The spotty lad behind the counter at Ladbrokes, the same one in the same blue lanyard who’d called it easy money sixteen days ago, did not say easy money when he counted out six hundred and eighty quid into my still-trembling hand.

He counted it twice. He looked at me. He looked at the slip. He looked at me again, like the slip might bite him. The whole back of the bookies had gone very, very quiet.

"...You’re sure you don’t want to put any of it back on?"

"Not today, mate," I said, folding the wad into my inside pocket the way a man handles a newborn. "Today I’m just going to walk out of here like it’s a Tuesday."

It was not a Tuesday. It was the most expensive Wednesday afternoon of my entire life so far, and outside the door, leaning against the wall of the betting shop with his keys spinning round one finger, was the only person in the world I was going to share it with.

Raj had got there before me. He’d done his own little errand round the back, in the William Hill on the corner, where his cheeky tenner on Switzerland to win at six to one had come back as a clean seventy quid, and he was now holding the seven tens between two fingers like a winning ticket off the Antiques Roadshow.

"Sam," he said, and his voice was somewhere between a laugh and a sob. "Sam. Look at this. Look at it. This is real, actual, physical money. There is now sausage roll dust on it and I do not even care. I am going to frame these and put them over me mum’s fireplace."

"You won’t. You’ll spend it on a Nando’s."

"I might spend a corner of it on a Nando’s. The rest is going behind glass."

Then he looked properly at me, at the heavy bulge in my jacket, and his whole face went quiet in the way that Raj’s face only ever goes quiet when he’s about to ask a question he’s properly thought about. "And you?"

I didn’t answer.

I steered him by the elbow round the corner, away from the high street, into the loading bay behind the launderette where nobody was about.

Drip, went a gutter pipe. Caw, went a gull. And I reached into my jacket pocket and I peeled four crisp fifties off the top of my wad and I held them out to him.

He stared at them like they were on fire.

"What’s that, Sam?"

"That," I said, "is for backing me when nobody in the entire world would have."

"Sam, that’s two hundred quid."

"It is."

"That’s two hundred quid, Sam."

"You backed me, Raj. You stuck your own ten on it because I asked you to and you didn’t even know why. I’d give you more but you’d refuse it and we’d be stood here all day. Take the two hundred. Put it under your mattress. Or buy your mum something nice. Or do the Nando’s, I’m not fussed. But it’s yours, it’s not a loan, and we are not going to be arguing about it."

He didn’t take it. He just stood there in that grimy little loading bay with the gull cawing overhead and a tear, an actual proper tear, the cheeky get, running down beside his nose. "Sam. I drive a minicab. My fares for a whole week don’t come to that much."

"I know."

"My ma has not had a proper holiday since 1996."

"Send her one, then."

His chin went.

He took the four fifties off me with a hand that, I noticed, was shaking slightly, and he folded them away into his own inside pocket, and then he stood there for a long second looking at the ground, his keys hanging quiet for once in the whole time I’d known him.

"Listen, you absolute lunatic," he said, his voice gone rough.

"Whatever it is going on with you, I don’t know and I don’t think I want to. But I’m in. Whatever you need a driver for, anything, you ring me first. Even if it’s three in the morning. Even if it’s to Aberdeen."

"Even if it’s to Aberdeen?"

"Even if it’s to Aberdeen, you bell-end. Don’t ruin the moment."

And that, right there, was Raj.

The next three weeks of that World Cup turned into something halfway between a job and a magic trick. Not a wild one. Not the kind they tell stories about in pubs ten years later. The opposite of that, actually.

I was a careful man. I was the most boring man in any betting shop you cared to walk into. The kind of bloke who puts a fiver on here, a tenner there, walks home with the slip in his pocket, comes back two days later and quietly collects.

I split my action between Ladbrokes and William Hill and the Coral by the station and a knackered little independent called Smiley’s off the high street with a fly strip in the window and a parrot in a cage that looked older than my mum, and I deliberately lost two or three small ones on purpose, daft ones, nothings, because a man who only ever wins is a man who eventually gets phoned by an office in Gibraltar, and I had a great many bigger fish to fry than to get blacklisted by every bookies in Essex inside a fortnight.

Ain’t nobody got time for that (In an American accent).

But underneath the boring man’s coat, I knew everything about this World Cup.

I knew the Germans were going to put four past poor Capello’s England. I knew Lampard would have one of the cleanest goals you ever saw chalked off by a Uruguayan linesman who would not look at the replay for the rest of his living natural life.

I knew Spain were going to grind their way to the trophy looking ugly and gorgeous all at once. I knew Argentina were about to get demolished four-nil by Germany in a quarter-final that would put Maradona on a touchline doing his sad-walrus face for the world’s cameras.

So I bet boring small money on quiet correct results. I racked up boring small wins. And every couple of days I did the same round of the same four bookies in the same order with the same little nod for the same till people, and the wad in my jacket pocket grew, and grew, and grew.

The Germany match was a joy, though.

Not for England, obviously.

For England, the twenty-seventh of June 2010 was the worst Sunday afternoon any of us had had since Maradona’s hand, and the Crown and Anchor looked like a wake by half-time, with grown men sat in their replica shirts holding their own faces in their hands going "no, no, please, no."

I sat in the corner booth with Raj and the better part of a thousand quid of bookies’ slips already cashed in my jacket and I tried very hard not to look like a man who’d watched the whole thing happen once before.

Three-one, the Germans were already, when Lampard hit it.

You know the goal.

The entire country knows the goal. I knew it before he hit it because I’d watched it on YouTube about four hundred times in another life, sat in a tracksuit in a portacabin in Bromley pretending I was happy, but I leaned forward all the same when he picked the ball up, because some things you just can’t help.

The shot.

The dip.

The bar.

The bounce a clear foot and a half behind the line. And the Uruguayan linesman’s flag staying down with the calm professional authority of a man who’d just personally killed a nation.