Chapter 241: Christmas Football I

Boxing Day came up the estuary on a wind off the North Sea, and it brought the rain with it, the thin grey kind that hangs in the air and waits for you.

I was at the ground by 8, before anyone. I have never slept the night before a game, and I have stopped pretending to my wife that I might.

Kieran was already out on the pitch in a woolly hat 2 sizes too big, forking water off the frozen corners, his breath going up off him in clouds. scrape of the fork on the hard ground.

"Boss," he called. "She held. All night, in that wind. Not a drop come through the new roof."

"Good lad."

"Me nan sat under it for the carols on Sunday and stayed dry the whole way. First Christmas of her life she has been dry in that end, boss. She cried over a roof."

"She is entitled to."

"My old man says roofs are for churches and softies." He grinned and drove the fork in. "I told him, come Saturday, stand where it is dry, then say it to my face."

drum of the rain on the new steel above the covered end, flat and steady, hiss of it across the empty plastic seats. Under it the Bovril End was a long dark dry strip while the rest of the ground shone wet.

I looked at that dry strip longer than a grown man needs to look at a roof.

I had put money I alone knew was coming on a lid for that stand back in the summer, when every sensible voice said a promoted club spends on players and nothing besides.

What is the use of knowing what is on its way, if you do not turn some of it into a dry place for an old woman to hear the carols in?

That was the one hat nobody in the ground could see me wearing. The football hat I could not take off today if I tried. Boxing Day decides things on a pitch, and I cannot see a minute of it coming.

22 games gone. Christmas here. 3 matches in 7 days stacked in front of us like a job to be got through. I had built the squad for exactly this week, and told not a soul that was the reason.

"You are playing me," Marsh said in the tunnel at half past 1, strapped, the knee wrapped tight above the sock.

"I am playing you. Boxing Day, at home, in front of your own. Where else would the captain be."

"And Saturday. The away one, 3 days off."

"Saturday you rest, and you will not argue it with me in a corridor." rip of him tearing a fresh strip of tape.

"I can do 2 in a week, Sam. I have done it 20 years."

"You can do 1 a week like the Lenny Marsh they will talk about in this town in 40 years. Or 2 a week like a man of 34 having his knee packed in ice on a Sunday night. I will take the first."

"Since when do you pick the side."

"Since I told Craig this morning, and he agreed before I got to the end of the sentence." I put a hand on the strapped shoulder. "Go and captain them, Len. Full house, and dry for once. Give them a day."

He rolled the ankle to test it, nodded once, and went up the tunnel toward the noise.

I did not tell him the thing I knew about this one good year of his, nor what the tape is really there to hold back. Some things a man carries so the other one does not have to.

The noise up top had the fatness that only comes on Boxing Day, when a ground fills with men let out of the house after 2 days indoors.

3 sides wet and roaring. 1 side dry and roaring. And in the far corner, open to the sky, a rectangle of blue that had come 120 miles on the worst travelling day of the year.

chime of a bell in the away end, and then their song, the old one you cannot help but respect. "PLAY UP POMPEY, POMPEY PLAY UP." My throat went for them, I will be honest, before it went for us.

Portsmouth. A proper club, a giant of living memory, come to a little Essex ground on Boxing Day sitting in the drop with a points deduction round its neck.

The men who ran them spent money the club never had, on dreams it could not carry, and the whole bill had landed at once. They were in administration. Docked.

And that winter their own supporters were passing buckets and forming a trust, trying to buy back the thing that other men had broken.

I knew how it ended for them. That is a part I can never say out loud.

I knew that come the spring the fans win it. That they save it with their own hands, that this proud old club goes down and then claws back every yard.

I stood with that warm and terrible in my chest, and could hand none of it to the 2,000 soaked men in the corner.

"PLAY UP POMPEY." boom of their drum. chime, chime of the bell.

And I thought of Ray Sully, 40 miles up the coast, in a ground he had bought with money he would have to give back one day.

This, I thought. This is the photograph of your future, Ray. It is singing in the rain in my away end, and it does not even know it is a warning.

"Come on, you Town," said a voice at my elbow, and it was Ted, 79, who ought to have been at his daughter’s with his feet up.

"You should be sat down, Ted. It is perishing."

"I have sat and got soaked through in that end for 60 Christmases," he said. "You went and put a roof on it. I am not wasting the thing indoors, am I."

"Your daughter will have my guts for garters."

"She can join the queue." He nodded up at the dry covered end, packed and steaming. "My old dad never had that. Stood there till his coat was through to the shirt, every year of his life."

"He would have said it let a draught in somewhere."

"He would that." Ted laughed, wet and old, and gripped my arm with a cold hand. "Go on, go and watch. And do not you have a heart attack when they score, either end, because score they will."

shriek of the whistle, and Boxing Day football broke out, quick and daft and loose, men with 2 days of turkey in them running it off in front of people who love them.

"UP, TOWN, UP," Sadler was already screaming on the line, both arms going like a man landing a plane. "SQUEEZE ON THEM. SQUEEZE." Portsmouth pressed like a side with nothing left to lose, and for 20 minutes we could not get out.

thud of a clearance charged down. "AWAY IT," somebody howled, and Braithwaite came up through the bodies to punch, smack of glove on wet leather, skid of studs on the sodden goalmouth.

They got their goal on 26, and it was no more than they deserved. A long throw, a flick, a blue shirt bundling it over off his shin while our young defenders looked at one another.

ROAR off the away corner like it came from 40,000, not 2,000. "POMPEY. POMPEY. POMPEY." Our own ground went quiet then, the loud kind of quiet a full house makes when it is losing at home.

I did not panic, and I made sure I was seen not to. 8,000 people take their temperature off the chairman on a bad day. I learned that in the autumn, the dear way.

We were losing at home on Boxing Day, and I could see the next 64 minutes no better than the fellow selling the programmes. There is no knowing on this earth that fetches you a goal back. You go and take it, with your feet, in the wet.

What I did have was a thing I had bought in July and hidden in plain view. A bench. A deep, real, dear bench, sat there in tracksuits, waiting for a day precisely like this one.

Kanté got us going, though he never scored it. Around the half hour he decided Portsmouth had run enough and began lifting the ball off them before they got started. crunch of a tackle, clean, ball away. "He never stops, the little one," Ted shouted, delighted. "He never stops."

Mahrez levelled it on 41. Kanté won it, Reece slipped it wide, and the boy I had turned 2 million pounds down for 4 days before stood the full-back up and bent it in off the far post. CRACK of it off the woodwork and in.

The covered end came off its feet, dry and roaring under the new steel. "MAHREZ. MAHREZ. MAHREZ." I grinned at the badge, and at the letter in my drawer. 2 million bought that club a photograph of the goal. It did not buy them the boy.

Half time, 1 each, and the away end singing yet. Portsmouth fans have had too much taken from them to stop over a scoreline.

I put my head into the dressing room at the break. Sadler had the board out and the spine gathered round, low and small, no shouting.

"They have given us their best 45," he said. "Legs like that do not last. We sit, we move it, we make them chase." He turned. "Bailey."

Quinn looked up, the youngest head in the room by years. "Last half hour, you are on. When their full-back’s legs go, you go at him. Can you?"

"Yes, gaffer."

"Say it like you have done it before."

"I can do that," Quinn said, and the room half laughed, and the boy sat up an inch taller in his seat.