You can’t hear it in the car park. You poke your head around the door to the club shop, but nothing. Through the sliding glass doors and into reception, you can’t hear it. Going up the stairs and into the bowels of the stadium, slowly a dull thudding starts to play on the eardrums. Along the corridor, it’s now clearly in earshot. Past the gym and along to the manager’s office, a repeating bang-bang-bang, of forehead on wood, is clearly audible. Through the door and the manager is sitting there, Premier League scout opposite, looking exasperated.
“I don’t understand”, the manager says. “He’s a kid who’s hardly ever played for the national team, who’s never played in the Champions League, who doesn’t have any medals, who’s never moved clubs so has no sell-on clauses and who hasn’t played 100 club games in his career yet. And he’s worth MORE than £10m?” “But boss”, the scout says, exhaling with the air of a man about to attempt to explain the finer points of physics to an intellectually reticent monkey – this isn’t going to make sense, but it’s fundamental truth – “he’s English.”
