1 - Crackers [T1] (Patreon)

Season 2022/23 - The Third Half

Books 1 and 2 Recap

"Max did some stuff."

***

“Famous quote that turns out to be incredibly thematic and you only realised it on re-read.” Einstein Maybe

***

1.

Monday, December 26th, 2022

The day after Christmas is Boxing Day.

It's called Boxing Day because there's no boxing but there’s loads of football.

Football?

While the sensible German leagues have a lovely old winter break and those footballers spend Christmas wrapped up warm and snug with their loved ones, the British play - get this - even more football! Christmas Eve! Boxing Day! New Year's Eve! New Year's Day! Did you enjoy your day off? Great! Get back on the pitch; we're playing Stoke at 8. Wait, that's on Wednesday. Today it's Oxford at 3. What do you mean you're tired and you want to see your kids? Shut your gob and get warmed up!

***

Eight days ago, after the immortal World Cup final between France and Argentina, the managing director of Chester Football Club, Mike Dean, offered me a job. A job that didn't exist yet and showed no signs of existing. It was my opinion as a professional ghoster that he was dragging his heels. Did he have cold feet? Or was he simply waiting until the January transfer window opened?

MD was strangely sensitive to the outside world's opinion of him. Chester signing a 22-year-old Director of Football (me) would have been the only topic of conversation in the boardrooms of England's sixth tier. An obvious source of mockery. What are they smoking over there at the Deva Stadium? On the other hand, Chester signing the league's best player (also me) by giving him a meaningless job title - yeah, MD would have pulled off quite the coup.

Whatever the root cause was, the delay in finding a path forward had been doing my head in. I decided to give MD what professional football players call 'a kick up the arse'. Chester's next league game could not have been more perfect for my purposes.

Me: Are you going to the Boxing Day match?

MD: Yes.

Me: See you there! winky face emoji

***

"Oh!" said Emma, my blonde bombshell girlfriend, who had forgiven me for a minor Christmas meal falling-out with her father.

"What?"

"This stadium. It's really nice!"

"Yeah," I agreed, peering out of the passenger window. The New Bucks Head was the home of AFC Telford United, yet another phoenix club, risen from the ashes of its former ownership. "That is nice. Looks like a real stadium."

"Maybe you should have taken this job."

"It's still available," I mused. Telford were bottom of the league by a considerable distance. Everyone thought they were finished, but I knew I could save them. There was only one fly in the ointment - I wanted to save Chester; I had friends there.

Emma wound down her window and spoke to a man in a luminous orange coat. A blast of cold air hit me like a forearm smash. "Max Best plus one," she said.

He looked down at a clipboard. "Ah yes," he said. "The guest of honour. Go right to the front. Roll up to the Chester team bus there, then go a little further. The spot says Home Manager. Can't miss it." He lowered himself so he could get a better look at us. No, not at us. At me. Imagine wanting to look at me when Emma was right there. I couldn't read his expression. He stood straight and gestured for us to drive on.

"The manager's spot," said Emma, with a wry smile. "What did you tell them?"

I tried to hide a smirk. "Just said I was coming. No reason they'd roll out the red carpet for little old me."

"Yeah?" She turned into our spot. "Just to be clear today, Max Best, if you tell another person I was in Geordie Shore I'll do something that one of us will regret."

"Huh?" I said. "I only said that once. With Mike Dean. Ha! Reminds me. I got a text from him last week asking which season you were in. I think he's watching it from the start, just in case he can catch you in a tight dress."

"I don't mean Mike. I mean your mum." We got out of the car and looked left and right. I pointed to a series of big glass doors that looked like a main reception. Emma headed that way. "I see you forgot already. You were trying to change the topic from that phone game that your mum and Anna were playing. What was it called?"

"Soccer Supremo," I said, shuddering at the memory. I'd recently asked my mother's friend Anna for help understanding my curse. That involved making her explore my old copy of Champion Manager - the old name for Soccer Supremo. After I left she had spent ten pounds - exorbitant - buying the latest mobile version. She was utterly addicted; managing Blackpool Football Club had taken over her life. Anna knew better than to ask me about the game because even looking at a static image made me feel sick, but mum had asked me what the latest killer formations were and who were the cheapest wonderkids. I’d tried to deflect in small ways, before going nuclear by mentioning mum’s passion: reality TV.

Emma nodded. "Soccer Supremo, right. Your mum was asking how many seasons it took before the game would start producing ‘regens’ and that’s when you said I was in Geordie Shore. That distracted her until I said you were joking.”

“Remind me to teach you the ‘Yes And…’ rule.”

“Then you said I was in Love Island and she said 'pah' because she would have remembered. Then you asked her to tell Anna what happened in the Love Island 'movie night' scandal and your mum went on a big rant and the game was forgotten. Why would you rather talk about reality TV instead of football?"

"I want to be a soccer supremo," I said. "Not pretend. And I don't want to talk about football 24/7. All right. On the other side of this door is a little place I like to call The Future. Have you been practising your WAG face like I told you?" WAG means Wives And Girlfriends. It's tabloid newspaper shorthand for talking about the partners of football stars.

She laughed. "You don't get to tell me what I do with my face. What's WAG face anyway?"

"I'll show you." I took her arm, turned her towards me, and asked her to close her eyes. I imagined I was married to Jack Grealish. What face would I have? "Okay, open."

She was still wiping the tears away when we were met by Telford's most senior hospitality volunteer. She would have smiled at us anyway, but seeing the huge grins on our faces brought one to hers.

She introduced herself, apologised for how cold it was, then got down to business. "Right, then. You said you'd like to wander around. By all means, have a gander. We're proud of this old place, so we are. Let me get you your tickets. Just in case anyone stops you when you move from section to section. Oh. Now, that's odd."

"What is?"

"I've got two envelopes for you. Let me check this." She pulled the first one open and nodded. "Yes, these are from us. That's our VIP section. Good view. So what's this one?" She opened the second envelope. "Oh! These are from Chester FC. Why would they do that? I'm sorry. It's none of my business."

"That's all right."

She offered both envelopes. "So, which do you want?"

I smiled at her. "I'll take both. If I don't like the company in one place, I'll try the other." She gave me a wobbly smile like I was making a joke she didn't understand. I gently gripped the envelopes between my thumbs and index fingers until she let go. "Lovely stuff," I said. "Thank you very much."

She scratched the back of her head. "I thought you were a player."

"Can you keep a secret?" I said.

"No," she said.

"Perfect. Chester might be offering me a job. The Board that represents the fans have to meet and approve it. But if they don't hurry up, I'll apply for the Telford position."

"You don’t mean manager?"

"Player-manager," I smiled.

"You're very young," she said, full of doubt.

"I might have the body of a 22-year-old, and the emotional maturity of a..." I turned to Emma. "What did we agree?"

"Sixteen."

"Sixteen-year-old. But I've got the... Huh. I don't know how to finish that sentence."

"Parking space."

"Yes! I've got the parking space of a fifty-year-old football manager. And all my own hair. If anything, I'm overqualified."

The hospitality lady gave me the warmest smile she could generate. "Enjoy the match, Mr and Mrs Best."

***

"That's an encounter she'll never forget."

"That's what I do best."

"Which seats first? Telford or Chester?"

"Telford."

"Oh! Plot twist."

***

A steward told me where to go. I went at one mile an hour up the stairs, taking in the stadium. From inside it was even more impressive. It was a real football stadium, four-sided, well thought out. Great disabled access. It had been built with care and with the fan experience in mind. I wanted it. I wanted it a lot.

Another reason to walk slowly was to try to catch sight of Mike Dean. I spotted him gladhanding some bigwigs. Presumably his Telford equivalents.

I paused.

"What vibe do you want?" said Emma. She enjoyed my little games. Most of her life involved being a lawyer, looking through fine print, cross-referencing documents. Utterly tedious. Sometimes she threw herself into my role plays with an enthusiasm I found disquieting. When I’d pretended she was my deranged stalker she was all too believable.

"Hmm," I said. "How about... one of us offers blistering football analysis while the other looks like sex on legs and gets some old, white men thinking of long, debauched nights in tawdry hotels?"

She nodded. “Football analysis. Got it.” She rubbed her nostrils while sniffing, and said in a pastiche of Chester's awful manager, Ian Evans: "4-4-2, get up their arse, keep it tight first fifteen." I bit my lip. The football dinosaur persona slipped off her face and she flushed. "What?"

I jerked my head towards the gathering. "You're fantastic. Let's go before icicles start forming on me."

***

"Mike!" I said, barging into the group. "Nice to see you. I thought you were on holiday. You didn't reply to my last 18 or 19 phone calls."

He rolled his eyes slightly and introduced me to the Telford lot. "Everyone, this is Max Best. Darlington's mystery winger. Nine goals in five starts. Max. Glad you got my tickets."

"What? No, MD. I'm here by invitation of Telford. They haven't said it out loud, but I think they'd like me to apply for the manager's job. They must have heard about me heroically beating Man City's under 16s with a team of much older, more experienced players."

There were some awkward smiles from everyone except MD. He said, "Can I speak to you privately for a moment?"

"You're always asking to speak to me privately! Weird habit. You know I long to save a club from relegation. Isn't it funny that two relegation-threatened clubs should be playing each other just as I’m scratching around for an opportunity? So convenient! But while I always liked the abstract idea of saving Telford, now that I'm here I find myself enchanted. Look at it! Guys, I love your stadium. I love the area. I love my parking space." To MD I added, "They gave me the manager's spot." Then to the dudes, "It's good you haven't chosen one yet. The chosen one, AKA the frozen one, may be closer than you think."

"Well, it's Christmas. Hard time to arrange meetings and such," said one Telford dude. “And with all the postponements recently, we haven’t really missed out on having a manager, if you see what I mean.”

I nodded rapidly. "Yep yep yep. Thing is, if I'm running a football club I'm going to use the January transfer window to find new players, aren't I? Beef up the squad. It's no good me getting a job mid-January, is it Mike? Need it now, don't I? To hit the ground running. Get stuck in," I said, giving him a gentle little punch to the belly.

He inhaled and put his hand to his forehead. "I'm going as fast as I can, Max. It would help enormously if you sat in the seat I organised."

"Enormously?" I said, whipping out the Chester tickets.

"Enormously."

"Then I shall so do."

I took a step away, and one back again. I lowered my voice in a pretence that MD wouldn't be able to hear me. "But just in case, do you guys have an application form or something like that?"

The main Telford dude seemed confused. "For the position as manager? Are you serious?" Three faces showed that I was: mine, Emma's, and MD's. The man continued. "There isn't a form as such. We'll take applications and conduct interviews. It's clear you're a special player but do you have any qualifications? Experience? It's a tough job."

I waved his worries away. "If I came for an interview you would literally be spellbound. Don't worry about that. As for qualifications, how about this?" I half-turned and pointed to spots on the pitch that would soon be filled with players. "If I know your caretaker manager, and I think I do, he'll send out a solid 4-4-2. Solid being a polite way of saying ultra-defensive."

I proceeded to name the starting lineup, who would take the corners, the left and right set pieces, penalties, and captain. The tactics screen told me all this. It also showed me that one player's stamina was written in red. "Huh. That second striker looks injured to me. Either he's been rushed back from injury or he's done it in the warmup and not told anyone. Naughty boy! I'd soon stamp that out. That's team spirit cancer, that sort of thing. But you're probably more interested in what Chester will get up to."

I did the same thing with the away team, but slowed down near the end when I was looking at the individual instructions. "Aff, that's what they call the Irish guy playing left-mid, is Chester's most dangerous player. So Ian Evans has instructed him... hold on, let me double-check this... has told him not to attack. What the fuck? Mike! We need three points today! Telford are bottom of the fucking league! If Evans plays for a draw today I'm going to spontaneously combust."

He was giving me a strange look. "Ian Evans is a very experienced manager. I'm sure he has a plan he thinks will win us the match."

I found myself trying to loosen my jaw. "Riiight."

***

We went to the Chester seats. I was fuming - not enough to warm me up - but through a shimmer of frustration I realised Emma was chanting something. "What?"

"Burn the witch! Burn the witch!"

It calmed me all the way down. I gave her a lop-sided smile. "You know I'm good at this here football malarkey. Why's it so weird I'd know the teams?"

"Not so long ago, you told me you didn't know anything about Telford. A week ago you didn't know what colours they played in. Now you know their tactical plans down to the subatomic level."

"I studied. I've got a brain the size of a planet. Not to be rude but until recently I was managing elite players in the sport’s biggest tournament. This match is remedial."

"Sure, sure. Oh, Max, just out of interest. When did you study? Because we've spent almost every waking minute together for a week. And when you've had spare energy, I've found ways for you to use it."

I grinned at the memories. "Remember when you thought I was playing Merge Mountain on my phone? I was actually researching that." I jabbed my thumb backwards. "Now," I said, pointing forwards, "MD wants us to sit in those two seats there. Obviously one of the people on either side is on the Board."

At some point in the last week, Emma had begun mocking me by intoning 'the board' in a deep, menacing voice whenever I mentioned it. She did so now. "The Board."

"Use your womanly intuition to guess which one is the Board guy."

"The Board," she said. Then she shook her head. "If I had any womanly intuition - whatever the fuck that is - I wouldn't have invited you to meet my dad, would I?"

I looked up at the terrace's roof. "I thought we'd agreed not to bicker."

"We half-agreed. You said yes, I said no." She tilted her head. "Got to be the blind guy, right?"

"Right."

We shuffled along the row and I sat next to the dude with the cane. Emma sat to the right of me. The match kicked off.

"Hey, Emma," I said, a bit louder than normal. "I've got some tactical insights into this contest. Would you like to hear them?"

"Oh, yes please my boyfriend Max Best," she said. She pulled her phone out and got stuck into WhatsApp while I repeated the spiel I'd given to the bigwigs. She tuned out so completely that when I was done I had to give her a little bump on the shoulder. "Er... gosh. That was fascinating. So it's true what they say?"

"What do they say?"

"You're not just a pretty face." She leaned in for a kiss and got one.

The blind guy to my left tapped his cane on the concrete floor three times. "What a performance! Seems like you're onto us," he said. He had a wide, round face with short wispy hair. His eyes were always closed and he was always close to a smile. He pushed a hand out. I shook it. "I'm Crackers." Crackers is English English for crazy.

"Max Best. Next to me's my girlfriend, Emma. She's very attractive. Do you want to palpate her face?"

Emma punched me. Crackers laughed. "I don't generally go round fondling strangers. I'm blind, not psychotic. Hollywood has a lot to answer for."

"Crackers, listen," I started.

"I'm all ears," he said, which I guess was a disability joke.

"Is this Mike's plan? To get this job, I have to meet the Board one by one in a variety of increasingly intense situations? First, a random encounter with a blind man. Will Max be kind and considerate, not knowing that the man holds his future in his hands? The next one, I'm trapped in an escape room with a librarian from South Chester. The seventh, Bulldog and I are pushed into a cage and only one can leave."

"Bulldog?"

Oops. Forgot to code switch. "Didn't I hear one of the Board was called Mr Bulldock?"

He shook his head. "No. Why does your missus keep mumbling the Board like that?"

"Because she has the emotional intelligence of a sixteen-year-old," I said. "Is that the plan, though? This delay is murderous. If I get the job, I want to get going. Get started. January is key to the whole thing! And if it's not going to happen, I'd appreciate being told as fast as poss. The delay is literally costing me money. I'm close to broke. It's not fair to keep me hanging."

"I can't say I know Mike's plan, or that there's a plan as such. It's a strange thing he's proposing. We can't rush into it."

"That's fair," I said. "But there's not rushing and there's going at the speed of a glacier."

"Glaciers are fast these days," said Emma. "Global warming."

"Thanks, babes. What I'm saying, Crackers, is let's get you dudes in a room and I'll wow you all and get it over with."

"Max, it's Christmas. And New Year's. You can't get everyone in one place so easily. And for something major like this, you'll need to meet us face to face. We represent different types of fans. We've got different specialties and interests. What's essential to me is tedious to someone else. You can't do it all in one go. And we're representatives for the wider fan base. If we give you this position and it goes tits up, we have to explain to CFU that we went through a proper process. You get that, right?" CFU was City Fans United, the association that owned Chester.

"Of course there should be a process," I said. "For normal jobs for normal people. You should think of me as a celestial being, though. People often describe me as a floating megabrain. I know everything about football except how to lose. I'm a million-pound player offering my services at minimum wage."

"That's even more reason to slow down," said Crackers, which seemed wise at the time but later sounded deeply stupid.

"All right, fine. Let's do the interview."

"Interview?"

"You want to check me out, right? Okay. I'm here."

He chuckled. "This is a simple meet and greet."

I shook my head. I wasn't into this. Would I do it if there was no alternative? Maybe. But I had three amazing alternatives. Become the player-manager of Telford and achieve all my goals. Win the league with Darlington. Or sack the whole thing and make sick amounts of money playing for a big team and then do the minimum wage ‘save the soul of football’ thing. "What's your area of interest?"

"Three main ones. Disabled access, of course. The atmosphere in the ground. And taking pride in the team. Chester are a pretty big deal in these parts, and I like that. I like feeling like someone. You probably don't understand what I'm talking about."

"I’m a Manchester United fan. So yeah, I do. But there's a big problem."

"What's that?"

"You like being a big fish in a small pond. Where I'll take Chester, you'll never be able to think that. We're going to the biggest pond of all. What's the smallest kind of fish?"

"Minnows are famously small."

"All they do is swim around and get eaten, right? That's their whole deal. That's like... Norwich City. Wigan. I don't know. We’re not going to be them."

"Failed analogies aside, what are you trying to say?"

"I'm going to turn Chester into some kind of piranha. Yeah, small. But a menace.” I imagined meeting a rival Director of Football one day in the future. “Yeah you can feel smug that you're bigger. But we've got fucking teeth, mate, and while you were polishing your 1995 Anglo-Italian cup trophy, we've just chewed your legs off."

Crackers seemed to enjoy this line of thinking. "How would you take us to this bigger pond? And I suppose it's only fair to ask... what fish are you competing with... that has legs?"

I shook my head. As much as I liked Crackers, there was no way I was going to have this conversation seven times. That was absurd. "Crackers, you come to support the team and feel the atmosphere first hand and all that. It must be spine-tingling sometimes. But you don't normally sit there and not watch the action, right? If I wasn't here, you'd be listening to the radio?"

"That's right. Seals Live." Chester were nicknamed The Seals, after their old stadium.

"Ah! I’ve seen the links on the website. It's the same tech as Darlo Fans Radio. Big fan of that. Emma found out how to listen to the old episodes and since then I've been listening on a loop."

"To the bits about himself," she said.

"Well, yeah," I said. "What else? The bits that aren't about me? Dull as dishwater. Why would I care about those? This Seals Live show, it's good, is it?"

"Oh, yes. Boggy does a great job. Very enthusiastic. Normally, anyway. We haven't had much to cheer, recently."

"Tell you what," I said. "I'm off to the toilet but you listen to a few minutes and see if I was right about the tactics and that injured player. See if… Boggy?... notices. I'm keen to get a sense of the guy."

Crackers didn't know what to make of that. "Why?"

"Oh, no reason," I lied, chuckling.

Emma leaned across me. "He's plotting some mischief. But don't worry. He means well."

I eased past Crackers onto the aisle and sent Emma a text.

She read it and shook her head at me. When I simply smirked at her, she replied by text that my idea was not a good idea.

I mimed putting earphones in. She shrugged. Why?

I mimed kissing my bicep and sent her a link. Then I snuck off.

***

Dramatic Extremely Fake Point of View Change!

Crackers, or Cracky to his closest friends, was starting to wonder where Max Best had gone. Not to the toilet - that had been an obvious lie. The man wanted this job, didn't he? Surely he could spend at least one half of one match trying to schmooze a Board member? Maybe Cracky's first thought had been right - the man was much too young. What could a 22-year-old possibly know about anything?

And yet it had been uncanny how accurately Best had predicted what would happen. Not the lineups - there were hundreds of ways he could have known those. But the names of the set piece takers and which side they'd take them from. The fact that Aff wouldn't bomb forward to get crosses in. And most implausibly, the fact that the Telford striker had been subbed off after only five minutes. Such things were hard to explain.

Crackers turned the volume of his earphones up and found that the early stages of the match had sapped Boggy's passion.

"A very drab affair, so far," said the Seals Live commentator. "A game of little quality and few chances. It does seem that both teams have set up hoping for a draw. I must say it's thin gruel for a bumper Boxing Day crowd here in Bucks Head. Er... excuse me? Hello? No, that's not plugged in. No! Don't touch that! We're live! We're on air! But who are you?" A tiny pause. "Oh." There followed a lot of clicking and crackling. "Um. Why don't you introduce yourself?"

"Hi, everyone! I'm superstar football player Max Best. I'm gatecrashing your broadcast to announce my application for the position of Chester's Director of Football."

Crackers gasped.

To his right, the girlfriend groaned. "Fucking hell, babes," she muttered. Crackers felt her twist in her seat to look at him. There was a smile in her voice. "So... you met Max, then."