Chapter 238: The Halving II

Burton came out of the tunnel to almost nothing, 400 in the away corner, and they lined up the way Sadler said they would, 2 banks of 4 and a spare man, and they meant to be dull, and they were magnificently, maddeningly dull.

thud of a hopeful ball launched clear. thump of the next one. For 20 minutes we passed it side to side in front of a wall and the crowd’s singing thinned into the first mutters of a crowd that expected a party and got a chess match.

Then, on 23 minutes, the thing that home favourites never see coming.

A long throw. A flick. A scramble our young defence had switched off for, because you do switch off when you are brilliant and the paper says so. scramble.thwack. Their number 9 stabbed it in from a yard.

silence. The specific, total, swallowed silence of a big crowd watching a small team score.

Then, from the 400 in the corner, delirium. "COME ON YOU BREW-ERS," they roared, "COME ON YOU BREW-ERS," a giant-killing 45 minutes old and already halfway believed.

"Do not," Raj said, low, staring at the pitch. "Do not say it."

"I was not going to say it."

"You were thinking it. The song. You were thinking about the bloody song."

"I was thinking about the song."

0-1. And I sat there with the old sick feeling, blind as everyone in the ground, and thought the one thought I could not say aloud.

I told you belief was a loan. Here is the interest, due on a Saturday, in front of the ones who took it out.

Marsh did not panic. Marsh has been 0-1 down in a cup tie more times than the whole young half of the side had been alive.

He got hold of it. He pointed, he shouted, he put a boot through an early one to remind Burton it would not be a picnic. And slowly, on a knee that would bill him for it on the Sunday, he dragged the tempo back up off the floor.

crunch of a Marsh tackle, fair and enormous. roar, the good kind this time, the crowd remembering it was allowed to help.

Half-time, 0-1, and Sadler earned his wage in the tunnel for 15 minutes I did not see. Marsh came off for the young legs with his job done. He had come on to stop us drowning before the tide turned, and we had not drowned.

The second half was a siege. A siege is the hardest football there is to watch, because it is 44 minutes of nothing and then, with no warning, everything at once.

thwack of a shot cleared off the line. SLAP of their keeper, who had the game of his life, because keepers do on days like this. groan, groan, groan, the crowd learning the hard way that a team below you, with 10 behind the ball and nothing to lose, is a genuine afternoon’s work.

"This is horrible," Raj said, on his feet like everyone. "Why is this horrible. We are miles better than them."

"Because they do not care that we are better," I said. "They came to not lose. It is the hardest thing in the world to break, a team that came to not lose."

"So how do we break it?"

"We wait for one of ours to do a thing they cannot coach against." I nodded down at Mahrez. "You cannot drill a way to stop that. You can only hope you bought it and they did not."

On 68 minutes Kanté, who never stops, won it 40 yards out and did not give it away, and slid it to Reece, and Reece to Mahrez, and Mahrez did the thing that cost 3 phone calls this week to Priya.

shimmy, and the full-back sat down, and the cross was perfect, and Vardy, who is always where it lands, put it in. thwack. 1-1. 68 minutes.

ROAR to lift the new roof off. "TIL-BROOK, TIL-BROOK." Relief more than joy, but at that volume you cannot tell them apart.

And then the last 20 minutes. The last 20 is where a good side beats a stubborn one, or does not, and finds out for certain which of the 2 it is.

We threw everything. Gray on for his legs. Big Pete on for his height, the plan-B battering ram, because a packed box is a thing you sometimes have to be tall at.

On 84 minutes we won a corner, and Mahrez stood it up to the back post, and up went Maguire and up went Big Pete and up went half of Burton, and it came down off a head to the edge of the 6-yard box where the game had left one boot unattended.

Reece’s. thwack. Low, through a forest of legs, in.

2-1.

Marsh Road did not sing. Marsh Road detonated. ROAR, stamp-stamp-stamp, the drum going, Bald Tony’s bell going, 6,000 people who had spent 84 minutes learning humility letting go of it all at once.

Burton threw their keeper up for the last corner and we cleared it and the whistle went.

PEEP-PEEP-PEEP.

Tilbrook Town 2, Burton Albion 1. Into the 3rd round.

"Never," Raj said, hoarse, both hands on his head, "let them sing that song again. Not ever. Not one of them."

"They will."

"I know they will. They are 21. But they will hear it different next time, after today. That is the most you can hope for out of anybody."

Raj reads a crowd better than most men I pay to do it.

Not a triumph. A survival, at home, against a team that came to spoil it, on a day the town had decided in advance was already won. We had believed the songs, exactly as I feared, and it had cost us 84 minutes of fright, and we had got away with it.

You do not always get away with it. That was the lesson, and only I and Sadler and a knackered old captain in the treatment room seemed to have learned it.

"Never again," Sadler said, finding me in the corridor, coat on, grey with the strain of it. "That is the last time this lot walk out believing a game is won before it starts. I will show them that 23rd minute every Monday until May."

"Show them the last 20 as well," I said. "That is who they can be when they stop admiring themselves."

"Aye." He almost smiled. "1-1 to 2-1 in 16 minutes against 10 men behind the ball. That is a proper side, that bit." He went to see about Marsh, and left me the corridor.

I found Marsh myself, ice strapped to the knee, the grin of a man who had been useful.

"45 minutes," I said. "You steadied a sinking thing."

"I have done it before. I will not do it many more times." He nodded at the strapping. "This is the last season this knee gives you 45 of those, Sam. You know that. I know that. Get the boy ready to do it without me."

"Maguire is nearly there."

"He is there. He just does not know it yet. That is the last thing I have to teach him, that he does not need me any more."

He said it flat, without a scrap of self-pity, and I did not insult him by offering any.

"One good year. Give me one good year of being useful, and then let me go on my feet, not on my back."

"You have got it," I said, and meant it, and did not tell him the other thing I knew about how his one good year ends, because some knowings you carry alone so that a good man can enjoy the not-knowing.

The R3 draw was on the television that night, the velvet bag and the numbered balls, the Premier League names dropping in among the survivors like coins into a slot.

I watched it in the office with the lights off.

They gave us a giant. Home. A club whose weekly wage bill was bigger than everything I had spent building the whole of Tilbrook, coming to Marsh Road in January, under the floodlights, for the cameras.

The town would lose its mind. The board would count the gate 3 times to be sure.

And I would take the biggest single payday a club my size ever sees, and feed it to a machine that had just, that very week, quietly promised to turn it into 10 times itself, and then 10 times that again.

click of the television off.

Somewhere out past the seawall the coin sat at a boring 12 dollars, and 3 men in a forum argued about whether anything had happened, and the answer, the one only I had, was that everything had, and none of it could be spoken, and all of it was about to arrive at once.

The vultures already knew our winger was good. After a run to the 3rd round, live on the telly, they would know it loudly, and in January they would come with numbers, and the numbers would look enormous to everyone in the building except the one man who knew they were a joke.

Let them come. I had the money now, ink not pencil, to laugh in the politest possible way and say no.

There was, first, a Tuesday league game to win, and a young side to teach that it is not as clever as its songs. But that was tomorrow’s work.

Tonight the halving was done, the cup was safe, and for the length of one dark hour in an empty office I let myself feel, quietly, like a dog finally allowed to be petted, the size of the thing that only I could see coming.