home

Five goals I scored. We scored eight in all. Five, just me. No one scored five in a game, in that league. We’d hardly scored five all season; suddenly we felt as if we could score a hundred more, score for fun.

He had grown up here, played here when he was very young. Gone on to great things, played for England, scored.

He became the manager of teams we could only ever dream of playing for, in hundred thousand seat stadiums, in front of a hundred thousand faces lit by towering floodlights in the beautiful cities of the world.

We weren’t a beautiful city. Coal city. Cold city.

He had learned Spanish to speak to the super players at his super club, to thank the clamouring fans and answer the throngs of journos who filled evening papers with his words.

They said he might come, come home. We never believed it. Why would he?

And there he was, in our changing room. He could let his broad, hometown voice know itself again.

He didn’t say much, or anything at all. ‘I’ve only been in a week’, he mumbled gently into the microphones of a Friday press conference, he was still taking stock.

Five goals I scored on the Saturday after; lunch time kick off. Eight we scored.

The streets rang; the chippies and the pubs heaved with the same men who had trudged in to St James, not daring to believe; even Sir Bobby couldn’t salvage such a wreck.

We were bottom of the heap, headed back where we belonged, they said; lower leagues with a Tuesday coach trip to Scunthorpe, not worthy of the Saturdays at Anfield, Old Trafford.

We won, and we won. And we scored, oh, we scored. We went to Europe, and played in hundred thousand seat stadiums, and saw faces glow in the light of the towering floodlights.

And we lost. Everyone has to lose. They teach you that when you play in bare feet and the coach is someone’s mum.

And when we got back, he was gone. To be replaced. To be thanked, sure enough. These days clubs live by success, they said.

The journos found him; he was quietly heading home.

He didn’t say much, he was still taking stock. “You fellas have a home to go to”, he said. “That’s more important than this.”

The season started, and he wasn’t anywhere, had no team. He’d always been in such demand, he’d been somewhere or somewhere new every year for so long, and lots to do.

‘I got to live the life, what a life’, he said. “Who gets that? The taxi driver, the man sitting next to you on the train?”

“But I was absent. I was always at the club. Now, I get to be home. Not absent. What a life. There’s always a silver lining.”