The Choice, page 9
I knew Colm would move heaven and earth for me – for any of us on that team. He had done it so many times over the years. And I knew by him, by his apologies, that there was nothing more he could do now. He gave me a pat on the shoulder as he went to open the door and show me out. ‘There’ll be other opportunities, don’t worry,’ he reassured me.
‘Ring him again,’ I said.
‘What?’ Colm was a bit taken aback.
‘You could ring Gerry again,’ I said. ‘Explain what happened. Tell him that I was picked originally, and that I picked up a knock but that I’m fit now, and ask him if I can go as well as the lads.’
Colm thought about it for a moment, and then shook his head. ‘They’re very strict on the numbers,’ he said. ‘It’s three per club max.’
‘Can you please just ring him and explain and double-check?’ I persisted. ‘Please.’
‘Okay, okay,’ he said finally. ‘But please don’t get your hopes up. I really don’t think this is going to work.’
He took his phone out of his pocket and started dialling as he went into another room. I could hear him talking, so at least Gerry had answered the phone, but the words were muffled. I couldn’t make out what Colm was saying or what kind of reaction his suggestion was getting.
I thought about opening the door into the front room to see what match was on the TV, but I distracted myself instead with the painting hanging in the hall, trying to feel the power of the sea as it crashed against the cliff face. Colm was still on the phone. It seemed to go on for ages.
‘Okay, I’ll tell him that, Gerry,’ he said as he came back out to me. ‘Thanks very much for taking the call. I’ll chat to you soon. Go on. Bye. Bye. Bye.’
He hung up the phone but it was hard to tell whether it had gone well or not. The look on his face wasn’t happy or sad. ‘Gerry Mangan said to make sure your boots are spotless in the morning,’ he said, breaking into a smile. ‘You’re in.’
13
The next morning I cut a long strip from the roll of bandage and wrapped it around and around my leg until it was tight. I taped it up at the edges to hold it in place and looked at myself in the mirror. There was no hiding the fact that my leg was strapped up, but other than that, I was ready to go.
Mam was in her room. It was her Sunday to work and she was getting ready to leave. She yawned as she packed her bag, rubbing at the dark circles under her eyes. I heard her get up sometimes in the middle of the night and go into the kitchen. She’d close the door behind her so as not to disturb any of the rest of us, but I could still hear the kettle boiling and the click of the switch to announce that it was done. I wondered if she had slept at all last night or if she had been up all night worrying.
Dad was gone since before I had even woken up. ‘They’re bringing everyone in,’ he explained to me when I came back home the night before. ‘We’ve to be off site by the end of the day on Friday, so it’s all hands on deck between now and then.’
I had raced back from Colm’s, completely forgetting about John for a moment, excited to tell them the good news that I was going to the trials after all. Dad could see how disappointed I was that he wouldn’t be able to come with me – that neither of them would. One of them always came to my matches, if not both of them. It would be strange not to have them there with me.
‘Good luck today,’ Mam said, kissing me on the forehead. ‘I know you won’t need luck, but it couldn’t hurt to have a bit anyway.’ She wrapped me up in a big hug and I could smell the perfume on her blouse. ‘You’re a great kid, Philip,’ she said, squeezing me tight. ‘We’re going to be okay, you hear me? We’ll pull through this.’ I thought of John and wondered where he was.
Kev and his mam, Trish, were waiting outside for me, and I threw my bag into the boot and jumped into the back seat of their green Ford Fiesta.
‘You both sure you’ve got everything?’ Trish asked before she started the car. The clock on the dashboard said 10.05 so we had plenty of time, but we didn’t want to realise we’d forgotten something and then have to turn back in a panic. I got out to check my bag again, even though I’d already double-checked it before I left the flat, and Kev did the same. It was better to be safe than sorry.
There wasn’t much traffic at that hour of the morning, so the drive to St Anne’s Park in Raheny took about twenty minutes. Trish found a parking spot and the three of us walked through the park to the pitches where the trials were being held. Taz and his dad were already there by the time we arrived, and Jimmy and his dad and his brother were a minute or two behind us.
‘I thought you weren’t coming?’ Taz said. He and Jimmy were both a bit surprised to see me.
‘And they didn’t mind Colm sending four of us?’ Jimmy asked when I explained what had happened. He seemed worried that we had already done something wrong, and that one of us was going to be sent home before the trials even started.
‘No, Colm said it’s all grand,’ I reassured him. ‘He was on the phone to Gerry Mangan for ages last night, and Gerry said there had been a few other injuries, so they must have a bit of extra space.’
I had never met Gerry Mangan before but I knew what he looked like, and I could see him in the distance. Three other coaches were with him, all dressed in Dublin tracksuits, two setting out cones in a series of precise patterns while the other followed behind them with a bag full of footballs.
As it got closer to eleven o’clock, more and more players arrived and started to cluster together in groups of two and three, looking for the familiar faces of their teammates, while we all waited for things to get started. If this had been a normal training session up in Poppintree Park, someone would have taken a ball out of the bag and started a kickabout, but nobody wanted to move a muscle until we were told to do otherwise by the coaches.
‘Don’t worry about being a team player today – are you listening to me? These aren’t your teammates yet.’
The voice caught my attention straight away and I turned to see who it was. Near us were two blond brothers, standing by themselves. I recognised them both immediately: Mick Devanney, wearing his Dublin tracksuit, doing all the talking, Andrew listening carefully as he stretched and warmed up beside him.
‘The ones who stand out are the ones who are going to get picked, I’m telling you,’ Mick said as I kept listening. He was slapping his hands together at the end of every sentence, making his own sound effects. ‘The first chance you get to make a big hit, you make it. If your team gets a free, you take it. And if you get a chance to shoot, don’t think about anything except putting it straight over the bar, okay? Nobody here is going to remember the player who made the pass. They’re all looking to see who kicked the score.’
If Colm had been there, I was pretty sure he’d be telling us the exact opposite of that, which made me think that it was terrible advice. Part of me wished John had come with me too; he wouldn’t have been much use when it came to advice on football, but I’d love to have heard the slagging he’d have given the two boys for being such posers. I turned to get Kev so he could listen for himself, but before I could do that, Gerry Mangan called everyone together.
He introduced himself and the three other coaches standing with him. Then he explained that the day would be divided up with two sessions in the morning, a short break for lunch and another session in the afternoon. He looked down at the sheet of paper on the clipboard in his hand. ‘There are forty-three of you here today,’ he said. ‘We picked twenty players from last week’s trial, and we’ll be picking another twenty today, and that will be our forty players for this year’s academy.
‘And I should say,’ he continued, ‘it’s wonderful to see some of our former academy graduates back here today as well: Mick, very best of luck with the seniors this summer.’
‘Thanks, Gerry,’ Mick Devanney said, turning to wave to everyone as if he was the President of Ireland.
‘Okay so,’ Gerry said, ‘before we get going properly, if I call your name, come up to the front here, please.’ He started to read from his list. ‘David Creedon, Eamonn Power, Pádraig Byrne, and …’
As each name was called, a player moved out of the group and walked over to where the coaches were standing. Gerry ran his pen down the side of the page as he read and then flipped over to the second page, but he didn’t call anybody else. He flipped back again to the first page and then stopped, looking puzzled.
‘And …’ he said again, pausing. ‘Sorry now, I can’t find the name. There’s a lad here from Ballymun Kickhams that I was speaking to Colm Doyle about last night?’
I put my hand up as if I knew the answer to a question in school and stepped forward.
‘Very good, thanks,’ Gerry said. ‘Sorry, you’ll have to give me your name again. I must have lost the piece of paper where I wrote it down.’
‘Philly McMahon.’
I spoke without thinking and I nearly surprised myself with the answer. I never used Dad’s surname – I had always been Philly Caffrey, for everything – but something subconsciously made me say McMahon. I didn’t want anyone to hear the name Caffrey and somehow make the connection that I was John’s brother.
Gerry looked even more confused as he finally found my name on the list. ‘McMahon? I have you down here as Philly Caffrey.’
‘Yeah, that’s me,’ I said confidently. Backtracking now would only make things more awkward. ‘That’s my name on my birth cert, but I go by Philly McMahon normally if you want to change it.’
I waited while Gerry scribbled the correction onto his page.
‘Right then, Philly,’ he said. He spotted the bandage as he looked me up and down. ‘You’re fit, are you?’
‘Yeah, I’m grand, it wasn’t serious,’ I said, turning away slightly so that the strapping wasn’t so obvious.
‘That’s good. You won’t mind doing a quick fitness test so.’
I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. Colm hadn’t mentioned anything about a fitness test.
‘You’re not the only one, don’t worry,’ he said, seeing the stunned look on my face. He turned to speak to me and the three others together as a group. ‘I’m sure the four of you know now why you’ve been picked out. We appreciate you letting us know that you’re carrying knocks, but if you’re not fit, there’s not much point in you being here today, unfortunately.’
He pointed to the far touchline. ‘We don’t have time to be messing around,’ he said. ‘You’re going to line up over there and do one sprint, the full width of the pitch. I’ll be over there’ – he pointed to the other touchline – ‘with the watch. If you do it in under fifteen seconds, you can stay. If you’re slower than that, you’re going home. Does everyone understand?’
‘Yes,’ the four of us said together. We sounded like parrots.
‘Wait for my whistle,’ Gerry said. ‘Get set on my first one, go on my second one. Good luck.’
We sometimes did sprints in training, and while I wasn’t the fastest, I was always in the first six or seven. Fifteen seconds for the full width of the pitch was no warm-up jog, though. It was a flat-out sprint.
The four of us walked together over to our start line. We were racing the clock, not each other, but nobody felt like talking. Nerves, probably. My bandage was a giveaway but none of the others had anything obvious wrong with them.
Everyone else had fanned out in a line in front of the goal to watch us, and I could see Kev and Taz and Jimmy at the far end, closest to the finish line. I stood on the outside of the group when we got down to the start. Not that it really mattered, but I wanted to be able to keep an eye on the others without having to turn my head from side to side.
I quickly stretched my leg out again while we waited for Gerry to blow his whistle. I had been stretching and warming up since I’d got out of bed, and I was confident I could get through the day without any problems. But I didn’t know what it was like going at full tilt in a sprint yet, and that unknown needled away at the back of my mind.
Gerry blew his first whistle and the four us crouched over the start line, the tips of our boots in a row, brushing up against the white of the pitch marking. When he blew his whistle again, I took off as hard as I could. There was no point in worrying about my leg any more. If something happened, or if it started to hurt, there’d be plenty of time to worry about it then.
The four of us were practically in a straight line, with nothing to choose between us. I was going as fast as I could but I had no idea if it was fast enough. We were halfway there. I expected cheering, that everyone watching would be willing us on, but there was near silence except for the sound of our boots chewing up the ground and the four of us trying to fill our lungs to keep going.
‘Go on, Philly, push it.’ Kev roared some encouragement.
I could see Gerry, one eye on us and one eye on the watch, ready to stop it as we crossed the line. We were nearly there. Just a few more strides. If I didn’t make it now, it was over.
I hit the line and with my final stride I dipped like the sprinters do on the telly. I dipped so much that I nearly lost my balance and I started to stumble. I looked across the line – I was first, and the others were just behind me. There were only two of them, though, and when I looked back out into the middle of the field, the third – Eamonn, I think – was sitting down, holding his ankle.
‘Well done, lads,’ I said to the others in between breaths. Gerry had gone off to one side and was deep in conversation with the other coaches, so we still didn’t know if the three of us were fast enough, or if any of us were.
‘Pádraig, David,’ he said as he walked back over to us. ‘I’m very sorry, lads. You were just outside the time. We’ll get you back down the next time and hopefully you’ll be fully fit. Philly …’
He held the stopwatch out so I could read the time for myself: 14.81 seconds.
‘Go get some water and catch your breath,’ he said. ‘We’ll be starting in five minutes.’
14
By the time it was all over a few hours later, I wasn’t sure if I had done enough to get through.
For the first two sessions before lunch, we were split up by position, and each of the coaches took one group: goalkeepers, defenders, midfielders and forwards. It was warm, even though there wasn’t an inch in the clouds for the sun to shine through, and I certainly wasn’t going to be the one to ask if we were allowed a break between drills. By the time we finished our first set of one-on-one work, my jersey was starting to change colour as the sweat seeped through in a ring below my neck. My leg felt fine, thankfully, because it was clear that this was going to be survival of the fittest.
When we switched to some two-on-two exercises, I was paired up with Jimmy. We were told to stay inside a small square, up against two other lads, and the aim was to keep possession for as long as possible; if we lost it, we had to try and get it back. Of all the pairs, Jimmy and I were the best at that drill. Even when we started without the ball, we won it back quickly and kept it until Conor, the coach who was working with us, called stop.
I watched Conor when the other pairs were working. He was taking a lot of notes, writing so frantically that I wondered how he could be doing that and watching what was happening at the same time. Every so often, he’d stop the drill and make us freeze on the spot in a specific position, and he’d pick out one player to ask why they had just made a certain choice. He never agreed or disagreed with the explanation – he just listened and then wrote more notes – but I thought about what Colm had told us over and over again: that playing well was mainly about making the right decision at the right time.
After lunch, the coaches split us into two bigger groups and set up two pitches for us to play 10-a-side matches. They put me and Jimmy on the same team again – maybe that was one of the things Conor had written in his notes – and when the two teams lined up, Andrew Devanney jogged down towards us. I expected that I’d be the one marking him, as usual, but he stayed out in the half-forward line and Jimmy picked him up instead.
Those heavy grey clouds gradually got darker and darker and then, in an instant, burst into a summer downpour just before the ball was thrown in. I went out to Jimmy and told him about the advice that Mick had given Andrew that morning.
‘He’s going to be a glory hunter today,’ I said, trying to wipe my gloves dry on the front of my jersey. ‘Don’t worry about leaving space if you have to push up a bit to close him down. He’s never going to pass it, and if he does, I’ll be ready to cover in behind you.’
Andrew had been strutting around all morning as if he owned the place. He kept calling the coaches by their first names, and at one point, I’m pretty sure I heard him telling them there was a better way to set up one of the drills. Mick was at it too, standing over the coaches’ shoulders, yapping away in their ears the whole time. I was getting irritated just watching the two of them and how they were behaving. They clearly thought they were better than the rest of us. If I couldn’t be the one to mark Andrew out of the game, I wanted Jimmy to do it – and he did.
I played well too. The lad that I was marking was from Naomh Mearnóg out in Portmarnock, a good footballer, the kind of forward who would be slippery enough even on a dry day, and he got away from me twice for two good scores. I did everything right, pushed him well wide both times, thinking I’d done more than enough, and twice he managed to squeeze the ball over from impossible angles.
I was still thinking about his scores, replaying them in my mind, as we shook hands and walked off the pitch afterwards. Was that really what it was going to come down to? That, by the luck of the draw, I ended up marking the best forward on the pitch, and even though I’d kept him quiet for most of the game, he’d kicked two ridiculous points off me, and that was what the coaches would have noticed? Would that be the difference between me getting a place and not getting one?
‘Well done, everyone,’ Gerry Mangan said as we all gathered into a group at the end.
