Only a Game

ONE

‘Of course, it’s only a game. It’s not a matter of life and death,’ said Edward Lanchester.

He looked round the table, assessing the reactions of his listeners, trying to time the pay-off line perfectly. Then he said, ‘Football’s much more important than that!’

They all laughed, dutifully rather than convincingly, because they’d all heard the quotation before and had known what was coming. A little deference which cost them nothing was surely due to the oldest man in the room. Lanchester didn’t notice the hollowness of the mirth. He grinned at his audience delightedly and said, ‘Bill Shankly said that, you know!’

They did, and they knew two or three other of the great man’s sayings, not only because Lanchester often quoted them but because this was a board meeting at Brunton Rovers Football Club. Everyone around the big boardroom table was a football man.

There was a little pause before the chairman said, ‘A great man, Shankly.’

‘The greatest football manager of all, in my opinion,’ said Edward Lanchester reverently. ‘Just what we could do with now, to get the enthusiasm back on the terraces.’

Jim Capstick glanced sideways at Robbie Black, the present manager of Brunton Rovers. He was gazing down at his agenda sheet with a fixed half-smile and didn’t seem to have taken any offence. The chairman cleared his throat and said, ‘As you say, Edward, fixing the prices for the cup tie replay is not a matter of life and death. Can we have suggestions, please?’

Black nodded, then spoke in his soft, Anglo-adjusted, Edinburgh accent. ‘I’d like to fill the terraces for this match, to give my lads a bit of support and enthusiasm. I wouldn’t say it in front of their directors, but Carlisle United aren’t the biggest draw in the country. They’ll bring a few supporters with them, because playing a Premiership team is a big night for them, but probably not more than a couple of thousand for a midweek evening match. I’d like to see us let people in for a tenner on that night!’

There was a shocked silence, as he had known there would be. Then the chairman said, ‘We’d make a loss on the match.’

Black was ready for this. He said in his soft Scottish accent, ‘Not if we had twenty-five thousand, rather than the ten thousand we might get at regular prices. What I don’t want is a thin crowd and players not up for it and perhaps even a damaging defeat. We might draw Manchester United away in the next round, if we get through, and get our share of a huge gate at Old Trafford.’

The old argument that was dangled in front of small clubs throughout the land. The Theatre of Dreams, they called Old Trafford, and it was certainly the stuff of dreams for many an impoverished club and its desperate treasurer.

It was the chief executive of Brunton Rovers, still often referred to as a secretary in the old-fashioned world of football, who now provided their manager with an unexpected ally. Darren Pearson pursed his lips and took the plunge. ‘It might get us some publicity. Good publicity, for a change.’ He shot a challenging look at Black, who had recently condoned some strong-arm tactics on the field which had led to sendings-off and press headlines about ‘Ruthless Rovers’. ‘Cut-price seats will be a story for them, if we make the cuts dramatic enough. We could sell them the idea that it was still the people’s game round here, the way it used to be in the days of Bill Shankly.’

‘The days when we got regular crowds of thirty thousand and more. When we didn’t need hundreds of policemen and scores of our own stewards to control them,’ said Edward Lanchester, predictably.

‘We should charge what the market will bear,’ persisted Pearson. ‘I agree with our manager. It’s better to have the ground full or even two-thirds full than to have long rows of empty seats filling the television pictures. Get through this one and look for the pickings in subsequent rounds, that’s my view.’

‘I think we should defer to our chief executive and our manager on this one,’ said the chairman. ‘Let’s face it, we’re only talking about a thousand pounds or two either way. Scarcely a day’s wages for an average striker, nowadays.’ He held up his hand at Edward Lanchester, preventing the former chairman from coming in with his well-worn diatribe on how the abolition of the maximum wage forty-odd years earlier had ruined football and been the beginning of the end for the smaller clubs up and down the land. ‘Are we agreed on a ten pound entry fee for this one night, then?’

They were, of course. Football clubs still have their boards, still pay lip service to democracy and consensus. But the reality in most cases is that chairmen are increasingly powerful. They usually have heavy financial stakes in the club, for a start, and any suggestion that they might walk away is usually enough to bring opponents scurrying into line. Today’s chairmen are usually business men like Jim Capstick, who are used to power and unused to handling opposition. This dominance is both a strength and a weakness: it gives such men the dictator’s power to achieve quick results, but if megalomania sets in it can blind them to any ideas other than their own.

Jim Capstick was a modern chairman, very different from the one Lanchester had been a generation earlier. He owned most of the shares in what was still a private company and the board would oppose his formidable will at its peril. Most of them recognized that reality.

The discussion now moved on to what should have been the most interesting part of the meeting, the one everyone in the room had been anticipating during the last hour’s brisk despatch of more routine items. Even the chairman could not keep a little excitement out of his practised tones as he said, ‘Item six on your agenda. Summer transfer activity.’ He studied his sheet for a moment, revolving his silver ball pen slowly between his fingers. ‘Perhaps I should reiterate what I’m sure we all think should be taken as read. On this item in particular, not a word of what is said within this room tonight should be repeated outside it. It should be obvious to all of us that any mention of either our financial situation or any particular targets we may have should not be leaked to the press or to anyone else. Any such leaks can only damage our manager’s position in any dealings he may choose to initiate.’

There were murmurs of assent round the table, the murmurs he had known would come. The need for secrecy here was self-evident: the press and the rest of the media were expert at turning the merest whiff of smoke into tongues of flame. Capstick deliberately did not look at the manager himself: Robbie Black had been known to ferment dissent among the supporters and sympathy for himself by thinly veiled suggestions that he could not bid for the players he wanted because his hands were tied by a miserly board. Chairman and manager worked well together on the whole, but there was only room for one ego in the overall direction of the club.

Black now aired three of his targets for the summer close season, the only time when deals could now be done, except for a brief ‘transfer window’ in January. Two of them had already been mentioned as possibilities by a press that fed on rumour and transformed intelligent guesses into rumours when there were none to be had. The third player was a surprise and would present a major coup for a club which was very small in terms of the Premier league. The possibility surprised and delighted even the experienced heads around the table. If he could be prised away from Newcastle United, that would be an achievement in itself.

There was excitement at the thought of Brunton Rovers going for all three of these players. Everyone in this all-male gathering had football in his blood. Although their very presence here implied that they should be hard-headed realists, they knew that everything came back to what was achieved on the pitch. When eleven very fit young men from all over the world trotted out to represent the old cotton town, they might know little of the hundred and thirty years of history behind the proud old club, but they were well aware that the points they won or lost in the most competitive league in the world would settle its immediate destiny. Highly successful businessmen might be ruthless and clear-sighted in the rest of their dealings, but there had to be a strong streak of romanticism underlying any deep involvement with a team like Brunton Rovers.

There were limits, of course, and Darren Pearson saw it as his duty as secretary to keep feet on the ground and heads out of clouds and any other cliché which would prevent financial disaster. He now said reluctantly, ‘We may need to sell before we can buy.’

There was a shocked silence, a mental throwing of hands in the air that the secretary’s characteristically dismal reminder should puncture the balloon of optimism so soon. Edward Lanchester said, ‘We’ve been prudent enough in the last year, surely? Our supporters expect the team to be strengthened.’ His face brightened as an argument came into his mind. ‘It will help season ticket sales for next year if we make some captures.’ For almost half a century, Edward had used that nineteen fifties word for any new signing and he wasn’t going to change now.

Pearson gave him the sour smile of a man who had heard the argument too many times. ‘The evidence is that season ticket sales will vary by only a thousand or so whatever we do. The days when a club like ours could sign an Alan Shearer are long gone. Unless a billionaire with a big cheque book comes along, which won’t happen for us, we need to cut our coat from the cloth we can afford. It’s not what you want to hear, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I said anything else.’

The manager felt the need to recruit some backing for his cause. He said sternly, ‘I went into this job with my eyes open. The chairman has always been honest with me and has always supported me to the limits of his powers.’ It never did any harm to support the man with the power, so he smiled a little acknowledgement of Capstick’s support towards the top of the table. ‘But I’m walking a tightrope here. We need to strengthen the team whenever we have the opportunity. I need hardly remind you how important it is for us to stay in the Premier League. The bottom club there will get thirty million pounds this year. If we drop into the Championship and lose that money, not only the team but the whole club will disintegrate.’

‘How much would we get if we sold Ashley Greenhalgh?’ said the chairman.

There was a gasp round the table. It was the question which all of them wanted answered, but none of them had dared to ask. The twenty-one-year-old Greenhalgh was the local sensation, the young man who had grown up within five miles of the town and come through the Brunton Academy to reach the fringes of the England team. No one wanted him to leave, but most of them privately regarded it as inevitable in the glitzy modern football world.

A man who had been on the board in the days of Lanchester made the ritual protest. ‘We can’t afford to lose Greenhalgh. We should be building a team around him.’ There were murmurs of assent from around the table, but no one spoke up to support the idea.

Instead, Jim Capstick said, ‘That is what we’d all like to do, so there’s no argument about it. It may be simply impossible to do it. Is the lad any nearer to signing a contract extension?’

Robbie Black shook his head. ‘No. His agent has told him not to. He loves playing for Brunton but he’s hoping one of the big four clubs will come in for him. You can’t blame the lad: he thinks his England prospects will be improved by playing for one of the big clubs, and he’s probably right.’

‘Bloody agents! We shouldn’t have to deal with them!’ was Edward Lanchester’s predictable reaction.

Black smiled wryly. ‘I couldn’t agree more, sir. Unfortunately, we have to. It’s a fact of modern football life.’ Don’t put the old bastard down too firmly. He was a harmless enough survival from the old days, and he still carried clout in the town, if not in the football club he loved to the point of obsession. A football manager never knows when he might need friends.

The secretary reminded them of another unpleasant fact of football life. ‘If he stays to the end of his contract, we won’t get a fee at all. Ashley will be able to go where he pleases on some vast wage, but the club will get nothing. If he won’t sign the new five-year deal we’ve offered him, we may need to cash in this summer, whilst we can still get a big transfer fee. I think we might get up to twenty million for him, if we handle it right.’ Darren Pearson voiced the unpleasant reality they all had to confront with an air of sober resignation.

Jim Capstick allowed a moment of silence for this to hit home before he said, ‘I must stress again how important it is that this discussion does not go beyond the walls of this room. The press will continue to speculate, but if it gets out that the Board may be willing to sell, it can only weaken our position in any negotiations.’

The all-male gathering nodded sage agreement. A few minutes later, they were filing out of the meeting and hurrying to their cars, turning up their collars against the north wind which reminded them that it was still only the beginning of March, however much the bright crocuses might be trumpeting spring.

The four people who had done most of the speaking gathered in the chairman’s office and agreed that the meeting had gone as well as could have been expected. Board meetings had long ceased to make any real decisions. Officially they did so, but what happened nowadays was that they rubber-stamped what the chairman had already decided. Jim Capstick owned eighty per cent of the shares in the Brunton Rovers Company, which had never gone public. Proceedings were increasingly a recognition of the reality that power was vested where the money and ownership lay. Anyone who did not recognize that when it came to voting was unlikely to remain on the board for long.

Edward Lanchester had once occupied this room himself. He felt increasingly ill at ease in it now, aware that he was invited in for a drink only because of his long association and previous pre-eminence in the club. He didn’t like what was happening to what he still thought of as his club, but he was enough of a realist to recognize that there wasn’t much he could do about it. He preserved his position as the voice of decency with a few remarks about the shallow loyalties of modern players, then downed his malt whisky as quickly as he could and took his leave. Darren Pearson and Robbie Black made a few not unkindly remarks about the old dinosaur before following him out ten minutes later.

Jim Capstick stayed for a little while longer, sitting behind the big desk to conduct his own silent review of the evening. His secret was still his own; that was the most important thing. He hadn’t come even near to revealing his plans for the next few months.

TWO

‘We need an au pair.’

‘Do we? I thought it was going to be easier for you now that they’re both at school.’

‘It is. But we can afford an au pair and I think we should have one.’ Debbie Black put her empty cup back on its saucer beside the bed and rolled over to make sure that her request was treated seriously. She was not an easy woman to shrug off. But then not many people chose to shrug away Debbie Black’s attentions.

Debbie had been the British number two at tennis, though her dark-haired beauty and willowy figure had enabled her to make more from modelling contracts than from a sporting career which had been much publicized without ever quite reaching the greatest international heights. She had enjoyed rather than endured the trappings of success and the racy tabloid lifestyle which went with it. Debbie had quickly become that vague but lucrative modern phenomenon, a ‘personality’. By the time she retired from tennis at twenty-eight, she felt that there was little she did not know about life in general and sex in particular. Her early experiences on the international tennis circuit had taught her that her own gender held no physical attraction for her.

Within a year, Debbie had married Robbie Black, then a Scottish international football player. Robbie’s looks and talent meant that his lifestyle had been subjected to the same sort of lurid tabloid coverage as her own. Although she was by then twenty-nine and he was thirty, it was a first marriage for both of them. Against the odds and what many had openly forecasted for them, the union had now lasted fifteen years.

Black was no fool, as Debbie had known from the start. He had played until he was thirty-five, then made a promising start on the hazardous but now handsomely paid career of football club manager. After success in the lower divisions, he was now one of the few British managers in the lucrative world of the English Premier League. The large and beautifully fitted modern house they lived in was tangible proof of his success. Debbie Black had found against her expectations that she enjoyed being out of the limelight and merely a glamorous presence in her husband’s shadow. Even more to her surprise, she had grown to love the surrounding country and the blunt, friendly people of the North Lancashire area.

Robbie Black sighed theatrically as he felt her lithe body against his. ‘I can’t see that we need an au pair.’ He was probably going to concede, he thought, but the persuasion might well be interesting.

Debbie lifted her head so that her large hazel eyes could look down into the darker brown of his, smiling the wide, half-mocking smile which was still as attractive as it had been twenty years ago. ‘We may not actually need one, darling, but think how much more we’d enjoy life if we had one.’

He grinned back, enjoying the knowledge that they both knew they were playing a game of which only they knew the rules. ‘I’m not here that much, am I? When I’m not checking up on the behaviour of my own players and watching them training, I’m sitting in the draughty stand of some God-forsaken second division or non-league team, watching the latest wonderkid and trying to pick up a bargain for Brunton Rovers.’

‘You poor creature. Dedicated to his calling and going out to obey the call of duty in those long johns that no woman could resist.’ She snuggled a little closer. ‘It’s a wonder that you retain any libido at all.’ She slid a little further down the bed, checking on the evidence of that libido and allowing her loins a small anticipatory quiver of excitement.

He let his hand run down her back to the division at the base of it, stroking it expertly, preparing to enjoy the unhurried, confident enjoyment that comes from mutual physical knowledge. He began the teasing which was all part of that; the little, non-aggressive argument which would climax in the uninhibited joys of coupling. He muttered into the ear which was suddenly available, ‘But suppose I get attracted to the au pair? Suppose her firm young Swedish body is thrust upon me and I am unable to resist?’

There was a small giggle, then a quick gasp of excitement as he entered her. ‘What makes you think she’d be Swedish, or have a firm young body, Robbie? I’d be doing the shortlist and selection.’

‘My God! A Romanian pensioner with no teeth, then.’ He enjoyed her giggle as it shook her body delightfully, excitingly. There was no need to hurry, but he might not have that choice.

‘There are no corn flakes and no rice crispies!’ A high, childish, accusing voice from the doorway of the bedroom. She slid away from her husband, exciting a little involuntary cry of pain from him.

‘All right, James. I bought some yesterday. They must be still in the boot of the car. I’ll be there in a minute.’ Debbie slid across and out of the big bed, pulling her nightdress down and hurrying to the door to give the boy a hug. But her son had turned indignantly away and was already halfway down the stairs, his small back a picture of righteous indignation.

Robbie Black stared at the ceiling and delivered an emphatic, ‘Bugger it!’ to no one in particular.

‘There you are,’ said his wife with triumphant female logic. ‘Now you can see how desperately we need an au pair!’

Six miles away on the other side of the town, a very different woman from Debbie Black was also stirring herself into morning life. Helen Capstick was the second wife of the chairman of Brunton Rovers Football Club.

At forty-seven, she was ten years younger than Jim Capstick and she knew what she was about. It was her boast rather than her admission that she had been round the block a few times when she married him. That was her way of saying that she knew the male psyche intimately and that the men around her should be aware of it. Jim Capstick might know his way around business, might know more tricks of finance and manipulation than the other fish in the dangerous ponds in which he swam. But in choosing a wife – it was better to leave him with the illusion that he had done the choosing – he had given himself a partner who could anticipate his every sexual whim, his every social reaction to other men and women. He had better be aware of that