‘The reason you’re going through all this is for one purpose and one purpose only: to win this tournament,’ Dig Grimsby said. ‘We are going to win. We have to win. Do you know who doesn’t win?’
‘Us?’
‘No, Octopus, not us. We’re going to win because we’re winners. The ones that don’t win are losers. I am a winner and the team I lead will win. First is first. Second is nowhere.’
‘What about third?’ Hawk Willis asked.
‘That’s nowhere too, Pain in the Ass. Now, we’ve talked enough. It’s time to start training.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
‘Well, Clive, it’s all about the two Ms – movement and positioning’
Ron Atkinson
‘Did anyone bring a ball?’ someone asked.
‘A ball?’ Grimsby spluttered. ‘It’ll be a long time before any of you lot will be kicking a ball. You have to earn the right to kick a football. You have to prove you’re hungry enough for it.’
‘Excuse me, Gaffer,’ Stevie said politely. ‘Studies have shown that most football training works best when you actually use a ball. On his podcast Ken Early said—’
‘Who does Ken Early play for? Who does he manage?’
‘He’s a journalist, but he knows a lot about football. I think he had trials for Marseille.’
‘Trials, me backside. I had trials for the X-Factor years ago. Sang a Glenn Medeiros song. Doesn’t make me a bloody pop star. Now, you lot listen to me and listen to me good: thinking is the enemy of football,’ he bellowed.
‘You’re wrong—’ Frank Courtney began.
‘Right, that’s it,’ Grimsby snapped. His cheeks puffed out, even redder with sudden rage. ‘Drop to the ground and give me twenty.’
‘Are you joking?’
‘If I’d made a joke, you’d be laughing right now. Make it thirty. And count them out for me.’
Frank dropped to the ground and started his press-ups. He’d never done more than ten before and his arms wobbled like strawberry jelly. ‘Two,’ he huffed. ‘Three. Four.’
‘Let that be a lesson to you. No talking back. Anyone else got anything they’d like to say? Anything they want to get off their chest?’
Thirteen heads shook left to right and back to left in unison. Noah frowned. This wasn’t the start he’d been hoping for. With so little time before the tournament he’d thought Dig would begin assessing the players immediately. Once he’d found out their strengths and weaknesses he’d find their best positions and focus on improving them as much as possible. Noah looked over at Stevie, who gave a little shrug.
‘Five,’ Frank spluttered. The tip of his nose touched the ground.
‘Is that the best you can do? When I was your age, I could do fifty using only my right arm, forty with my left and fifty-six with my old man standing on my back.’
Noah wondered why Dig Grimsby needed to have his father stand on his back when he was doing press-ups, but he wasn’t about to ask.
‘Oh, for pity’s sake,’ Grimsby said, wiping away a sheen of sweat with the sleeve of his nylon-polyester mix tracksuit. ‘I can see we’re going to have to get a lot fitter.’
Darren began to chuckle. Grimsby spun round. Maggie was doing press-ups. Smoothly, easily. Her form was perfect.
‘Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty,’ she said, not even breathing heavily.
‘What are you doing?’ Grimsby asked, more than a little confused.
Maggie hopped to her feet and broke into a grin. ‘Just getting them out of the way early. We both know I’m going to say or do something to annoy you at some point, so I thought I’d get a head start on the punishment.’
‘You and me are going to have a falling out, girl,’ he said.
‘The name’s Pretty Boy,’ Maggie replied.
‘Right, drop to the ground and give me thir—’
Dig Grimsby caught himself just in time. He walked round the back of the shed muttering to himself and returned with an old fire-engine-red racing bike that had seen better days. It had a very thin frame and looked far too light to accommodate Grimsby’s bulky mass, but surprisingly it didn’t buckle when he climbed aboard.
‘Same kind of bike as Stephen Roche won the Tour de France with,’ he said.
‘Are we going cycling, Gaffer?’ Adam O’Brien asked.
‘I’m cycling. You lot are going to jog.’
There were more than a few groans.
‘Off you go, two abreast. Past the edge of the pitch, then straight on. I’ll let you know if you’re going in the wrong direction.’
He took a whistle from his pocket. Two loud shrills pierced the air.
‘One peep means go right, two means left. I know that’s far too complicated for most of you, but you’ll get the hang of it.’
This is just an exercise in team building, Noah told himself. If every player hates the coach, then we’ll bond as a group and that’ll help us. Yes, the man was allowing himself to be hated just to help the team. Grimsby was a psychological genius.
Grimsby wasn’t a psychological genius, he realized half a kilometre later.
‘Technically, I’m not even part of the team,’ Stevie gasped as he struggled along.
‘Quit your guff,’ Grimsby said as he conducted the impressive feat of lighting a cigarette while cycling his bike.
Stevie huffed and puffed along the footpath.
‘What’s wrong with you, lad? You must be the most unfit young fella I’ve ever met.’
‘Cigarette smoke . . . not good for asthma . . . and pollen count high today.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ Grimsby asked.
‘He’s got allergies,’ Noah said. He was breathing easily. Running had never been a chore for him.
It wasn’t a chore for Maggie either. She was striding ahead, showing off. Occasionally, she’d drop back, run a couple of rings round McCooley, duck out of reach of the flailing arm he’d swing in her direction and sprint to the head of the group again.
‘Allergies? Don’t believe in them,’ Grimsby said, sucking deeply on his cigarette.
‘But science . . . has—’
‘The power of the mind overcomes everything,’ Grimsby said, tapping the side of his head with his finger and inadvertently singeing his eyebrows by bringing the lit cigarette too close to them. Thankfully, the odour of burning hair was quickly lost in the wind. ‘When I was young, there was no such thing as allergies and we all got along fine. If we didn’t like what our mothers put on the table and refused to eat it, then we went hungry. You couldn’t afford to be allergic to anything back then. Now, enough chatting. You’d better speed up if you’re going to keep up with me because in the words of Mr Christopher Cross, I’m going to ride like the wind.’
When they’d lapped the nearby housing estate, where their only audience was mothers pushing babies in buggies, and a few sullen teenagers hanging around with nothing to do, they headed towards the town centre with its busy traffic and shoppers. People stopped what they were doing to watch as the motley crew huffed and puffed by, jogging two abreast on the footpath, led by an overweight cigarette-smoking cyclist in a too-tight tracksuit.
‘This is mortifying,’ Barbara said to herself.
They reached the top of the town and looped round the statue of the town’s least corrupt mayor.
‘Water,’ someone gasped.
‘Water is for winners,’ Grimsby said, slamming his hand on the roof of a car that had dared to get too close.
When the group returned to The Hatch, their earlier vim and vigour had been replaced by plodding and panting. They collapsed on the pitch in a messy heap, their lungs gasping for air, their cheeks flushed pink, their muscles aching and quivering.
‘You’re a disgrace,’ Grimsby called out as he cycled around them. ‘You’re young, in the prime of life, and look at the state of you. And here’s an old lad like me and I’m hardly out of breath.’
‘In fairness, you are on a bike, Gaffer,’ Cormac Mc
Hugh cried out in an agonized voice.
‘Excuses, excuses. Meet me here tomorrow and we’ll see what you’re like as footballers.’
‘We’ve earned the right to use the ball?’
‘Not even close, buddy boy,’ Grimsby said. ‘Power lifting and drills. Lots and lots of drills.’
‘Please, no more, man,’ Hawk Willis whispered. ‘Shoot me now. Put me out of my misery or else I’m just going to lie here and wait for the sweet kiss of death.’
‘How far do you think we’ve run?’ Noah asked. He wasn’t feeling bad at all, but he didn’t want to act like he was fine when the others were in bits.
‘Forty kilometres,’ Hawk Willis said.
‘Three,’ Stevie wheezed. He rolled up his tracksuit sleeve to reveal the running watch strapped to his arm. ‘This records heart rate, distance, all . . . those kinds of things. According to the stats . . . I’m no longer alive.’
Michael Griffin was the first to get back to his feet.
‘You OK, Michael?’ Noah asked, hopping up.
Michael shrugged his shoulders.
‘We’ll recover. That was just Mr Grimsby throwing his weight about, showing us who’s boss. Tomorrow will be easier,’ Noah said.
Tomorrow was twice as hard.
Name: Frank Courtney
Nickname: Courts. The Judge. My nicknames are so uncool it’s unreal.
Age: 12
Position: I’ll play anywhere. Often at centre-back because I’m fairly tall although you wouldn’t think that if you saw me standing beside my sister. She’s a giant, a gentle giant – until she starts playing.
Likes: Hanging out with my friends and having a laugh. Someone’s always saying something stupid and it’s really, really funny.
Dislikes: Going to bed early. What’s the point of that? Since humans learned to control electricity we don’t have to sleep just cos it’s dark outside so why do people still think it’s great to go to bed early? Can’t understand it.
Player you’re most like: Per Mertesacker. I’m fairly decent, but I don’t have much pace. Being slow means you have to read the game better, though. Xabi Alonso said that tackling isn’t a great quality, that it’s kind of a last resort and I think the same way. If you’re in the right place at the right time, you’ll intercept the ball and there’s no need to risk a tackle. Most of the people I’ve played with disagree with me. They love a sliding tackle more than anything.
Favourite player: Zlatan Ibrahimovi[ć]
Favourite goal: That goal against England. You know the one, the overhead kick. Wow. Zlatan’s a monster.
Messi or Ronaldo: Ronaldo for me.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
‘Fail to prepare, prepare to fail’
Roy Keane
‘I don’t know,’ Stevie said. ‘I like the ones with the stripes. What about you?’
‘I hate stripes. I’m not a zebra,’ Maggie said.
‘Pick whichever one you want, man. I look good in anything,’ Hawk Willis said, running his fingers through his thick head of hair.
Stevie and Barbara were flicking through a sportswear catalogue. Big Dave had got one from his friend Elaine, just as he’d promised Noah he would. There were pages and pages of football kits available in all sorts of colours and sizes, more combinations than Noah could have ever imagined existed. Elaine had been kind enough to give them a large discount and Mrs Power had agreed to pay fifty per cent of the costs; it was up to Simone to organize the rest of the payment. But getting his teammates to agree on what shirt and shorts combo they were going to wear in the tournament wasn’t easy. Everyone had very different taste and everyone thought their taste was good.
Slightly more than half of the team were in the makeshift clubhouse and dressing room at The Hatch waiting for their next training session. They were huddled into the shed, which was in semi-darkness even with the light provided by the solitary sixty-watt light bulb. The wind howled outside, rattling the door. It was almost gloomy enough to start telling ghost stories.
‘What do you think, Noah?’ Stevie asked. ‘Which shirt do you like best?’
Noah gave a mental sigh, but smiled encouragingly at his friend. He couldn’t care less about the jerseys. They could be any colour as far as he was concerned; he had far more important things to worry about. As long as they didn’t choose a pink shirt he was fine with their choice – he didn’t like pink at all. Yellow as well – he wasn’t a fan of yellow. Far too bright for his liking. And orange wouldn’t be great either, come to think of it.
‘What about black jerseys? We’d be like a team of Darth Vaders. That’d be awesome,’ Cormac McHugh said, pointing a slim finger at a picture on page twenty-eight.
Adam O’Brien, who was in the process of tying his long hair into a ponytail for training, nodded in agreement. He loved black too. All his clothes were black, even his pyjamas.
‘That jersey is cool,’ Barbara said. Her cheeks flushed and she lowered her chin when she realized everyone was listening to her.
‘I don’t know,’ Limbsy said. ‘My mother makes my dad wear black shirts all the time to try to hide his belly. She says black is slimming. If I slim down any more, I’ll disappear.’
‘Can I have a look?’ Noah said.
Stevie handed him the catalogue. Noah knew the moment he saw the jersey it was the one for him. It was as black as a starless night. The v-neck collar had a strip of white and two white stripes ran across the shoulders and down to the tips of the sleeves. It looked . . . perfect. He didn’t have a phone, but he’d borrow the catalogue and ask Simone to take a picture of the jersey and text it to their dad.
‘You’re right, Barbara,’ he said. ‘It is cool. Let’s go for it.’
‘You can’t make that decision without consulting me,’ Maggie said, leaning over his shoulder to take a look. But she must have liked it too because she made a noise that signalled approval. ‘I’ll wear number nine. And make sure you get O’CONNELL printed on the back.’
‘It’s not the Premier League. We don’t get our names on the jerseys.’
‘Then how will people know it’s me?’
‘Don’t worry, Maggie, I’m sure you’ll find a way of letting people know who you are,’ Noah said.
She grinned and gave him a friendly shove. ‘Right, but we’re wearing white shorts, OK?’
‘We will be black and white like the penguins or the nuns,’ Piotr yelled.
Noah couldn’t believe they’d actually come to an agreement. It seemed far too easy for this bunch of players. Maybe it didn’t always have to end up with shouting and threats, he thought.
‘They’re late,’ Stevie said, referring to the rest of the team as he checked his watch.
‘So’s the gaffer, man,’ Hawk Willis said.
Noah counted the heads in the room. Including himself, there were only nine there, eight if you didn’t count Stevie who wasn’t even a player. There was no sign of Darren, McCooley, Sunday, Frank or Michael Griffin. Five of them late for training, and they’d only been under the supervision of Dig Grimsby for a week. That wasn’t good at all. He found it hard to blame them, though. Stevie’s posters and online messages had promised them football and fun, and what had they got instead? A week of misery. The training had been extremely tough and about as much fun as an ice-cold shower on a winter’s morning. With each passing day, the team’s enthusiasm had faded and Noah knew that he was going to have to do something drastic or half of them were going to quit on him. And if they quit then his chances of being spotted by a scout and recruited by a football club were over. He wouldn’t be able to bring his father home. After his struggle to get into the tournament, he wasn’t about to let everything fall apart that easily. His own doubts about Grimsby’s so-called expertise had multiplied and Maggie had been quick to say I told you so. It was time for a conversation with the gaffer. He wasn’t looking forward to it. Grimsby was far from being a reasonable man.
His thoughts were interrupted by the commotion outside.
A moment later, Darren and Sunday staggered through the door. Sunday had blood dripping from his nose and his T-shirt was torn at the shoulder. Darren looked even worse. His lip was cut and he was missing a clump of hair, as well as a shoe. That wasn’t the odd thing, though. The odd thing was that they were both laughing.
‘What’s going on?’ Noah asked. ‘Are you OK?’
‘Never better,’ Sunday said, wiping his nose.
Barbara jumped up and guided Darren and Sunday over to the bench. She made them sit down even though they protested that they were fine.
‘What happened to you?’ Limbsy asked.
Darren and Sunday looked at each other and grinned.
‘Whacker Ryan,’ they said in unison.
‘Who’s Whacker Ryan?’ Maggie asked.
Noah remembered now that Darren and Sunday had told him that Whacker Ryan had been after them because they’d helped out some young boy on their estate. He must have finally caught up with them. That explained the cuts and bruises. It didn’t explain the laughing and joking, though, not unless they’d both gone insane.
‘Where is he? Is he outside?’ Noah asked.
‘Whacker’s gone. We won’t have to deal with him again,’ Sunday said.
‘Why?’
‘Because he made a terrible mistake. Whacker and his friends attacked us on the way to training, but it turned out that one of our teammates wasn’t too far behind us,’ Sunday said. ‘He made sure that Whacker won’t even dare to look at us from now on.’
‘There he is. There’s the man,’ Darren said, getting to his feet as Kevin McCooley arrived in the shed.
The Mighty Dynamo Page 13
