Tuesday, 8th September 2015
The fluorescent lights of the '24/7 Local' hummed a monotonous, soul-crushing B-flat. It was the soundtrack to my life, a constant, buzzing reminder that I was stuck. 3:17 AM. The graveyard shift.
My kingdom was an empire of brightly lit aisles, stocked with overpriced essentials and enough sugary, caffeinated drinks to give a rhino a heart condition. I was Danny Walsh, twenty-six years old, monarch of the crisps and potentate of the pot noodles.
My real life, the one that mattered, was happening inside my head, piped in through a pair of cheap, crackling earbuds I'd bought off a market stall. The left one had a tendency to cut out if I turned my head too quickly. A small price to pay for tactical enlightenment.
"…and the issue with City's current setup," a posh, southern voice crackled in my ear, "is that while the 4-2-3-1 gives them defensive solidity with the double pivot, they're losing the creative link between the midfield and Aguero. De Bruyne can't do it all himself. What they need is a classic 'trequartista', someone to operate in the hole, but the modern game has coached that player out of existence…"
I scoffed, stacking tins of baked beans into a perfect, gleaming pyramid. Trequartista. Easy to say from a London studio, mate.
The modern game hadn't coached it out of existence; it had just made it a luxury item.
In my current Football Manager 2015 save with Wrexham, I had built my entire promotion-winning campaign around a journeyman midfielder I had retrained as a trequartista.
It took months of specific drills, mentoring from a veteran player, and a lot of shouting from the digital touchline, but it worked.
We stormed the National League. Of course, my journeyman's stats were a lie, a beautiful collection of numbers I had pored over for hours, but the principle was sound. You just had to find the right player, the right system, and have the guts to see it through.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. A message from Raj, my flatmate. 'Mate, you will not BELIEVE what just happened on my FM save. My wonderkid striker just scored a bicycle kick in the 94th minute to win the Champions League against Real Madrid. I'm crying.'
I smiled.
Raj got it.
He was a taxi driver, another soul trapped in the endless loop of the service economy, but in the digital realm, he was a tactical genius managing Paris Saint-Germain. Our two-man support group for the hopelessly football-addicted.
I was just typing a reply when the chime above the door announced the arrival of my least favourite part of the night shift.
The post-pub crew. Four of them, all in their early twenties, loud and swaying, reeking of cheap lager and bravado. Their leader, a lad with a shaved head and a Stone Island jacket that probably cost more than my monthly rent, swaggered towards the counter.
"Alright, mate," he slurred, leaning heavily on the counter. "Four packs of Marlboro Reds. And be quick about it, yeah?"
Years of this had given me a sort of sixth sense, a finely tuned bullshit detector. I knew the script. They were looking for a reaction, a spark to ignite their drunken boredom. Give them attitude, and it would escalate. Be too timid, and they would walk all over you. The key was a specific brand of weary, unshakeable neutrality.
"No problem, lads," I said, my voice calm and even. I turned to the cigarette display, my movements deliberate, unhurried. I didn't turn my back completely, keeping them in my peripheral vision. "Got ID for the smokes?"
Shaved Head laughed, a harsh, barking sound. "You having a laugh? I'm twenty-four, you melt."
"Not my rules, mate," I said, placing the four packs on the counter but keeping my hand on them. "It's Challenge 25. You look under 25, I've got to ask. Boss checks the CCTV. I lose my job if I don't."
It was the perfect cocktail of appeal to authority and shared victimhood. I wasn't the enemy; I was just another poor sod getting screwed over by 'the man'. It almost always worked.
He grumbled, his mates snickering behind him, but he pulled out a dog-eared driver's license. I gave it a cursory glance, nodded, and rang them up. "That'll be forty-three pounds and eighty pence, please."
As he fumbled with his wallet, one of his mates, a lanky kid with a goofy grin, knocked over my pyramid of baked beans. Tins clattered across the floor. My masterpiece of retail architecture, ruined.
"Oi, watch it, you clumsy git!" Shaved Head snapped at his friend.
I held up a hand. "Don't worry about it. Happens all the time." I crouched down and started picking them up, not making a big deal of it.
Humiliation is a trigger. By making it a non-issue, I took the power out of the situation. The lanky kid mumbled an apology. They paid, grabbed their cigarettes, and stumbled out into the pre-dawn gloom, their boisterous energy already fading as they sought their next target.
I finished stacking the tins, my hands moving on autopilot. My heart rate hadn't even gone up. That was the depressing part. This was my area of expertise. Not tactical analysis or player development. De-escalating pissed-up idiots at 3 AM. I was the Pep Guardiola of conflict avoidance.
The rest of the shift passed in a blur of stocking shelves and serving the occasional taxi driver or factory worker.
At 7 AM, my replacement arrived, and I was free. I walked out of the 24/7 Local, the cool, damp Manchester air a welcome relief after eight hours of recycled B-flat air conditioning.
The sky was a bruised purple, the sun still hesitating below the horizon. Moss Side was waking up, the streets slowly coming to life with the rumble of buses and the clatter of shop shutters.
My flat was only a fifteen-minute walk away, but I always took the long route through Alexandra Park. Especially on a Sunday. Even at this hour, you could hear it. The distant thud of a ball, the faint shouts of men chasing a fleeting moment of glory on a muddy pitch. It was a siren song to me.
Today, the game was already in full swing. A classic Sunday league encounter.
Mismatched kits, a variety of body shapes, and a level of passion that was inversely proportional to the quality on display.
One team, in garish yellow and green, looked vaguely organized. The other, in a motley collection of red shirts, was a shambles. Their defence was all over the place, their midfield was non-existent, and their striker looked like he'd spent the night before wrestling a bear and losing.
I found an empty spot on a worn wooden bench, the cold of the wood seeping through my thin trousers.
This was my cathedral. I didn't care about the dropped passes or the scuffed shots. I was looking at the patterns. The space the left-back was vacating every time he bombed forward.
The way the holding midfielder for the yellow team was constantly being dragged out of position. The striker for the red team, for all his lack of fitness, had a cleverness to his movement, peeling off the shoulder of the defender, even if the ball never came.
I was so engrossed, I didn't notice a man sit down beside me until he spoke.
"What do you see, son?"