to complain yet again about the lack of recycling facilities at England’s training complex.
‘Yes, Kevin,’ she sighed, leaning back in her chair. ‘What’s on your mind?’
I’m not having a pop, that’s not my style, but Gillian simply doesn’t understand football. She doesn’t know a 4-4-2 from a… well, whatever other formations there are. And listen, that’s not a sexist thing – I know plenty of blokes who are just as clueless about the game. Steven Taylor, for one – you’d give him simple instructions and his eyes would just glaze over. Mind you, I’m one to talk. I hadn’t even heard of the offside rule until 1999. At the end of the day, Gillian’s a bureaucrat, a cynical pencil-pusher whose only consideration is about the numbers, the bottom line, the ingoings and outgoings. She doesn’t understand that what really matters at a football club is the graft, the passion, putting the ball in the net, the catering facilities. I knew that prising a few quid out of the coffers for a new striker was going to be a big ask, so I decided to play it cool and blindside her.
‘Nice sunny day outside,’ I said casually.
‘Yes, I suppose so,’ she agreed.
‘Can I have a new striker?’
‘No,’ she replied wearily. ‘We’ve been through this before, Kevin; we simply can’t afford to spend money on player recruitment right now. The budget is stretched thin as it is, you know that.’
‘We’re getting killed in the league,’ I protested. ‘We’re wallowing in the bottom half of the table.’
‘We’ve only played one match; most other teams haven’t played their opening fixture yet,’ Gillian argued. I rolled my eyes.
‘Yes, but on alphabetical order, Palangonia FC are right down in the doldrums,’ I said. Once again Gillian had displayed her woeful lack of knowledge.
‘Look, I’m sorry, but it’s absolutely out of the question,’ she went on. ‘I was at a meeting of the Compound Council just last night and General Leigh was making a big stink again about how much money is already set aside for this football club. There’s a war on, Kevin – a big one – and it’s not going to end any time soon. You know the L’zuhl are making great advances across the galaxy.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘How can you not know?’ Gillian asked patronisingly. ‘It’s been all over the news – they annihilated the horse-mutants of Teplok in a raid just yesterday. They’re really upping the ante. We have to be prepared for the possibility that they’ll strike Palangonia next. If they find out about our military presence here… It’s no secret that the L’zuhl were furious to discover that some of us managed to escape during the invasion of Earth. It made them look weak and that is one thing they are most certainly not, and if they begin to see our small outpost here as a threat then they will not hesitate. Mankind is high on their list of targets.’
‘And a new striker is high on mine,’ I argued. ‘Anyway, if the bloody L’zuhl come down here and see how half-arsed an operation this football club is, how’s that going to make us look? If we’re going to win this war, we need a team that’s competing for promotion to Galactic League B. That’s basic.’
‘I sometimes wonder what planet you’re on,’ Gillian said quietly, shaking her head.
‘Palangonia,’ I replied defiantly. ‘You know, the one with the football club that has no firepower up top.’
‘You’ve got Rodway,’ Gillian said. ‘He scored hatfuls for us last season. There’s no reason he can’t do the same again.’
‘The kid’s cracked,’ I snapped irritably. ‘Out until all hours, drinking himself silly and then going to seedy clubs. Probably snorting weed too. He’s a liability. I can’t have it affecting the other lads.’
‘I’m sorry, Kevin, that’s my final word,’ she said, putting her glasses on and looking at her computer screen, which was her way of saying that she wanted me to leave. (Also, she then said aloud that she wanted me to leave.)
‘Fine,’ I grumbled. ‘But remember this conversation when we get our arses handed to us on Saturday. You need to wake up, Gillian – the real war is out there, on the pitch, eleven against eleven. Everything else is window dressing.’
‘Oh, and Kevin?’ Gillian said as I stood up to leave. ‘Have you considered switching to three at the back, perhaps utilising Rooker and Nightingale as attacking wing-backs supporting Rodway and Alex Booth up front? Or perhaps even a move to one striker and drop Rodway into the hole as a creative playmaker? Just something to think about, anyway.’
‘Aye, well,’ I shrugged. I didn’t need strategic advice from anyone, thank you very much. (Though I made a mental note to adopt pretty much everything Gillian had just suggested.)
‘Take Barrington12 with you,’ Gillian said as I opened the door. ‘Maintenance have discharged him; they couldn’t see a problem but reckon it may have been a clogged oil filter that caused him to keep saying… what he kept saying.’
I sighed – that was insult to injury. It was bad enough having to marshal a skeleton crew of a squad without having to deal with a walking, talking tin can as part of my coaching setup. I asked them for Sammy Lee and they sent me Barrington12. It just summed everything up.
‘HELLO, KEVIN KEEGAN,’ he said in his foghorn, mono-tone voice as I stepped into the corridor outside Gillian’s office. The robot staggering uncertainly towards me was the absolute bane of my life – a clattering, clanking, insufferable relic that had been ready for the knacker’s yard for decades. Now he looked up to me like a father, though he also looked down at me from his height of around eight feet. His limbs were gangly and thin, his legs little more than coils of wire around metal bars that looked like leftovers from a Meccano set. His bulky mid-section was like a household boiler and his head was an upturned metal bucket with an approximation of a face, two small blue dots for eyes and a thin, unmoving slit for his mouth.
‘Back so soon?’ I asked miserably.
‘YES, I AM BACK,’ he replied amiably. ‘I WAS SUFFERING FROM A CLOGGED OIL FILTER, A COMMON COMPLAINT ASSOCIATED WITH THIS BARRINGTON MODEL. THIS BLOCKAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED SO I WILL NOW FUNCTION AT NORMAL CAPACITY.’
‘No more of your filthy talk, then?’ I asked, eyebrows raised. In the week or so before he was finally shipped over to maintenance, Barrington12 had been acting peculiarly, ending every sentence, irrespective of the subject matter or the person to whom he was speaking, with the phrase ‘I’D LIKE TO ALSO REMIND YOU THAT I AM FREE OF ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION.’ It got rather wearying after a while but Gillian didn’t seem minded to approve the cost of a once-over from maintenance – not until we had that class of youngsters from the Compound school over for a sports day. I haven’t had to apologise so profusely on someone else’s behalf since I had dinner in that posh restaurant with Al Hansen and he ordered ‘a dry white wine’. I had to hurry after the waiter and say, ‘I’m so sorry about that – he means “wet”.’
‘ALL SUCH PHRASES HAVE NOW BEEN ERADICATED FROM MY VOCABULARY,’ Barrington12 reassured me.
‘Well, let’s hope so,’ I said haughtily. ‘Come on, let’s get down to Giuseppe’s. We’ve probably missed pizza now, but we should make it in time for ice cream.’
Gillian’s office door opened and she poked her head out.
‘Oh, good, you’re still here,’ she said. ‘I meant to say – the thrice-weekly pizza and ice cream trips have also been cut from the budget.’
PIZZA AND ICE CREAM
With the loud buzzing of Barrington12’s mechanised legs clattering along behind