I’m aware of that,’ I muttered. ‘I’m sure it’s just General Leigh trying to look like the big I-am. Showing off to the ladies, trying to look like a tough nut. You know how vain he is.’
We hurried on, and the square quickly reverted to its normal bustle as though a terrible war machine had not just roared directly through our midst. I didn’t believe a word of what I’d just said, of course. Something was very, very wrong.
*
‘There you are!’ Gerry greeted me as we hurried into Giuseppe’s. My heart sank as I saw Rodway at the table in the corner, tucking into a double-scoop butterscotch sundae. I was too late.
‘Sorry,’ I said as Gerry shook my hand eagerly like we hadn’t just seen each other barely an hour ago. ‘Got held up.’
‘Did you hear that thunderstorm just now?’ Gerry asked. ‘Big old rumble right outside here.’
‘Yeah,’ I replied quietly. ‘Seems to have passed now.’
No point in worrying him unnecessarily. Gerry was prone to overreacting – he refused to shop at HMV for years back on Earth in protest at their decision not to shelve Grease in the sci-fi section. ‘The bloody car flies off at the end, are you blind?’ he’d shouted in vain at the young lad behind the till as security ejected him from the premises.
‘Anyway, I’ve ordered you the Enormo-Bloat,’ Gerry said proudly. ‘Twenty-seven scoops of ice cream with fudge pieces, flakes, strawberries, whipped cream and gherkins. Obviously you can just peel the gherkins off. Everyone does.’
‘Oh, bloody hell,’ I replied. ‘How much is that?’
‘Kev, don’t worry – the club’ll cover it.’
‘No, they won’t!’ I said, exasperated. ‘Gillian’s cut our funding again. She’s killing this club, Gerry. Do you know she turned down my request for a jukebox filled with Motown classics for the dressing room last week? She said it had nothing to do with the game of football. What a slap in the face for Marvin Gaye.’
‘Outrageous,’ Gerry agreed. ‘Everyone knows that Let’s Get It On is about a referee deciding that a match can go ahead after a pitch inspection. Y’know, Kev, I hate to say this, but… do you think we ought to maybe look elsewhere? I heard that Dave Moyes is on the verge of the chop from that swamp planet in the Fifka System. Who knows, it might be just the fresh start we need.’
I had to admit, it was tempting. Life at Palangonia FC was slowly but surely falling apart around me. A threadbare squad, inadequate training facilities – I’d even heard Gillian remark in passing at last year’s end-of-season party when I did a DJ set consisting of Rumours played back to back six times that she preferred early Fleetwood Mac to the Buckingham-Nicks era. I mean, what kind of madness had I involved myself with?
But as all of these thoughts zipped around my mind right there in Giuseppe’s, I looked over at the faces of my lads as they innocently stuffed their faces with ice cream and realised there was simply no way I could walk. I’d come to Palangonia with the sole aim of building a club that could compete (as well as to escape the L’zuhl genocide on Earth, obviously) and I couldn’t just bail out because the top brass didn’t appreciate my maverick ways. These kids relied on King Kev.
‘Giuseppe,’ I said, a steely note to my voice, ‘I’ll take the Enormo-Bloat. And please make it payable to Gillian Routledge at Palangonia FC.’
THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE
As predicted, the second match of the Galactic League C season against Groiku IV was a disaster of, well, disastrous proportions. With barely enough fit players to field a team, I was left with just young Booth up front on his own – the very idea of playing with only one striker made me feel physically ill but I had no choice. Or at least none that I was prepared to make.
Gerry was vehemently against my decision to leave young Rodway on the bench. The kid was itching to play and had been on his best behaviour in the few days since his dressing down, but listen, people need to understand that actions have consequences. Like the time I sent Joey Barton home from training when he wore a baseball cap that read F**K THE POLICE. I was disgusted. I said to him, ‘Sting is Newcastle’s favourite son – he deserves better.’
‘Kev, our goose is cooked without Rodway up top,’ Gerry said when I handed him the team sheet before kickoff. ‘He’s our star man. We need him.’
‘I can’t believe you have so little faith in our squad,’ I scolded him. ‘Little Dunc has come on leaps and bounds in pre-season. He lobbed the keeper from the halfway line in that practice match last week. That takes a special kind of quality.’
‘Yeah, but that was an own goal,’ Gerry said doubtfully. ‘He was aiming the other way and scuffed it.’
‘Look, you can’t get bogged down in details,’ I insisted. ‘We’re going with Alex Booth up front, Tilston as an advanced playmaker behind him.’
‘Tilston? He’s the goalkeeper, Kev.’
‘I know, but I want to play a high pressing game against this lot – he’s wasted back there in his own box.’
An emphatic 6–0 defeat later and Gerry gave me just the faintest ‘I told you so’ look as our lads trudged off the pitch dejectedly. The boys from Groiku IV were a good side; their crusty red skin made them fairly impervious to most of our attempts to tackle them – in fact Wiggins, our midfield general, knackered his own knee going in for a crunching tackle on their number nine.
Still, despite everything, I didn’t feel too downhearted. No one enjoys a defeat (least of all John Gregory, who once lost a game of Connect 4 to me in the green room before we appeared on Football Focus in 2003 and hasn’t spoken to me since) but I saw this capitulation as simply a means to an end. Gillian was up there in the stands and she’d have seen just how little I had to work with. And with a record crowd of over forty-one people in attendance, she’d be feeling the pressure even more. In a strange way, this defeat was going to turn into a victory in the long run. I just had to wait for Gillian to call me up to her office – which, an hour or so after the match, she did.
‘Shall I come too, Kev?’ Gerry asked as he put the boys through a warm-down after the match. ‘Moral support and all that.’
‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ I assured him. ‘I can fight my own battles, you know.’
And that was true – like when that Hollywood studio tried to make that film based on my life back in 2003. I was told it was going to be a straight biopic job, my life story from A to B to C and then however the rest of the alphabet goes. I’d insisted ahead of time on being given script approval and input on casting – Jack Lemmon to play me was a deal-breaker, but they kept fobbing me off with ‘he looks nothing like you’ and ‘he died two years ago’, and so in the end I had no choice but to pull the plug. Their loss.
Anyway, I made my way up to Gillian’s office once again, trying hard to disguise the spring in my step. We certainly hadn’t thrown the match – I would never do that – but I’d known going in that we’d more likely than not end up taking an absolute battering. Now the ball was in Gillian’s
