Chapter 255: One Year At A Time I

"Then come back in and shut the door," I said.

Sadler shut it and stayed on his feet, in his training boots, on the far side of my desk. There was a crumb of dried mud on the carpet where he stood. Down in the street a school bus went by with its windows steamed.

"What do you want to tell them?" I said.

"I want to know what I am managing first." He put a finger on Danny’s headline. "A side that is staying up, or a side that is going for 6th. They are different teams, Sam. I pick different men."

"How different?"

"Staying up, I rest Vardy last night and I rest him again Saturday week. I play the kids in March. I walk Marsh to May in one piece." He moved the finger an inch along the page.

"Going for it, I play my best 11 until their legs come off," he said. "And I am in here on Friday asking you for 3 loans."

"Which do you want?"

"I am gone in June. We shook on it. So next year is yours to decide and I keep my nose out." He took the finger off the paper. "Saturday is mine. Tell me what Saturday is for, and I will pick you a team for it."

knock at the door, twice, and it was Maureen with the green ledger under her arm. She was the one who had left the paper on my desk.

"I could hear the pair of you from the photocopier," she said.

"Good. Fetch Margaret. And Priya, if she is in. If we are having this, we are having it once, with everybody."

Priya was talking before she was through the door. She had her own chair in one hand and a printed sheet in the other.

"Before anybody says anything sensible," she said. "2.3 million pounds."

"Good morning, Priya," Maureen said.

"That is what the Premier League hands every Championship club, every year. A solidarity payment, they call it. Next season ours is 360,000." tap of her nail on the sheet.

"Same pot," she said. "Then the television share on top. A club up there starts the season over 3 million a year better off than us, before it has sold a ticket."

"And I have 14 promotion bonuses to pay out of it before you have the envelope open." Maureen had not sat down either. "400,000 pounds on the day we go up. The agents asked for the clause in August, and it cost us nothing to say yes in August."

"3 million pays 400,000 a few times over," Priya said.

"For one year. Then all 14 of those contracts step up to a Championship wage on the 1st of July, and they stay there." She turned to the radiator. "Margaret. Tell them what you told me at Christmas."

Margaret had taken the seat by the radiator with a folder on her knee. She opened it and found the page with her thumb.

"Down here, what the owner puts in counts as the club’s income," she said. "It gives us room on wages. I have filed it that way since we came into the League, and they have checked it twice."

"We know that," Sadler said.

"A division up, from this August, they count it the other way round. They add up what the club loses in a year and put a ceiling on the loss. 3 million pounds. 8 million, if the owner covers the gap in equity." She shut the folder. "Past 8, they stop you signing players."

"8 million is a lot of money," Sadler said.

"It is. It is also the first rule this club has met that Sam’s cheque cannot walk round."

Somewhere down the corridor a telephone was ringing and nobody was answering it. ring. ring.

By December the coin would be worth 70 times what it had fetched at Christmas.

In League One I could pour as much of that into this club as I had the nerve for. A division up, I could put in 8 million a year and no more.

"So I say we wait," Maureen said.

Priya’s head came round. "You?"

"Me. One more year down here, where the sums work. Take the squad to 24. Go up in 2014 with the wage bill already standing where it needs to stand." She looked at me. "It is what he has said since the day he bought the place, and for once I agree with every word."

Maureen had fought me on the roof, on Maguire’s fee, and on every figure I ever asked her to write in ink. I had waited a long time to hear her say she agreed with me. I found I could not look at Priya while she said it.

"It is what I have said," I told them. "We have one roof and a thin squad. I want a stand on the east side and 4 more footballers and the academy grade through. Then we go up, and we stay."

"You said that when we were 16th," Priya said. "We are 7 points off 6th."

"And if we go up in May, we are Southend."

Every one of them had lived through Southend. It is half an hour from my desk.

"Champions of this division in 2006," I said. "11,000 in Roots Hall the day they did it. Straight back down the next year. By 2010 the taxman had 2 winding-up petitions out on them, the players went a month without wages, and they were in the bottom division."

"Southend did not have Kanté," Sadler said.

"Southend had debt," Priya said. "We have none."

"They all say that." Maureen put the ledger down on my desk at last. "I could show you 6 sets of accounts that said it."

"I am frightened of it," I said. "I have not said I am right."

Sadler looked out of the window. Priya folded her sheet in half, and in half again.

"It is 20 to 10," Margaret said. "I do rules. I do not get a vote on wanting. But Craig needs something to say to them."

"I will say it myself," I said.

I drove out to the training ground behind Sadler’s old estate car with the radio off. I tried what I was going to say 3 different ways at 3 sets of lights, and I did not like the sound of any of them.

So at 10 o’clock I stood in the canteen at the training ground, in the smell of toast and deep heat, in front of my whole squad. The back page of the Gazette was pinned to the noticeboard between the fines list and the fire drill.

They sat at 3 long tables in their training kit with mugs of tea. Hartley was at the far end with the young keeper. Quinn was beside Doyle, holding a slice of toast in both hands.

Reece had a chair pulled out ready to stand on, and Sadler looked at him until he sat on it.

"The sum in the paper is right," I said. "7 points, 21 games. You can all count, so I will not stand here and tell you it is wrong."

scrape of a chair leg. Somebody at the back said "Get in," quietly, and was elbowed for it.

"52 comes first. When we have 52 points I will stand in this room again, and we will talk about what comes after."

"How many have Brentford?" Mahrez said.

"46," 3 voices told him at once.

"Chairman." That was Marsh, over by the tea urn, with his weight on his good leg. "Can I ask it straight?"

"Go on, Len."

"Are we allowed to want it?"

"You are allowed to want whatever you like."

"I am asking does the club want it."

Kanté was looking at the floor and smiling. Vardy was looking at me. Stokes had his arms folded, and he was watching Marsh.

Marsh had asked me for a good year to finish on. He had asked it in a treatment room in December, with ice strapped to his knee, and I had told him he had it.

"The club wants 52 points," I said. "Ask me again at 52."

"I am 34," Marsh said. "I am short of agains, Sam."

"If we are 6th at Easter," Vardy said, "you will not have to tell us anything."

They believed it. I looked along the 3 tables, and every face in the room had the same look on it.

Sadler clapped his hands once, crack, and sent them out to the grass. Through the window I watched them jog out in a line. Marsh went last, and slower than the rest.

I sat in the Astra in the car park with the engine off and took the notebook out of my coat.

It is a plain black one, the kind with an elastic band, and it fell open at the page I wanted. I had written the heading in January. UP: MAY 2014.

Under it, in my small handwriting, were a drawing of a stand, a figure for the lot, and 4 names that would have meant nothing to any scout in England that winter.

The windscreen had misted over with my breath, and my hands were cold on the cover. I had not eaten since the night before.

Was I being careful, or was I only afraid?

I had said Southend to the room. I could not say Yeovil. Yeovil Town is a market town in Somerset with a ground called Huish Park that holds 9,565, a little more than ours.

The first time I lived through this spring, Yeovil won the play-off final for this division, at Wembley, on the 19th of May 2013. I watched it on a pub television with the sound down. A year later they finished bottom of the Championship. The year after that they finished bottom of League One.

6 years on from Wembley they were out of the Football League. I had liked that club.

And they were in our division now, this very season, inside the top 6. If we went for it, they were one of the clubs we would have to go through.

buzz of the phone on the dashboard. Priya.

"I have the Coat on the other line," she said.

"The what?"

"Mahrez’s agent. The one in the camel coat. I am not learning his name, he will only change agencies." click of her keyboard. "He says it is not urgent, and he has rung 3 times since 9. Shall I put him through?"

"Put him through."

"Mr Mercer." The voice was warm and unhurried. A car door shut somewhere behind it. "First, congratulations. 4-0. I watched the free kick on my phone 5 times. I told Riyad, that is the one I will show people."

"What can I do for you?"

"Nothing today. I am ringing to tell you what is on my desk, so that you have it from me. The club from January have been on again. They will pay 7 million in June."

"He is not for sale in June."

"I know. He told me. He gave you this season and next, and he will keep it. His mother would not let him do anything else. So you and I have one thing left to talk about, and it is where he plays next season."