[Current ability .... 58 / 200]
[Potential ability ..... 172 / 200]
He knew what those numbers meant, because everybody in football knew what those numbers meant.
A fifty-eight was not a National League player.
A fifty-eight was a National League squad number, a lad on the bench at Meadow Lane who came on when it was three-nil, and if he was honest with himself, which he was forcing himself to be, a fifty-eight was roughly what sixty-one minutes in eight months looked like.
A hundred and seventy-two was not the Championship. A hundred and seventy-two was a man who played in the Premier League on a Sunday afternoon with his name on the back of thirty thousand shirts.
So he had been right, and every one of them had been right.
His dad's mate had been right, and the man from Schalke who had come to the house had been right, and the bloke who had written "the most gifted sixteen-year-old in the building" had been right. It was all still in there, all of it. It just had two screws in it.
He found that he had put his hand over his mouth.
And that settled the other question as well, because no coach at Notts County, at Schalke, or at any club in between had ever written down a word of this.
Every report he had ever been shown said the same four things: pace, movement, good feet, needs to add strength.
No report had ever put on paper the thing he actually was, which was a man who saw the whole pitch two seconds before it happened and had a body that would not do anything about it.
He had never said that sentence out loud in his life, to anybody, because it sounded like an excuse, and it was one.
A tumour would have had to watch him play.
It was real.
And potential did not expire, which was another thing nobody told you. Potential sat there being worth exactly nothing while your body decided whether it was coming back or not, and then one day you were thirty and the potential was still on the sheet and you were selling cars.
A hundred and fourteen. That was the gap.
The distance from fifty-eight to a hundred and seventy-two was a hundred and fourteen points, and he had until the thirtieth of June. And a cap was not a promise; it was a ceiling. It told you how high the room was. It did not put you anywhere near it.
He sat with that thought for about thirty seconds.
Then he reached out and touched the panel, and this time it did not behave like the thing in the changing room that his hand had gone straight through. It moved under his finger like a phone screen with a soft bzzt, and the bonus stat line lit up in a different colour.
So the messages were just messages, and this one was a controller. Right. That meant he could spend them.
He did not spend them.
He sat there instead and worked out what he actually needed, the way he had been working out what he actually needed since he was eleven, and it took him about four minutes.
Finishing was a nine, and a nine was a joke, but finishing was worth nothing at all if he was never inside the box.
The technical column would come back with a ball and a fortnight of work, and there was not a ball this fortnight.
Strength was the one that every coach he had had for six years had told him to fix, and every one of them had been wrong, because he had never been strong. He had been nine stone something at seventeen, and he had been unplayable.
He got up and went to the window.
Down on Sneinton Dale a bloke was locking up the chicken shop, and the shutter came down with a bang that set a dog barking, woof, woof, two streets away.
Acceleration seven. There it was. That was the number, the only number on the whole sheet that mattered, and it was a seven.
When he was eighteen, he could go from standing still to top speed in three steps, and that had been the entire trick.
He had not been strong, he had been slow over a hundred metres, and he could not head a ball, and none of it had mattered, because he could be somewhere before anybody had even decided he was going there.
An Anticipation of thirteen and an Off the Ball of thirteen and an Acceleration of seven added up to a man who knew where to be and arrived after the ball had gone. The one who arrives in the box a second late.
And then they had put two screws in his ankle.
He touched Acceleration, and it answered with a blip.
[YOUR ACCELERATION HAS INCREASED 7 > 8]
[YOUR FIRST STRIDE COMES QUICKER]
He waited for something to happen.
Nothing happened. His leg felt exactly the same as it always felt. He stood in his own front room in his coat and flexed his right foot, and it did what it had done every day for three years, which was work, and ache slightly at the back.
Well. Either that was a con, or he was going to have to go and prove it.
The timing gates at Meadow Lane held his best forty-metre time from the pre-season medical on the eighth of July, and he had it written down, because he had every number he had ever produced written down in the black notebook at the bottom of his bag. When you had nothing else, you counted things.
The page went ffft as he turned it, and the pen went scratch-scratch across the top of it.
5.11.
And under it, in the same handwriting going back to when he was seventeen, the column read: 5.04. 5.09. 5.01. 5.06. 5.11.
He had never gone under five seconds in his life. He had not done it at Schalke, and he had not done it at eighteen when everybody wanted him, and he had stopped expecting that he ever would.
He looked at the clock, which was going tick, tick, on the wall. It was 9:52pm.
Ah, come on. It was Saturday night.
He put his boots in the bag and drew the zip shut, zip.His trainers went scuff, scuff, scuff on the pavement the whole way down Sneinton Dale, twenty-five minutes at a pace that was nearly jogging, because the alternative was sitting in the flat with the number.
The lights were off across the whole of Meadow Lane except for one corridor, and the gate on Iremonger Road was shut, and Nev Utting was in the hut with the radio on and a flask.
The radio was hissing, ksshh, stuck between stations, and the flask went glug as Nev poured himself half a cup.
"You are joking," Nev said.
"Alright, Nev."
"It is ten o'clock at night."
"I know what time it is."
"On a Saturday." Nev was sixty-eight and had worked that gate for eleven years, and he had a moustache you could have swept a yard with. "We lost, did we?"
"We drew."
"Against ten men."
"Against ten men, yes."
"There you are, then." Nev drank the half cup himself, because he always drank it himself, and Angell had never once seen him offer it to anybody. "Are you not travelling on Monday?"
"To Wrexham? No, I am not in the party."
"They are taking eighteen."
"I know how many they are taking."
"They have got cameras and all sorts up there now." Nev said it like a man reporting the weather.
"Two Yanks off the telly bought the club in February, and there is a film crew that follows them around everywhere. Barry's lad went up for the friendly, and he said there are more of them behind the goal with cameras than there are people in our whole away end."
"That is Wrexham for you."
"That is money, is what that is." He drank some more of his tea. "You have been here since January."
"Since the fourth of January."
"The fourth of January," Nev repeated. "That is eight months, near enough. And how many games have you started?"
Angell looked at the gate.
"None."
"None." Nev nodded slowly, the way old men do when they have already known a thing for a fortnight and have been waiting for you to say it out loud.
"There is a lad in the ticket office who reckons there is a number in your contract."
"Is that what he reckons?"
"He reckons it is fifteen."
"Then he wants to be careful what he reckons."
"He does the season tickets, duck. He is not reading your paperwork, he is repeating what somebody in a suit said in a corridor." Nev put the cup down on the ledge with a clink.
"And if the number is fifteen, and you have got none, and it is the end of August, then somebody ought to be running about at ten o'clock at night. So go on."
He hit the button, which went bzzt under his thumb, and the gate rolled back with a clank.
"You have got half an hour. And do not put the floodlights on, because Kemp has had a memo out about the floodlights."
"Half an hour. Got it."
"That is what you said in July."
"Nev."
"Go on."