He woke up at 6:40 on Monday morning with a cockstand you could have hung a wet coat on, and with the alarm on his phone going bzzz on the chest of drawers.
That part was nothing new. He had woken up like that most mornings since he was thirteen and had never once given it a second thought.
What was new was that he had been dreaming about a twenty-year-old cleaner on a tiled floor with her heels in the backs of his legs, and that he lay there for a good forty seconds letting the dream run before he had the presence of mind to be embarrassed about it.
Oh. We are doing this now, are we.
He put a hand over his face. Twice in the night, as well. Both times her.
He had gone twenty-two years with all of that filed somewhere at the back under things other people do, and now it had come out of the box and it was not going back in, and he could tell already that it was going to have opinions about his day.
Right. Later. Not now.
He got out of it by doing what he always did, which was to check the damage.
Here we go.
He had done three hours on a pitch in the dark on Saturday night and another two on Sunday morning because he had not been able to help himself, and by every law he had lived under since he was sixteen he should have been getting out of that bed sideways, one leg at a time, with his calves screaming and his ankle full of glass.
He sat up, and the bed went creak under him.
Nothing hurt.
He put both feet on the carpet and stood, and bounced twice on the balls of them, the floorboards going thud-thud under him, and went down into a squat and came back up, and stood in the middle of a rented bedroom above a barber's on Sneinton Dale at twenty to seven in the morning feeling like a man who had spent the weekend on a sofa.
That was wrong. That was completely wrong, and he knew it in his knees.
He put the kettle on, and it went kssshh and then clicked itself off, and he did the same breakfast he had done every morning since the middle of January, which was a hundred grams of oats with water because the milk was for the tea, four eggs going sssss in the pan, two bananas, and a mug of tea so strong it stood up on its own.
It cost about ninety pence. He had worked that out as well.
At the training ground in Gelsenkirchen there had been a table twenty feet long with everything on it weighed out and labelled, and a chef called Ralf who did his eggs in front of him and called him der Junge, and Angell had walked past that table four days a week for two years thinking about absolutely nothing except whether he was in the eighteen.
Ralf would have taken this pan off him and thrown it in the bin.
He got the panel up while he was doing his laces, each lace going snap as he pulled it tight, and it answered with a ping.
[ITEMS: TRAINING EFFECT X3 (5 DAYS REMAINING)]
Five days. So it was counting Saturday and Sunday.
And it said training effect.
He sat on the end of the bed with one boot in his hand and thought about that properly, because there was a thing inside it that he did not want to get wrong.
The training effect was not the session. The session was just where you did the breaking.
The effect was what your body did about it afterwards, and your body did it while you were asleep. So if the panel was tripling the effect, and the effect happened overnight, then he was doing three nights of recovery every single night.
He did not know that for certain.
He wanted to be clear with himself that he did not know it, the same way he had been clear with himself about the four points he had not spent.
But he had woken up feeling like this four times in three years, and three of those times had been pre-season at seventeen.
Test it. Do not decide it. Test it.
He got the other boot on and caught himself thinking about the far pitch, and about whether Quinn would do the shuttles first or last, and about how much he could get done before the group even arrived, and he stopped with his hand on the door, the latch going click under his thumb.
Hang on. Am I turning into one of them?
Every club had three or four of them.
The ones who were in at seven and out last and had a folder on their phone of their own sprint times, who told you about their sleep, who would explain magnesium to you in a car park.
He had spent six years taking the mickey out of those men.
No. It was not that. It was two days. It was a spike.
The barber's shutter went up with a clack behind him as he came out onto the pavement, and the barber said morning and he said morning back, and it was already warm, and the thought came back at him from the side with its hands in its pockets.
And anyway. There were worse things to be addicted to. He had had one of those since Saturday and he was already thinking about the next one.
The doors on the number 44 went pssh and shut on his heel.
The ticket reader went beep when he tapped on, and the bus went down past the Trent with its engine going vrrm, and the ground came up on the left the way it always did, black and white and enormous for what it was, nineteen and a half thousand seats on a bend in the river.
The taxi driver had left a few things out.
Notts County were founded in 1862, which made them the oldest professional football club in the world.
They won the FA Cup in 1894. In 1903 a club in Turin wrote and asked for a set of shirts, and they got black and white stripes sent out from Nottingham, which was why Juventus looked the way they looked.
There were men still drinking in Nottingham who had watched this club play Liverpool at home in the top division. That was 1992, and in Nottingham it felt like yesterday.
They had gone out of the Football League on the last day of the 2018-19 season, at Swindon, after a hundred and thirty-one years in it.
And still, 6,934 of them had come through the gate on Saturday to watch us fail to beat ten men.
Third season down here and they still turned up. Nobody outside Nottingham could explain that, and nobody inside it had ever needed to.
Angell got off at the corner and went in through the players' entrance, the door going bzzt as it let him in, with three minutes to spare, which at that club counted as nearly late, his boots going clack-clack down the corridor.
He went along the row to dump his bag under peg fourteen, the bag going thump on the bench, which was where the bomb squad hung their things because the numbered pegs belonged to the sixteen, and he stopped.
There was a training top on the hook, and a pair of shorts, and socks.
Washed. Dried. Folded, with the sleeves in, in a square, the way nobody in that building had folded anything since he had walked through the door in January.
His base layer was underneath it with the collar squared off.
There was a strip of masking tape stuck to the wood above it with ANGELL written on it in biro.
He stood there with his bag in his hand for about four seconds.
At Schalke there had been a lad whose whole job was that. A man called Uwe, who did thirty of them before eight o'clock and printed the names on a machine.
Here, there was a girl with a trolley and a washing machine from 2009, and she had folded his kit like it belonged to somebody, and she had written his name in biro because there was no machine.
He put his hand flat on the folded top and then took it off again, because Fallows had come in behind him with his boots going clatter on the tile.
Right. Was that the number doing that? Was that the seventy-six?