Pre-Season 6 - Weirdly Exciting (Patreon)

6.

What lay inside was an echoey sports hall, nicely cool, with a bunch of women warming up in front of exactly one spectator. Me.

I didn't have long to wait for kick-off. The wall clock started counting down from 25:00, so 25 minutes each way, quick half time orange and biccy.

The game was enthusiastic but short on quality. I wouldn't say it in front of Beth but the goalkeepers were really bad. One thing in the game's favour was a general feeling of positivity. Just a lack of snide challenges, much less cheating, much more encouragement. And one thing is for certain - the time absolutely flew by. I had no problem keeping my attention on the game, and yes, I got 1 XP per minute just like normal.

Beth (known to most of her side as 'Beff') was the best player and she had the highest stamina, so in the last ten minutes she dominated and scored two goals to put the game to bed. It finished 11-7.

Her team was ecstatic, and after a few high-fives and hugs they shook hands with the other team and went to their side of the pitch where all their kit bags were. Stupidly, I had hung around, thinking about certain things I'd noticed in the game. Too late, I tried to slip away. Beth bounded up to me before I could escape and dragged me towards her teammates. They were quite international - probably some kind of university team. Beth was high on victory and the bursts of speed her extra training had allowed her. "So, what did you think?"

"I enjoyed it. Can I come next week, too?"

The rest of her team made cooing noises like I was flirting. Beth said, "First you have to prove you were really watching." Her teammates ate up this twist in the tale. They had front-row seats to an exclusive one-off Love Island special.

I said, "What do you mean?"

"Are you some rando perv who wants to look at our legs or what? Were you watching the game or were you watching us?"

I got it. And I smiled. I'd never been able to say this before in my entire life, but right at that moment I was uniquely qualified to comment on their footballing ability. Completely detached from their appearance! What I knew about them from their player profiles was totally objective. I was pretty sure it was, anyway. "Well, the first thing I noticed was that Nobuko is left-footed but only uses her right."

The team's general level of fun and jolliness didn't change right away, but Nobuko looked crushed and the rest caught on. "How do you know my name?"

I'd only gone and put my foot in it FOUR SECONDS into the conversation. Why do I think of myself as smart when I'm so consistently stupid? "I heard someone say it during the match."

"They all call me Nobby."

"Yeah but a Japanese woman called Nobby. It's obviously going to be Nobuko."

They relaxed a bit. Not so much Nobuko, who wasn't convinced it was obvious. But she didn't want to make a scene and she had other sushi to fry. "How do you know about my foot?"

That was easier. I mean, there's no way to know someone's left-handed just by looking at a photo, but it’s much easier if you see them play tennis. So it was a breeze to bullshit my way out of this one. "Just a sense from the way you move. Your balance. There's nothing wrong with the way you kick the ball but it didn't seem totally right. I had this feeling that..." Nobuko was staring at a spot on the floor. "Well, anyway. Look, Beth, guys, I keep annoying everyone by accident. I should just go."

There was uproar. No! Not annoying. Don't go. Nobuko was shaking her head slightly and she waited for a lull. "My family is extremely traditional. To write left-handed in Japanese is very hard. They didn't force me to be right-handed like in the old days, but they encouraged me. And I was happy to try. Why not? Easier to fit in. So now... yes. He's right. I am shocked. I never knew it was so obvious."

She was close to tears. This was brutal. I hated that I had done this. But on the other hand... it was weirdly exciting. One significant piece of evidence that the player profiles were real! But now I had a social issue to deal with. "It's not SO obvious. Honestly. You could ask a hundred people to comment on you as a footballer and I'd be the only one to say it. Seriously."

"He's right, Nobby," said Beth. "You can't tell."

"Okay, I'm going. It was fun. Thanks." They tried to stop me leaving, invited me to join them in the pub. I held firm. Plus I had very little money left. "Same time next week? Or did I fail the test?"

Beth walked outside with me. She said she didn't know what time they'd be playing but she could text me. It was a blatant lie to get my number.

I took her phone and started typing it in, but paused. "This is just for the football."

"Right."

"I'm serious." She looked doubtful, but seemed to understand what I was saying. I typed in my number and saved it.

She took her phone back without looking at it. "What about me?"

"What?" I was worried she was going to get all intense. Was it too late to snatch her phone out of her hand?

"You saw Nobby was left-footed somehow. What about me?"

That was easy. "You should play in defence. Bye."

As I walked away, she looked down at her phone. "Bye... oh, he's left a fake name. Fucking hell."

***

Saturday was the day before the deadline, and I didn't quite get to 1,000 XP.

But I thought my overall plan was pretty sound. After brek, I went to the police facility, and kept going back every half an hour or so in between drives to the shops and once, to the library in Withington where I spent some time looking up my curse on a computer that couldn't be traced back to me. "Slummin' It non-league achievement". "What's it called when you see things NOT schizophrenic." "Does doctor patient confidentiality apply in England."

No help. No evidence that anyone else had this problem.

Anyway, one time I drove to the police and saw a game on. This time I was mentally prepared in case anyone came to challenge me. My plan was to say I had come to see my friend Niall Stephens - one of the names I'd seen the last time I was there. This Stephens guy had a habit of shooting from the halfway line no matter the state of the game, to the growing apoplexy of his teammates. I felt like most of the regulars would know him. And if there was a second game, I'd refer them to one of the players from this current game I was watching. "Oh," they'd say, sympathetically. "He was here earlier."

The game was bad, again, but this time I focused on one attribute: tackling. I took the players with the highest and lowest scores - there were many that had a 1 so I focused on a guy playing in midfield who had more chance of being involved in tackle situations - and kept an eye on them through the game. Tried to keep a tally. The guy with the 'good' tackling attribute did slide in and win a couple of tackles, but so did the rubbish one. The 'good' one looked slightly more convincing to my naked eye, but the point of watching them was to see how their performance related to these numbers, not to put my own interpretation on it. In the end there just wasn't enough data from one tiny, amateur game. Maybe I'd invest some cash in going to see a professional game and see what came out of that. I still had that Scottish money, after all.

But there was absolutely no chance of me going out of my way to watch godawful amateur games or overpriced professional ones if I bought Super Scout and found it was as useless as 4-4-2. If it was another bust, then this journey was over.

***

After the football I went to get petrol - catastrophically expensive - and bought Hot Goss, a trashy celebrity news magazine. I drove to the care home and read some articles about Love Island to my mum. Halfway through, Anna, looking much improved, came in and sat by mum's bed and wheezed and listened and asked me to read their horoscopes. I did, but grew frustrated by the sheer stupidity of the thing so offered her a choice between another article on Love Island or a story about a woman who'd fallen in love with a murderer. She chose the latter.

***

The forecast for Sunday morning was 50% chance of thunderstorms. I only needed 110 more points. Just a game and a bit! If the storms didn't hit until lunchtime, I'd make it.

The first game kicked off under dark grey clouds. I was so distracted by them I didn't get full XP. Stupid! At full-time I moved over to another pitch where they'd kicked off twenty minutes late. I guessed the players would try to finish their game even if there was a fair bit of rain, but that maybe the matches scheduled for later would be cancelled. Of course, in the event of an actual storm, it was game over for the day’s schedule and game over for Project Super Scout. It was frustrating - I knew I needed one more set of matches to kick off. Just one more!

The skies darkened. There was lightning in the distance, though I couldn't hear the thunder. Every minute counted; I had to pay attention. I tried to imagine my eyes being pulled open like I was being forced to watch the games. Like in that picture from that movie.

Goals flew in on all the pitches around me. 1-0 over here. 4-2 over there. But the only number I cared about crept up slower than me up a stepladder.

I had 950 XP.

I had 975 XP.

984.

98...5.

Then: disaster. Huge cracks in the sky, like ship masts splitting in half, condemning all who sail in it to drown. And drown we did.

Hundreds of men gathered their most vital possessions and ran for what little shelter there was. I let four complete strangers into my car - it stank of mud and sweat for days after.

Stuck on 985 XP! Stranded! Shipwrecked! At first I was depressed. To come so close and fail by fifteen minutes. Pure torment! But the good-natured banter of the guys distracted me, especially when the conversation turned to women's football. 3 of the 4 guys had been watching the Euros - reluctantly at first - "there was nothing else on" - but with growing interest. When the discussion moved away from the general - "but aren't the goalkeepers shit?" - to the specific - "She's got to pick Russo to start ahead of White" and "Bright won't be able to stop Alex Popp; England are in for a rude awakening" - I knew I'd missed out on something big. A shared, collective experience. A national carnival.

Again, my thoughts turned to making a mad dash down to London to see if I could get a ticket. Maybe I could pay someone to let me watch the first 15 minutes!

Petrol: half a tank each way; a hundred pounds there and back. Ticket from a tout: several hundred quid. Sandwich and a bottled water in London: an arm and a leg. Parking: a kidney.

I rubbed my face hard, decided to give it up as a bad job. Let my life return to normal. Maybe I'd go and watch the girls play football every Friday night - without creeping them out in future - and upgrade my skillz over the years (or until I was cured). Basically, treat my condition as a mild curiosity and not let it bother me much or change how I lived.

I turned to the guy in the passenger seat. I knew his name but had learned my lesson about revealing too much. "If you've got all your kit I can drop you home."

There was a silence that stretched into the back of the car. I turned and saw them all looking at me like I was a deep-sea fish with 7 heads and hooks for teeth. In the few seconds before someone spoke, I tried to retrieve the conversation I'd tuned out. They had been talking about tactics and players... from their game. What?

"Take me home?" the guy said. "We've got the whole second half to play."

"There's a huge storm!" I said.

"It'll be gone in a couple of minutes," said one guy in the back.

"The pitch!" I said, thinking about how waterlogged it would be.

They didn't seem to care. "As long as the ref sticks around, it's game on. Not letting a bit of rain ruin our season."

A bit of rain! I couldn't believe my ears. There had been about a metre of rain in the last five minutes. At one point I'd checked the water level outside the car to see if we'd start floating off or whatever.

They continued talking about the game, getting more and more animated when discussing which opposing players were giving them the most shit and what to do about it.

They were going to keep playing! These absolute morons! These absolutely beautiful absolute morons!

I could have kissed them.

Deliriously happy, I blurted out, "You should target Matty Smith! He's actually a striker and he's got no stamina. Make him sprint a couple of times and he's toast."

The passenger seat guy said, carefully, like he was talking to a mentally challenged person, "Which one is Matty Smith?"

I dialled my excitement down by about 10%. "He's the left-back. He's wearing number 12."

The guys looked at each other. Finally, the oldest one nodded. "We can move Arkhy out there, have him run at him."

I should have quit while I was ahead, but my mouth had a mind of its own. "Hit your goal kicks over there, too. The guy can't jump and he can't head it."

There was another silence. The oldest guy gave me a hard look. "Do you watch a lot of them?"

He meant their opponents. "No," I said. "Never seen them before. I'm just... I'm sort of training to be a scout, is all. I’ve been at City’s academy a lot." This was stretching the meaning of the words way way past breaking point. Platt Lane hadn’t been City’s academy for years, and even the vaguest follow-up question about what exactly I was doing at the ‘academy’ would mean a lot of cringeworthy backtracking.

Another silence, this one much deeper than the last. It wasn’t merely suspicion and anxiety; we realised the storm had passed and the worst of the rain had gone. The next sounds were those of car doors opening and slamming. The lads did a little jog towards their pitch, but the oldest one turned and said, "Target the full-back, yeah?"

"Yeah."

He nodded and jogged off. I followed, ruining my trainers in the thick Manchester mud, and watched the older guy giving instructions to his team. I noticed he was wearing Man City shinpads.

They followed my advice and scored two goals in 15 minutes.

And as the second goal was being damply celebrated, I bought Super Scout and my life changed.

Permanently.

***

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