young one, in his thirties, and capable of doing real young-man harm—was trying to claw past his own players to land a blow to Danny’s face, and the whole thing looked for all the world like it was happening in a dream, or on television.
The referee, a birdlike little man in a blousy, oversized black shirt with wide white collars, raced through the throng and stood before Danny—a full head taller—holding a red card‡ as high as he could, as if he were a child reaching for the top of the refrigerator. He rose to his tiptoes for a moment and, on landing back upon his heels, pointed to the changing room of the Auld Moors with a theatrical flourish—and Danny put his head down and started that long, lonely trudge. One more Dire Vale United player ran at him and landed an awkward slap to his beard, but that was it. Everyone seemed to back away after that and let the big man walk off in his quiet shame. As Danny passed the dugouts, a Dire Vale player, almost in tears, called him a “wanker,” and Danny heard another one mumble something worse, much worse, but that one’s tone was more despondent than pissed off. British Forlorn. Danny kept his head down, as you do.
Danny showered, got dressed, and was gone from the ground by halftime. It wasn’t the right thing to do—you’re supposed to wait around for your mates—but he couldn’t think of any other way to handle it. He lived near enough to walk home. The streets were empty; he could hear the stadium breathe—its oohs, its aahs, its screams and coughs of exaltation and dread. He could almost track the score by what he heard. Almost.
When he got to his destination, he got up on his bicycle, the only vehicle he owned or needed, and rode around for an hour, maybe more, reliving his mistake, trying to right his wrong on the streets of East Southwich, before finally returning home to his sad little flat, home to wonder what on earth might happen next.
* ON THE MATTER OF THE COCKEREL: East Southwich Albion’s logo was a one-legged cockerel perched upon a ball and wearing a crown. The bird symbolized the Legend of the One-Legged Cockerel King who ruled the Greater East Southwich area during the Dark Ages. Legend had it that Edward XXVIII, of the Southwich line, had lost his leg while leading a swarm of cockerels into battle against a unified force of Gauls and Yorkshiremen who coveted East Southwich for its abundance of poultry. As the story goes, the enemy stood back and just let the swarm of fowl through, after which they cut off Edward’s left leg, took the cockerels, and that was pretty much it. He was allowed to retain his throne because Yorkshiremen are generally nice people and Gauls have a complicated sense of humor, or the other way around.
† A BRIEF HISTORY OF WWFC: Wolves United and the Wolfingstonesgreenupon-Heath Wanderers merged in 1973 after United slipped into administration following a poorly funded and ill-conceived world tour during which they produced seven wins, against thirty-four defeats and eleven draws and four confirmed player deaths in forty countries over sixty days. When they returned, bedraggled and traumatized, for a preseason friendly in Wolfingstonesgreen, they learned that the Wanderers had lost three-quarters of their squad to a traveling cult/circus that had absconded to the Isle of Wight. The merger initially seemed not only logical but amicable, but it hit a snag when the new club’s combined management could not determine whether to adopt United’s colors of red and white or the Wanderers’ white and red. In any event, United retroactively changed its colors to claret and sky blue, while the Wanderers posthumously reverted to their founding strip of green and white hoops. The new club, Wolves & Wolves, wore a halved jersey striped on one side in green and white and on the other in maroon and blue, occasioning Parliament to hastily pass an emergency act requiring W&W to play in all white for matches televised in color in the name of public safety. One snowy night in 1989, the team loaded its effects onto a boat off the Dennispool docks and traveled to America, where they became the Minnesota Timberwolves of the National Basketball Association.
‡ The sprite of a man was a pioneer of sorts. Having witnessed and taken solace in the introduction of yellow and red cards at the World Cup in 1970, he had been an early and keen advocate of their adoption by English football. As the FA had been reluctant to embrace the disciplinary revolution within the game, he had taken matters into his own hands and fashioned yellow and red cards of his own for moments just like this one. Sending off, a rarity in those days, had been a purely verbal business before 1970 (hence the introduction of cards for the World Cup to surpass the language barrier), and the League would not formally adopt the practice until the subsequent fall, but the gathering at the Auld Moors knew that Danny had to go and intuited that the man’s red card was some new-fangled way of saying so. And so, as a footnote to a footnote, Danny Hooper received the first red card in English football history, and the last known to have been of the homemade variety.
Danny stayed in his flat all day Sunday. The phone rang four or five times. There were a few knocks at the door. A couple of the more aggressive local journos hollered at him. “Danny Hooper! I know you’re in there. Just like a word, Danny! Someone has to tell your story, might’s well be me! I’ll do right by you, Danny!” But Danny managed to get through the day without speaking with anyone, not even his dad.
At 11:30 P.M., and with the lingerers no longer lingering at his door, he put on a drill top, gray sweatpants, and trainers and went out for another bike ride. He knew where to go so that no one would see him, and when he returned over an hour later, he took a short shower and went to bed hungry, nervous, embarrassed, and as tired as he could remember ever feeling.
On Monday, Danny made the short bicycle ride from his flat to the Auld Moors for his morning training session. He wasn’t looking forward to it, and he timed his arrival to be as close to the beginning of the workout as possible to reduce non-footballing human interaction. To make matters worse, Dire Vale United had beaten the shorthanded Royals 2–1 on a goal in the waning minutes, something that almost certainly wouldn’t have happened had the home side remained at full strength for the entire match. East Southwich Albion was now out of the FA Cup, and he was well aware that he was being singled out as the villain.
He saw the newspaper headline on his ride in: “Hooper Out of His Gourd, Royals Out of the Cup.” The accompanying photograph, of Danny surrounded by aggrieved Dire Vale men, made Danny look like King Kong swatting at helicopters atop the Empire State Building, made him look like a criminally bonkers, maniacal brute. He shook his big head and mumbled something to himself even he didn’t understand.
He felt he owed his teammates an apology, and they would get one today—first by example: no one would train harder this Monday morning, no one would show more dedication to the club and to the lads. And then afterward, as the men dressed to get on with their non–FA Cup lives, he would speak up—he dreaded having to do it, but he knew it was the right thing, the only thing—and say that while he knew he’d been in the wrong, and he would do anything in his power to make it up to the boys, what he had done he had done out of passion for his teammates, for the club’s supporters, and for his deep desire to win something, anything. He was sorry, he would say, but the fact of the matter was he’d been dead determined not to let that little prick make his way down the left wing of East Southwich Albion’s pitch ever again, and in the event, big, strong Danny Hooper had, indeed, not let the poor kid down that wing. Sorry. I’m done talking now. All right?
The team would nod and murmur. Someone would say something meaningless: “Unlucky,” which would make no sense, but footballers say it all the time, or “Next time,” which made some sense anyway...; others, Danny knew, would remain silent, might never forgive him.
But when Danny arrived outside the ground, Aldy Taylor was waiting for him. Not what Danny wanted to see. Before Taylor could address him, Danny offered a contrite, “Hullo, Aldy.”
“That’s some black eye, Danny boy.”
“What are you doing out here, boss?”