The courier wouldn’t come past the front desk. He put the envelope into Maureen’s hands like it was warm to the touch, wouldn’t meet her eye, and was in his van and gone before she’d turned it over for the sender, chunk of the door.

She didn’t open it. She carried it up the stairs, set it on my desk, and stood there with her arms folded while I did, and that was how I knew she already knew.

The way I knew. The way the pair of us had known since a dark drive before Christmas that this would come, and that it would come in the first week of January, the minute his lawyers were back from their turkey.

Rrrip of the flap.

Cream paper, thick enough to bruise the desk. A firm’s name you don’t put on a retainer unless you mean the worst of it. Four pages of the finest manners in the English language, and one line on the second page doing all the real work of the other three: an application to discharge the restrictive covenant.

So. The patient man, out of patience.

I laid it flat and smoothed it with the side of my hand, twice, the way you’d settle a dog, read the date they’d set for the first hearing, and found, to my own surprise, that I wasn’t frightened. I was nearly glad. You cannot fight a man’s waiting. His paperwork you can fight all day.

He hadn’t gone at a missed payment in the end. Six met on the trot will have told him what December nearly told him for nothing, that this club might just live, and a living club is no earthly use to a man who wants the grass under it. So he went the other way. At the deed itself. At a widow and her 1923, to have a judge rub her out.

Win it, and the field is his. The leaning white T, the Bovril End, the not-quite-round circle, the two by the penalty spot, my dad’s corner. The lot, on the say-so of a court, because a man in a good suit told it a town like this can manage without somewhere to stand of a Saturday.

"Well," said Maureen.

"Well," I said back.

And that was the moment the last of it dropped into place, the part I’d only half taken in on that drive in the dark. I could not do this and pick a team for Saturday.

A fight for the actual ground is barristers and bundles and a hearing on a weekday in a room that smells of radiators, and it wants a man with two hands free and nothing else in his head. I had a whole team in my head. I’d spent a freezing autumn building it so it wouldn’t need me.

Time to find out if that was true.

I got Stan and Doyle up to the office that afternoon, and Maureen made the good tea, which is how they knew before I opened my mouth that it was something.

I kept it short. The tribunal’s real. It’ll take everything I’ve got, and there aren’t two of me. So in January I come out of the dugout and I stay in this chair and I fight for the ground with both hands, because that’s the one job here nobody can do but me. The football I hand to a good man.

The room went quiet. The kettle ticked as it cooled, tk, tk.

Stan spoke first, and all he said was, "Good." Just that. Then, softer, the nearest that man comes to a whole speech: "I’ve been waiting two months to hear you say it, son. You already look less like a ghost." He’d sat on the floor of a tunnel with me. He’d earned the good.

Doyle took it like a player, which is to say straight to what it meant for him. "Who takes us, then. Is it Danny?" The one the whole club had quietly settled on, because he was the one they could see. "He’s ready enough. Bit young."

"He’s a fortnight younger than me, Robbie."

"Aye, well." Doyle had the grace to laugh. "Nobody’s you."

"It might be Danny," I said, and let them have it. "Leave the who with me. You’ll know when the squad knows."

Maureen was watching me over her glasses the way she does when the ledger disagrees with a man’s mouth. She didn’t say a word. Maureen has known me long enough to spot a card held face down and long enough not to ask to see it. She just wrote something in her book and underlined it.

I want to be straight with you about one thing, because I’ve been straight about the rest. Giving it away is the right call, and it still felt like handing over a kid.

I built that dressing room out of bedsits and chip vans and old Dockers who walked up in their trainers. I know every one of their mums’ names. And in a fortnight I’m going to walk in there and tell them I’m off. Right and easy have never once been the same word. This was right. It was not going to be easy.

I did have a card face down. I’d turned it over on a black motorway a fortnight ago and shown it to nobody, and I wasn’t showing it now, not until it was signed. I’ll only tell you what I told you then, and no more, because some things you carry a while: I know exactly what the man I want becomes.

I’ve watched him do it, in a life not one of them has lived yet. Everyone who meets him this side of the Football League thinks he’s finished. I happen to know what’s on the far side of finished, for him, and it’s worth more than any player I’ve ever put my name to, and I’m going to spend it on the only seat that matters.

Not Danny. Let them think Danny.

That’s all you’re getting, same as them.

The war itself I could start that day, and I did. I was at Carbery’s within the hour, in the little office between the vape shop and the Greggs, and Edwin had the deed out on the baize before I’d got my coat off, crackle of it, Sandra already pulling the file.

Edwin, 81 and slower than a wet Tuesday, laid one finger on the trust deed we’d made in November and said, "He’ll not have expected this to have a body, dear boy. He’ll have expected a ghost." Then, drier than I have ever heard him: "Let us give him the fright of his professional life."

The money for it we did not have.

A barrister worth the name costs what this club takes in a fortnight of good gates, and January is not a month of good gates.

But the money was three weeks off waking, in a corner of the future only I can see, and for the first time in half a year the sum in my head wasn’t a wall I was going to hit. It was a countdown I could lean on. February was finally on my side.