1.21 - This Is Max Speaking

21.

I woke up feeling great - no trace of the headache - but then realised I had to go to the call centre. Back to reality.

It was brutal. It was torture. I didn't want to be there. I had lost every single shred of appetite for answering phone calls. I didn't give a shit about my stats.

I wanted to move Gribbin to the right-wing. I wanted to switch to a 5-3-2 or overload the midfield. I wanted a five-digit bank balance. I wanted to take Emma to the opera. Well, maybe one of the short ones.

"Hello, International Bank, this is Max speaking, how can I help you?"

***

On the football side of my life, I was equal parts happy, excited, and anxious.

Many questions were unanswered - primarily, would FC United try to steal my client?

I swallowed such feelings. Marked them as unread. The following Monday would be the Queen's funeral, and that seemed like a good place to stop and rethink everything. Do a bit of strategising. In the meantime, it was back to the grind.

On Monday evening, I drove to Goals Manchester, a Powerleague competitor. 5-a-side pitches, artificial grass. I loved these places. There were quite a few matches going on but I found it hard to concentrate - I kept wanting to reposition the players or give them instructions. Mark number 7! Play down the left! Basically, I was struggling to get out of the football manager mindset and back into the Super Scout one. I picked up 90 XP.

I also saw a couple of interesting players. Couple of lads with PA 20 - could have been a backup at FC United. Not really interesting to me with my agent hat on, but I mean, good to know. There was also this older guy with CA 7, PA 50. I had a chat with him and it turned out he'd been scouted by West Ham when he was a kid, and played for a while in a semi-pro league down south. Couple of bad injuries and now he was just taking it easy.

On Tuesday, I returned to Ardwick's Powerleague to check on Raffi Brown. He was there, all right, as lop-sidedly beautiful as ever. None of his attributes had changed, but now I could see that his finishing was 6. A tiny bit of a letdown - he wasn't going to be scoring silly amounts of goals from midfield like Michel Platini. But he was running the game, pulling the strings. I made eye contact with him once, and it was intense. Scary. I think I'd have been calmer having eye sex with Ariana Grande. I did a little nod, friendly but masculine. He just went about his business.

Later, I got a text from Neil, FC United's manager. It just said:

5-3-2 my arse.

They'd played Matlock Town. He can't have been that unhappy - United won 2-1.

***

XP balance: 268

***

Wednesday and Thursday went in similar fashion. Just hitting spots I knew to be reliable sources of XP, paying special attention to anyone with PA higher than 1. I was still always trying to do little thought experiments, especially if the games were bad. Like when a pace 5 player was against a pace 8 player - could I see the difference? (Yes.) And how big did the difference need to be for there to be a clear and obvious tactical benefit? Like, if I had a pacey right-winger, would I play him on the left-wing in order to put him against the opposition's slowest defender? (Sometimes, maybe, but mostly not. But if the pace difference was high enough, then yes. I thought I would.)

There was also stamina - players with low stamina, which was most of them, faded badly towards the ends of games. Players with good stamina, like Beth, could dominate the last 10 minutes. These players were unevenly distributed; it wasn't like there were teams of super-fit amateurs winning every game with late comebacks. That'd be interesting though - a team of clumsy marathon runners against a slightly more talented team of, I don't know, bus drivers.

***

XP balance: 386

***

On Friday I snapped at my boss. I'd turned my phone off for a few minutes to get a break. In the past I took my 'breaks' at the end of calls. After I'd solved whatever problem, I'd ask the customer a question about the weather or how their day was going or something bland. I didn't need to think much, and some of the customers enjoyed the little chats.

But I didn't want to do that anymore. As discussed, I'd rather have been watching two 40-year-old men sprint towards a loose ball at the speed of giant turtles, so that I could calculate whether pace 2 with a one-yard head start was better than pace 3. So I just ended the calls and then gave myself a minute or two 'off the phones'.

My boss spotted me staring into space when there were calls in the queue. "Max," she said. "Is your phone off?"

"Yep. I need a break."

"You seem to be taking a lot of these little breaks." Good on her for noticing, I suppose.

"Yep."

"Well, you're not allowed."

I pointed to the stats board. I was in first place, just ahead of the next best employee. I'd been swapping places with her on and off the whole day. Basically, I was doing just enough work to keep in touch with her, and then I'd pick up the pace in the last half hour of my shift so that I'd finish every day as the top employee, while doing as little work as poss to get there. A season is a marathon, not a sprint. Boss wanted me to go flat-out, 24/7. To squeeze me like a sponge and then chuck me out. I pushed back. "You've seen the stats?"

"Think of the customers, Max. They have to wait. You know what it's like. It's frustrating. And you've got them on hold."

"I think what I'm doing is fine. I'm answering more calls a day than anyone. I need a little time out sometimes."

"But you're not - "

This was the part where I snapped. "They're on hold because you're understaffed. You've been understaffed since the day I started." I had a lot more to say, but my tone had already said it. I cooled all the way down. Switched from direct passing to short. Changed 'counter attack' from Yes to No.

She moved closer to me. "Max, you're not allowed to turn your phone off." And then she made a big mistake. She leaned over and pressed the button. The button on my phone. My. Phone. Instantly, a call came down the line.

"Max speaking, how can I help you?"

Boss lady walked away in triumph, but by the end of the day I was in a distant second place in the stats. I wanted to finish third, but I'd built up too much of a lead.

So I was looking at Beth's team doing a little warm up before kick off in a strange kind of mood. There was the high of knowing I was about to get 2 XP per minute, and knowing I was about to be able to boss people around. To paint one part of the world the colour I wanted it.

I knew I was going to quit my job. I couldn't afford to right away - I could very possibly freeze to death if I did. But I had one foot out of the door. And if I was getting out of one job, what was I getting into?

Football. But why would I get into football? Because I had the curse. Because I had the cheat mode. But what if I built a whole career around my screens and my ability to see player profiles, and after 7 years the curse ended? If I couldn't see the screens, would there be anything left? Did Max Best have what it took?

"Beth," I said. She broke away from the warm up and jogged over to me. I always worried that she'd be weird or clingy, but she never was. She had her own stuff going on. I felt a tiny surge of affection for her.

"Max."

"When are we playing City?"

"Not next week, the week after."

"Right."

She jogged off again.

"Beth."

She came back. "What."

"Where can I see the league table?"

She raised one of her drawn-on eyebrows at me, but then rummaged in her bag, whipped out her phone, and started double-thumbing it. She handed it to me and jogged off.

Should I go to her Whatsapp and get some hot goss? See who she was sending nudes to? It was briefly tempting. But nah. I pinched the screen to make the page bigger. It was the shitty website of the North Manchester Women's League Indoor Limited Invitational League and surprise, surprise, it didn't have responsive html tables. Anyway, City had won every game and judging by their goal difference, no games had even been close. Except they'd only beaten us 3-1, so they must have gone goal-crazy in the next match to make up for it.

Looking up and down the table, I was once again aware of my own stupidity. Somehow, after all this time, I didn't know the name of Beth's team. I had always thought of them as just that: Beth's Team. I knew they weren't one of the bottom names, so I made an educated guess that they were the team in third place: Manchester Met Heads. Was that a pun on meat heads or meth heads? The Met part stood for Metropolitan, the name of the second biggest university in Manchester. The team in second had played a game more but were only one point ahead, so there was every chance Beth's team would finish the season in second place. Especially with me in charge.

But that wasn't good enough.

"Beth. Team meeting."

She rolled her eyes, but gathered the ladies.

Now, this was a proper challenge. When I'd managed AFC Phoenix, I'd simply given orders on my screens and the guys had carried them out. I didn't need to verbalise. I didn't need to explain. But with Beth's team, the Match Overview screen didn't appear. I had to do things the old-fashioned way.

And that was fine by me. I wanted to prove myself.

I looked around at my squad. Keeper: Jane. Defenders: Beth and Nobby. Defensive midfielder: Freyja. Midfield terriers: Sophie, Bella, Bex. Striker: Lula.

"All right. Ladies. It's big speech time." I cleared my throat. "Four score and seven days ago, I became your coach."

"Let me stop you right there, Max," said Beth. "We're playing St. Thomas Aquinas. They're shit. We don't need Braveheart."

"Fine. Jesus. Listen. These lot are bottom of the league. Next week we're playing the team just below us. Then it's City." I left an ominous pause there. "I want to beat City."

Beth nodded. "That's nice. It's not going to happen. Can we finish our warm up now?"

"I want to beat City," I said. "If we beat City, I'm going to quit my job." Not totally sure why I said that, but as it bounced its way along my throat and out of my mouth, it felt right.

"What's one thing got to do with the other?" asked Nobby.

"So the way I see it," I said. "We need to treat these two games as training sessions. To practice moves and ideas we can use against City."

"Max," said Beth, exasperated. "When we play them we're just there to make up the numbers." My head snapped in her direction. Make up the numbers... now, there was a good idea.

"Beth. We can win. We will win. We must win."

Freyja tilted her head. "You've got a plan, haven't you?"

I grinned. "I may have one or two ideas."