"A good coach. Just not a winner."

He stopped, the bag still on his shoulder.

"That’s the one they hung on you," I said. "Word for word. I’d put my house on it."

He turned round, slow. "And how would you know that? Word for word."

"Because knowing what a man is before he knows it himself is the one thing I’ve ever been any good at. I knew a lad would be a great player before he’d scored a goal that counted. I knew about you the second you moved that full-back five yards and mended a game nobody else in the ground could see was broken."

I let it sit a beat.

"And I know what those three words do to a man, because I’ve worn my own version of them since I was a boy a club I loved decided wasn’t worth the coach fare home. I wore it a long time. I know to the penny what it costs to keep standing out in the cold being right after the game has looked you in the eye and told you what you are. I’m not here because you’re a nice idea about me. I’m here because I know what’s on the far side of those words for a man who stops wearing them, better than any soul alive, and I would sooner hand it to you than watch it go to waste out here another season in front of 40 people and a dog."

The bag came down off his shoulder, slow, back onto the wet tarmac.

He still didn’t take the slip. But he’d stopped loading the coach, and he was looking at me the way you look at a man who’s just shown you a scar that matches one of your own.

"You’re a strange lad," he said, at last.

"So I’m told."

I reached past him and tucked the slip under the wiper of his coach, where he’d have to make a decision to bin it. "Ring me when being right in the cold stops being enough. You’ve a good while left in you. Don’t spend it proving them right."

I walked back to the car and I didn’t look round, because looking round is for men who aren’t sure. Four hours home, heater ticking, tick, tick, the radio off the whole way. I had him. Not tonight. But I had him.

Back home the whole town was busy picking my replacement for me, which suited me right down to the ground, because it meant not one of them was looking where I was actually looking.

They wanted a name. They always want a name. By the weekend the Anchor had a shortlist chalked up behind the bar, and half the town had an opinion and the other half had two.

"It’ll be young Danny, you mark me," said an old boy propping up the bar. "Been groomed for it, that lad."

"Will it heck," said Raj, who drives a minicab and has therefore been wrong about everything since 1998. "He’ll get a name in. Someone off the telly, someone who’s been in the League. Stands to reason."

"What’s he want a name for," said Bald Tony, not looking up from his crossword, "when he already is one?"

And round it went, every night behind the bar and on the terrace and in the queue at Erol’s kiosk, Danny, or a name, or bring back one of the old boys, and not a single one of them within 100 miles of a frozen car park and a betting slip under a wiper. Which suited me right down to the ground.

A loud search out the front is the best cover a quiet one out the back can buy. I even took the meeting the town wanted me to take. An hour with a man this club worships, warm as a bakery, who sat in my office and talked for the whole 60 minutes about what Tilbrook meant to him, every word of it true, and never once, not one time, said a thing about how you actually keep a side up.

"I bleed this blue, Sam," he told me, and I believed him.

I’d have carried him shoulder-high down Marsh Road myself. I’d also have watched him get us relegated by April, loving every one of them all the way down, because loving a dressing room and keeping it up are not the same job, and I have seen the season where a man like that finds that out. I told him no as gently as I have ever told anyone anything.

"You know what you’re at, son," he said on his way out, which was decent of him, given he plainly thought I’d lost my mind.

Let them think the name. Let them think Danny. The longer the town guesses, the longer my man stays only mine.

The war didn’t stop for any of it. Sully doesn’t hit you once and wait politely for the bell. On the Wednesday Maureen put a call through with her hand over the receiver and a face like she’d smelled gas on the landing.

"Some agent," she said, low. "Smooth as a snake in a good suit. Wants a word about Jamie. I don’t like him, Samuel, and I’ve not even seen him."

An agent. Silky. Wanted, he said, to "open a dialogue" about Jamie. Permission to speak.

A club two divisions up who’d "had a watcher at the Grimsby game and one or two since." Which was interesting, that, because Vardy had spent most of the one or two since in a tracksuit on the side of a frozen pitch, so somebody had been watching my striker for a good while longer than that, and talking about him to people. I let the man finish his lovely sentence.

"Whose client are you?" I said.

A pause. The wrong length of pause.

"I represent a number of interests, Mr Mercer."

"I’ll bet you do." I knew that pause. I’d heard its cousin on my own office phone a fortnight since, offering me a stand with my dad’s name on it.

"He’s not for sale. Not this month, not this window, not to a single soul you’re fronting for. And you can tell whatever interest you represent that the harder he chases my striker, the more he’s telling me what my striker’s worth, which means he’s doing my sell-on clause a kindness, so by all means, keep it up." I put the phone down, click.

He’ll be back. They always come back, with Vardy, and every time they do the number in my head that I never say out loud gets a nought on the end of it. Which is a lovely problem for a version of me that gets to have lovely problems. Not this one. Not yet.

There is a chemist in West London where a girl of 20 draws eyeliner onto strangers with the tip of her tongue between her teeth, and hasn’t the first idea who I was to her, or will be, or won’t be now. I’ve known where she stands on a wet Tuesday for two lifetimes. I could be at that counter in under two hours. I did the wages instead. Not now, Karen. Cat off the counter.

And under all of it, quiet as a tide going out, my own clock was running down, and I could hear it now.

I coached a home game that Saturday knowing it was one of the last I’d ever coach, and I didn’t tell a soul, and I stood in my technical area and let myself feel it the once. The size of the thing I was about to give away.

The 16 I’d named that afternoon, and behind them the rest of a squad I’d dragged out of bedsits and chip vans and steelworks and old men’s front rooms, every one of their mothers’ names in my head, and I was about to hand the lot of them to a fella in no hat that not one of them had heard of.

Bailey was 17 down that flank, with a number over his head that only I can see, and the new man would have to earn the right to be told what he’d been handed. That one I hadn’t worked out how to say yet. I wasn’t certain I could.

Then I stopped feeling it, because there was a game on, and 900 frozen souls don’t go quiet just because the manager’s got a lump in his throat.

"VAR-DY! VAR-DY!" off the Bovril End the second he touched it, that dirty, loving roar a crowd saves for the one they’d walk through a wall for.

"GO ON, MY SON!" from somewhere behind the goal when he took it round the keeper. And the old boy by the tunnel who bellows the same thing every single week no matter the score,

"THAT’S IT, DOCKERS, NOW HOLD WHAT WE’VE GOT!" We held what we’d got. We won it. The barge bell went, DONG, DONG, and Erol was doing a roaring trade in the corner, hiss of the urn, and a fortnight stopped feeling like very long at all.

My phone rang on the Sunday night. A number I didn’t have saved. From a long way up the country.

I let it ring twice, then a third time, so it would never know I’d been sat there since Sunday teatime with the phone face up in my hand, waiting for it.

[SYSTEM] You have offered a man something no one else alive is in a position to offer, because no one else alive knows what you know. That is the whole of your edge, spent on one appointment. Spend it well.

"Tilbrook Town," I said, like I hadn’t a clue who it was.

"You said you could prove it," said the voice with no hat. "Go on, then. Prove it."