1.68 - Maxy No-Thumbs

68.

I was early. I'd brought the crutches because I'd told Mike Dean that I was still using them. And I was, sometimes. But at about 10 AM I'd gotten a notification that Chester FC had sent me 170 pounds. 60 for the petrol, 10 for a pie, and 100 for my scouting report. And that had reduced what remained of my pain by approximately 80%.

Alchemy! For the first time, I'd turned football into CASH.

I could have danced, yo!

Fine. I danced a bit. Relax. No-one was watching.

MD MD arrived, parked, and we did some small talk and whatnot. The curry place wasn't busy, but we weren't alone. Next to us was a group of three older women. Older than me, you understand. Younger than MD. A blonde, a brunette, and a ginge. He seemed very happy to see them, but they barely looked at us.

Okay, fine. Jesus. They barely looked at him. With me they came for the crutches, stayed for the fireplace snuggles in an Irish cottage - or whatever they thought my default move was. I tried to snub them but they kept shooting hopeful glances my way.

Our waiter was wearing a crisp white shirt and was polite and professional but had the air of someone who didn't want to be helping out in the family business. Mike ordered chili chicken and I had a chicken korma. Pretty basic, but that's what I like.

Did I mention the small talk? There was a bit more of that. Let's skip to the important bits. Which was, ah, most of it.

Mike. Serious face. Dabbing a napkin against his lips. "Max, I just wanted to kind of clear up any misunderstanding about last weekend."

I held up a hand. "Mike. Let me stop you right there. I'm here, and you're here, so neither of us is particularly grumpy about it. Right? But let's not call it a misunderstanding. We both know what happened. You didn't like what I was doing and you fired me. No hard feelings, I wasn't blameless, but I don't think this conversation is going to go well if we start pretending it was something it wasn't."

He tapped his fork against a blob of chicken. "Yeah. Good. Even better. But let's talk about it. No, hold on. Let me think." He speared a chunk and munched on it while he deliberated. Finally, he put his cutlery down and folded his arms. "History. Chester City. Proud old club. Older than most American cities. Run into the ground by its owners. Club folded. Kicked out of the league. Big trauma. Still hurts. We formed a new club. Chester FC. Community owned, community run. I wanted to get involved. I've got experience running pretty big businesses, Max. I ran a division of a pharma company. Huge turnover. Running a football club? It's peanuts, financially. Tiny. But it's such a part of the community. Outsized. Nothing compares. It's a heavy burden. The stress is suffocating. I'm from a business background, Max. And I'm from Chester. My priority, my absolute priority, is that the club survives. Has enough money to survive. Anything else is secondary. You get that, right? You're a United fan so maybe you don't. But that's what gets me out of bed every morning. Shitty, unglamorous work. Begging for sponsorships. Staring at a balance sheet like it's an oncoming truck. Cold, hard numbers. What I don't know, if I'm being honest, is football. There are times I think I'm learning but then something will happen and I realise I know bugger all. Times like last Sunday when you rolled up. So that's some background. Some context. I was hoping, maybe, you'd tell me the story from your side?"

"Which bit?"

He shook his head. "Why you took those four players off? Just explain that to me."

I shoved a spoonful of curry in my gob, chewed, swallowed, then told him the whole thing. Without mentioning curses and all that jazz, obvs. It didn't take that long, maybe two minutes. In those two minutes he chewed twice.

"Okay," he said, when I indicated I was finished. "Okay. So that was the under 14s. I saw the Chester Knights. And you're a scout, too. Is this the player you found at a five-a-side?" He tapped his phone and showed me footage of Ziggy's wild celebration. Sound blaring - the jeers from the away fans only slightly louder than Ziggy's shouts of 'come on!' I glanced at the women on the next table - they didn't seem too bothered by Mike's rudeness. I confirmed that it was my client in the video, which felt like confessing to a crime. Mike did a cheeky kind of grin that suited him but was all too rare. "Amazing." He took his phone back. I wanted to ask to see the whole clip, but it didn't seem the right moment. Something more important was happening than me winning my bet. "Jackie told me all about it. Jackie told me a lot about you. He said we should sign you before someone else did, and I asked if he'd seen you play, and he said only for ten seconds and that was enough. Then he called me again and said he'd seen you really play and I should get the red carpet ready. And then he said you were injured and he wanted to get you checked out but also he wanted to show you around and I said sure, my casa is your casa."

"You really trust him, don't you?"

"This is what I'm trying to say, Max. I know fuck all about football. I know a thousand times more than the man on the street, but he knows the square root of fuck all. Someone like me needs someone like Jackie."

"You've got Ian Evans."

"Well," he said, and that signaled a break in the chat.

I got the sense that MD had gotten carried away, and now he was trying to get his thoughts into order. I ate and drank and tried not to be sexy.

"Max. You sent that scouting report in."

"Boston versus Alfreton," I said.

"Yeah. I loved it. I read it three times. Tactical diagrams, player strengths, great. But there was a kind of assumption in your thinking that the reader would be... well, would be Ian Evans."

"Yes," I said, with a little frown. Who else?

"A couple of times you added notes, almost like an afterthought. This player makes mistakes, press him. This guy tires - if they have used all their subs attack down his side. Just off-hand recommendations like it was nothing."

I'd almost not included any of that stuff because it seemed so remedial. It was just to flesh out the word count. Make sure I got a second gig. "Yeah."

"And I got excited. This is what I wanted! And I sent the email round to all the staff. And do you know who was in my office 5 minutes later wanting to talk about it?"

"Ian Evans, who it was written for," I said, deadpan.

"Terry. The coach of the Knights." The disabled team I'd managed. "He's a huge fan of yours. The kids never shut up about you, apparently, and he loves it. He came in and we had a big chat about it all. And I had it out with him. Because I couldn't make head nor tail of what you did that day. The Knights. One minute it was pure chaos and we were losing, the next it was pure chaos and we were winning. So he talked me through it, step by step. And I have to say... I don't know, Max. I was pretty skeptical. It seemed impossible. But then he told me he'd gone to watch the under 14s and what you did there was even harder. He said I should talk to Spectrum and find out what steps I'd taken." He sipped his beer as his mood darkened. "Well, I'm sorry to say that Spectrum wasn't as complimentary. He portrayed you as erratic and capricious. And based on what I'd seen myself, it was easy to agree with him. And after you left, Tyson went back on the pitch and scored two goals. So... that showed you up, right? I asked one of the first-team coaches what he thought of you and he said the guys had nicknamed you 'Maxy No-Thumbs'."

I looked at my hands. What was wrong with them?

Mike held his hands up, but pushed his thumbs into his palms. "Because you can only count to eight."

"Oh," I said. "Good gag."

"Yeah," he said, picking up his fork and tapping his meal again. "But this is what I'm trying to get at. Obliquely, I know. Just bear with me. If a load of football people tell me something, I have to listen. Our old owner installed himself as manager. That was when we started laying the foundations for the phoenix club. Everyone's got an opinion about football but there are experts and dilettantes, like with everything. So when five people tell me Max Best is an idiot, I have to pay attention. Sorry to say. But I wasn't born yesterday, either. I know there are cliques and I know people will look after their own fiefdoms and feel threatened by change. In my old company, I had a VP once who came to me and told me he thought his department was obsolete and I should look into scrapping it. Can you imagine that? The guy was amazing. Not great for his career, though, is it? Most people cling onto power for as long as possible." His face lit up and he picked up his phone again. "Which brings me to this."

He handed me the phone and I watched a clip from whatever website had all these football snippets. One team had a corner, and they fired it into the penalty area. It was cleared as far as the half-way line. Some clumsy defender was on his own - no-one within 20 yards of him - but he took a bad touch and suddenly he was in full panic mode. He turned to pass the ball back to the goalkeeper, but this blisteringly fast guy on the other team swooped in, took the ball from him, ran the rest of the pitch and scored.

"Sorry ladies," I said to the table next to us. "He's so excited he forgot to turn the sound off."

"What's he excited about?" asked the blonde.

"Oh, he's the managing director of a football club," I said, like that explained anything. It got the desired effect, though. They thought that was tremendous, but Mike Dean was stupefied by the attention. Surely he was one of the biggest alphas in Chester?

"And who are you?" said the brunette.

"You know after a match, the guy who goes round the stadium picking up crisp packets?" She said yeah. "I'm his assistant."

They laughed. I tried to kick MD but missed. "Buy them a drink," I said from the corner of my mouth.

He took slightly too long, but finally unfroze, smiled at the ladies, apologised for being uncouth, and offered to buy the table a bottle of wine. They said they'd prefer beer, and that particular chapter ended with all the middle-aged people being a little bit giddy. Jesus. Was it so boring being old that a spot of light flirting made everyone blush?

I clicked the sound off and watched the clip again. A goal scored from a counter-attack. It was something that happens hundreds of times a year. Thousands of times a year. "Mike, mate, I have no idea what I'm looking at."

"Don't you recognise the teams?"

"No."

"The one conceding from the corner... That's Alfreton Town." I still didn't get it. "Max! That's exactly what you predicted!" He pulled out a piece of paper. "I have it here. When taking corners, Alfreton leave Garry Osgood as their covering player. He is slow, with poor technique, so Alfreton are vulnerable to a break. Chester should play their fastest strikers to take advantage of this weakness. Kin hell, Max! This is Nostradamus stuff!"

I shook my head. "It's trivial. Anyone could see that."

"No!" He very nearly slammed his fist into the table but controlled himself. "No, Max. It's trivial to you. It's trivial to Jackie. Yes! It's trivial to Henri Lyons, and holy shit was it weird to see him being your assistant. I have to apologise for calling him a nutjob. Shows what I know. Do you know he did more for our disabled programme in one morning than any of Chester's first team have ever done? Yeah, anyway. Let's put everything together. You can scout. You know tactics. You take one look at a seemingly healthy youth team and say it's got 6 months to live." He looked around furtively and spoke in a whisper. "And the people who hate you are the ones I've always thought were total shits." Delighted with his indiscretion, he was about to take a big swig of beer when he remembered something else. Much too loud, he said, "And you can get bloody Jackie Reaper to sing your praises and fucking Henri Lyons to be your youth team assistant!" He beamed at me like I was a table full of horny Mancunian women he could choose from. "You've got a bleeding enormous football brain in there. Enormous. I shouldn't say this but when I saw that corner routine and the goal I got really excited. You may be the answer to all my problems, Max! I need someone with a football brain. Someone who can spot talent, see points of failure in our culture, help on the tactical side. Imagine it! Someone who could help me find good players for free. Stop me wasting money on shitheads. Improve the youth setup. Help us win games! Help us get promoted! Get back into the football league. Where we belong." The guy couldn't hold his drink, so I was alarmed to see him take another massive swig of beer. "Max. I need someone who can help me on football matters and won't take shit from anyone."

This was too much to take in. I hadn't really been expecting anything in particular, and I thought I was ready for anything Mike Dean could throw at me. But it sounded like... Player recruitment, player development, tactical input, the conduit between the money people and the football people... Yes, it really sounded like... "Mike. Are you saying you want me to be Chester's Director of Football?"

...

This chapter was sponsored by Ted Steel Shark Jumping Supplies.