down the tunnel side and did not trust it. I have learned this season what a 2-goal lead is worth. It is worth nothing at all until the last whistle has blown on it.

Sadler was in the corridor with a cup of tea he was not drinking.

"Do not change it," I said.

"I was not going to." He blew on the tea anyway. "They will come at us though. 3 up top, second half, the kitchen thrown at us. First time they score, do not watch the pitch. Watch the crowd."

"The crowd is with us."

"The crowd is with us at 2-0," he said. "Ask me again at 2-1."

The doubt came back with the second half, the way it always does.

whistle, and Sheffield came out changed, 3 up top now, throwing bodies, and for 15 minutes we could not get out of our own half.

"Here we go," said the man behind me, not unkindly, just braced. "Here is where we always fold."

He was talking about October. The whole stand was thinking about October. You could hear it in how the singing thinned.

On 61 minutes it went in.

A ball we half-cleared, a shot from the edge, a deflection off a shin that sent Braithwaite the wrong way. thwack. 2-1, and the away 600 erupted, and the drum started, and the old sick feeling came up the stand like cold water round the ankles.

Had we done it again? You ask that, 2-1 with half an hour left and the memory of a 4-nil still fresh. I made myself stop asking. I looked instead at the one place worth looking. The middle of the pitch.

Kanté had the ball. Kanté was not panicking. He gave it 5 yards to Reece and pointed, calm as a man directing traffic, and the pointing did more than any shout. The house did not fall.

Vardy nearly settled it on 70, clean through, and their keeper spread himself and smothered it off his boot. SLAP. The groan up the stand was pure October, a whole town braced for the worst thing it knew.

But the worst did not come. Kanté kept finding the ball. Reece kept wanting it. Mahrez kept dragging 2 red shirts out of the picture every time he touched it, and minute by minute the game came back to us.

They saw the game out the way I had asked Sadler to let them play it, forward, brave, on the front foot, with a promotion side chasing an equaliser that never came.

And on 80 minutes, they made it safe, and they made it perfect.

A corner, Mahrez to take it, the whole ground up. He hung it into the 6-yard box where the tall men go.

And up above every one of them, red shirts and amber both, rose the 19-year-old that Sheffield United had sold for a number their fans still called a robbery.

THWACK. A header like a penalty. Into the roof of their net, in front of their 600.

Maguire did not celebrate at them. He is better than that, or Marsh has taught him to be. He ran to the corner where the academy kids sit and stood with his arms wide and let his own people come to him.

"THERE'S ONLY ONE HARRY MAGUIRE," sang Marsh Road, all of it, the roof holding the sound down like a lid on a boiling pot. "ONE HARRY MAGUIRE."

The 600 in red had gone quiet, the chip-butty song dead in their throats. silence off the away end, the particular silence of fans watching a boy they sold come back to head their afternoon apart.

Then our lot filled it for them. "YOU SOLD HIM, YOU SOLD HIM," rolled off the Bovril End, not cruel, just true, a whole town enjoying a thing it had waited a hard month to be allowed to enjoy.

3-1. And then, from the Bovril End, rising, the sound I had not thought I would hear again after October.

"MER-CER," they sang. "MER-CER, MER-CER."

8 days short of a month before, in a different ground, one man had sung the other version of my name, the one with OUT on the end of it. I had stood and taken it and told nobody it stung.

I stood and took this too. A crowd is a weathervane, not a compass. But you would have to be made of colder stuff than me not to feel the wind swing.

PEEP-PEEP-PEEP.

Tilbrook Town 3, Sheffield United 1.

Ted was crying and pretending to have something in his eye, and Bald Tony was ringing his bell at the away end, and 6,000 people were singing a manager's name and a chairman's name and a boy's name into a roof that had kept them dry through all of it.

THE LEAGUE TABLE // League One, after 15 games (the drop end) 20th ... TILBROOK TOWN ... 15 played ... 16 points (out of the bottom 4, by a single point) 21st ... Hartlepool ... 15 ... 15 22nd ... Bury ... 15 ... 14 23rd ... Scunthorpe ... 15 ... 13 24th ... Portsmouth (in administration, minus 10) ... 15 ... 4 Above the line for the first time since September. The bookmakers who made us 5/4-on to go down in August have quietly moved us out to 3/1. The number changed because the football did.

Danny caught me in the corridor after, and he had stopped clicking the pen.

"I am writing the brave one," he said.

"Write what you saw."

"What I saw was a side that had no business playing like that in the middle of a relegation fight, coached by a man who is supposed to be leaving in May, bought by a chairman who is supposed to be skint." He shook his head.

"You held your nerve through 9 games that would have had any other board in the country reaching for the manager's contract. You want to tell me how you knew to hold it?"

There it was, the question, from a new mouth. I gave him the half of it that was safe to give.

"I did not know we would win today, Danny. I have told you that twice and it is still true."

"That is not what I asked. You knew to hold. All through the dark. How."

"Because I have watched those 4 lads in training since July," I said, "and a man who has seen a thing up close does not lose his nerve about it as easily as a man reading the table from the outside."

He looked at me a second too long.

"You talk about them," he said slowly, "like you have watched them a lot longer than July."

My stomach did the small drop it does 2 or 3 times a year. I turned it into a laugh. A laugh is the only thing that has ever reliably closed that seam.

"I watch a great deal of football, Danny. Ask my wife what it has done to our Saturdays."

"You are not married."

"That is what all the football did to it." He laughed, and the moment shut over the top of itself, and I breathed again.

I found Maguire last, by the boot room, mud to the knee, the match ball nowhere near him because a 19-year-old does not ask.

"They sold you for a number they thought was mad," I said. "You just headed it back over their own crossbar."

"I did not do it at them." He looked almost worried I would think he had. "Marsh says you never do it at them. You just do it, and let it be enough."

"Marsh is right." He is right about most of it now, and running out of season to say so. "Was it enough?"

The boy thought about it, properly, the way he thinks about everything.

"It was today," he said. "I will want it again next week." Then he went to find his phone, and I let him go, because wanting it again next week is the whole of what I am building, and he had found it on his own.

The stand had almost emptied when I came back up. Ted was still in his seat, in no hurry, watching the groundsman fork the goalmouth in the last of the light.

"My dad stood here in 1962," he said, not really to me. "Watched them lose 6-nil to nobody in particular. He would not have believed today. Not the football, not the roof, none of it."

He got up slow, a joint at a time. "You did a thing here, son. I do not know how. I have decided I do not need to."

That is the kindest sentence anyone has said to me in either run of it, and he will never know why.

I walked out last, the way I like to, when the lights are going off in rows and the ground is mine again for 10 quiet minutes.

The turn was real. I could feel it the way the crowd felt it, a wind changing, a thing swinging back toward the light. We were out of the bottom 4 by a single point and playing football the town would queue in the rain for.

And I stood in the empty stand and made myself remember the one thing none of the 6,000 could.

A crowd that will sing your name after 3-1 will sing the other song after 2 bad Saturdays. Belief is a loan, not a gift, and the interest on it is cruel. The very worst thing a young side can do now is read the back page and believe the back page.

There was more. Up in the directors' box a man I did not know had watched the whole 90 with a notebook and a lanyard, and he had not been watching for Sheffield United.

When a small club's cheap players play like mine had just played, the men with notebooks start to arrive. I knew what came after the notebooks. It came in January, it came with a chequebook, and it would test me worse than any bad run.

And behind all of it, 18 days off, invisible, a number I had lived through once was climbing toward a morning that would change what my money could do.

I turned the last of the lights off myself.

The town had its turn. In the morning I would start getting ready for the price of it.