The pitch froze solid on the second Saturday of December, and I was out on it at 6 in the morning with a garden fork, a bag of rock salt, and Stan’s flask of tea, a chairman and a manager and, that morning, a groundsman, trying to beat the weather at a game so I’d lose a bit less money to it.

The fork went into the top half-inch and stopped dead, chnk, like stabbing a road, and I did it anyway, square yard after square yard, my breath hanging white in front of me, because a man who won’t fight the weather has lost to it before kick-off.

We lost anyway.

The ref came at half ten, put his boot to the surface, crunch, felt it give back at him like a paving slab, and shook his head the way they do, and 2,600 people who’d have paid at the gate went home to their fires instead, and December took its first bite out of me.

That was the shape of the whole month.

The cold came the way I’d always known it would, the hardest winter in a hundred years, and it did to a small football club exactly what a patient man across the marshes was praying it might. It froze the gates shut.

Two home Saturdays lost to a pitch like iron, no whistle, no click of a turnstile, no money in the tin, and the wolf on the 31st not caring in the slightest that the sky had robbed me first.

So I made money out of whatever the weather left lying about. We ran a Boxing-week bonus draw off the back of the good autumn, rrrip, rrrip of raffle books the length of the Anchor bar.

Murat kept the kiosk lit on the dead Saturdays, hiss of the urn, and sold hot Bovril to the diehards who came anyway, to a locked ground, to stand in the car park with their hands round a cup and just look at it.

"Come to check she’s still standing," one old boy told me, tipping his cup at the white pitch. "She’s stood through worse than a bit of frost, this place."

The 500 held their nerve and their tenners. And when the freeze loosened its grip enough for a Tuesday, the team, bless every frozen one of them, kept winning without me. A scrappy 1-0 up at Histon on a swamp.

A 2-2 I listened to on the kitchen radio, crackle under the commentary, while I did the December wages by hand at the table, tk, tk, tk on Maureen’s old adding machine past midnight.

And all that month the black Range Rover sat in my head without ever needing to sit in my car park. Sully didn’t have to lift a finger in December.

The weather was doing his job for him, and he knew it, and he knew that I knew it, and every frozen, gateless Saturday was him making no move at all, which is its own kind of move when you are the one counting the days down to a payment you are not sure you have.

But you cannot fork ice off a pitch at dawn, and sit in a solicitor’s at noon hardening a covenant, and take a session in the dark at three, and do wages till one in the morning, and sell a strip of raffle tickets in between, on four hours’ sleep, at 24, for a whole frozen month, and expect the body to keep saying yes.

Mine said no on the 22nd of December.

I don’t remember going down.

Stan had to tell me after.

We were locking up from a night session, him and me and the old caretaker, and he said I stopped mid-sentence about the weekend and put a hand out for a wall that wasn’t where I’d left it, and then I was on the concrete floor of the tunnel, thud, with the cold coming up through it into my back and Stan’s face very close and very frightened, saying my name. Not gaffer.

Sam. Over and over, the way you’d call a man back from somewhere.

There was a band of tightness across my chest that put the fear of God in me, because I know exactly what a thing in the chest can do, and for one long minute on that floor I was certain the timeline had swung round early and come for me instead of her.

It hadn’t.

It was exhaustion, plain and total, a body driven into the ground and left there. The doctor at the walk-in the next morning called it, not unkindly, "the sort of collapse I mostly see in men twice your age and half as sensible."

Rest. Eat. Sleep. Stop. He wrote it on his pad like a team sheet and tore it off and gave it me, and he had no idea he was not the first person that month to hand me the very same instruction.

And here is the thing that cracked me clean open, lying on the tunnel floor with my whole club standing over me in the dark.

Somebody got to me in time.

Stan was there, on his knees on the concrete.

The caretaker was there.

Inside the hour Maureen was there with a blanket off the treatment table and her coat over her nightie, and Lenny came straight off a night shift still in his hi-vis, and Raj came down the road in his slippers and never said one word about it, and not a single one of them would leave me on my own.

I have never in all my life, either of them, been so thoroughly surrounded and so completely overruled. They put me in Raj’s car. They sat with me. They took the keys off me, actual and otherwise.

She never got that.

My mum went on her own. You know the shape of it by now, so I’ll spare you the saying of it again.

***

Thank you for reading.