It took me three of the four days to work out how Ray Sully was going to beat me.

I worked it out at two in the morning, lying on my manky carpet staring at the ceiling with the certified copy of Eliza Pargeter’s deed propped against the wall where I could see it, and when it landed it landed cold, the way the really obvious things always do once you finally see them.

The covenant didn’t protect the club. It protected the football. The land could only ever be used for football and recreation, yes, in perpetuity, cast iron, beautiful. But read it again, the way Sully’s expensive lawyers had read it, sat in Carbery’s chair with their coffee cup on a Victorian conveyance.

Should it ever cease to be so used...

Cease to be so used. And what happens to a football ground the moment a judge winds the football club up and padlocks the gates and the last player drifts off to sign for somebody else?

It ceases to be used for football.

That was Sully’s whole game. That was why he’d read the covenant and probably smiled and filed his bid anyway. He didn’t need to break Eliza Pargeter’s covenant.

He just needed to wait for the club to die properly, for the football to stop, and then his lawyers would stand up in front of a tribunal and argue the covenant was obsolete, spent, pointless, protecting a use that no longer existed and never would again, and they’d get it discharged, and twelve acres of priceless riverside land would come unlocked in his hand like a safe.

A dead club was the key. The club dying was the whole point. He wasn’t bidding against me. He was bidding against a corpse, and the corpse was on his side.

Which meant the deed, on its own, was useless. Walk in there waving it like I’d planned and Sully’s lawyers would nod along, oh yes, lovely covenant, shame the club it protects is deceased, motion to discharge, see you at the tribunal.

There was only one way to beat him. Only one.

I had to walk into that room and make sure the football never stopped.

I had to keep the club alive.

So I spent the fourth day doing the one thing the old me, the dreamer, the bottler, never once managed freely. I stopped planning the perfect speech I’d never give, and I went out and did the rough, frightening, real thing instead.

The supporters’ trust met in the back room of the Anchor under a dartboard with two darts still stuck in it from somebody’s lunchtime game and a faded photo of the 1974 promotion side curling at the corners. Twelve people.

That was all there was left of a thing that had once filled a coach to every away game in the country. Twelve tired, grieving, defeated faces round sticky tables with halves of bitter going warm in front of them, here, by every available bit of body language, to plan a wake.

"Oi," Maureen hissed in my ear. "They’ve heard enough bad news sat down. Give them some standing up."

"It’s wobbly, Maureen."

"Up, Samuel Mercer."

So I stood on a wobbly pub chair in the back room of the Anchor with eighteen-stone Maureen Tully gripping my left ankle like a lock forward at a lineout, and I clocked the knee, by the way, while I was up there. Wobbly chair. Maureen’s hand cutting the blood off to my foot. The knee held. The knee, in fact, was the steadiest thing in the room.

"Right," I said. Click of someone’s lighter at the back. Slosh of a half going down too fast. "Eliza Pargeter."

A bloke in the front row blinked. "Who?"

"Widow. 1923. Lost her husband in a war we don’t properly remember the name of any more. Before she died she gave the people of this town the field at Marsh Road, in writing, on a deed sat in a solicitor’s office down the road, for football and recreation, in perpetuity, for ever. Means the land was never the club’s, never has been. It’s the town’s. It’s yours."

A second blink. A man in a Tilbrook scarf going grey halfway down its length leaned forward over his pint, knuckles whitening round the glass.

"And the deed says," I went on, "the second football stops on it, it reverts. To the town. Not to anyone else. Which is why a developer like Ray Sully, with two hundred and forty flats penciled in on a drawing back at his office, needs us dead. He’s not bidding against me on Friday. He’s bidding against a corpse, and the corpse is on his side."

"Bloody hell," said somebody at the back, soft. Almost a prayer.

"That a fact?" said the lighter man, slowly. Not really a question.

"On paper. In Edwin Carbery’s safe. I’ve got a certified copy in my jacket pocket if anybody fancies a read."

A long, careful silence then. The kind where you can hear a fag end being put out in a beer mat. Hsss.

"They’ve been telling you the club’s dead," I said.

"They’ve been telling you to grieve, and go home, and let the nice man build his flats. Here’s the thing they’re banking on you never working out. The only way he wins is if the football stops. So we don’t stop the football. We turn up to that meeting Friday. All of us. Every single one. And we make them look us in the eye while they decide. They want it quiet. Paperwork in an empty room. Let’s not be quiet."

Nobody breathed.

Then a chair scraped, the way chairs only scrape when somebody’s about to say something they hadn’t quite planned on saying. Skrrk. A big man at the back stood up. Docker’s build gone soft round the middle, hands the size of dinner plates, eyes shining wet under the strip light.

"My old man’s ashes are on that pitch, son," he said, and his voice cracked clean in half on son.

"By the penalty spot. We did it ourselves with a spade, late one night in 1998, me and our Trevor, the day after the funeral, and the groundsman saw and looked the other way and walked off home. Nobody is building a Tesco on my dad."

A second chair scraped. The long-scarf man. "Mine’s still alive, mind. Eighty-three. Walks to home games with a stick. He’s bloody not having it either."

The woman in the third row stood up so fast her glass went over, splat across the sticky table, and she did not even look down.

"My grandson Daniel plays in the under-tens, Samuel. I’ve been bringing him every Sunday morning since he was five years old. He came home from school last Wednesday and cried. In the back of the car. Because he’d heard. I will be at your meeting on Friday and I will be sat at the front of it."

"Same," said the lighter man, putting out a second fag in the same battered mat. "I’ll close the cab firm for the afternoon."

"And me." A retired teacher in a thin cardigan I had not seen speak yet.

"Aye." A pipe-fitter in overalls at the next table, just nodding.

"All of us."

And the docker who hadn’t spoken yet, sat very still in the corner under the 1974 promotion photo, finally looked up and nodded once. Slow. Final. The nod that says you’ve got me too, son, you didn’t even need to ask.

Twelve people. By the time the landlord started flipping the stools up at half-eleven, scrape, scrape, scrape of legs on lino, twelve had become an army, and the army had a Friday afternoon clear, the postcode of a Premier Inn off the A13 written down on the back of a beer mat, and a plan.

The players I didn’t have to ask twice. I went down to the rec on the Wednesday afternoon, thud, thud, thud of someone hammering up the floodlight cable on its pole behind the changing-hut, and I sat on a low concrete wall between Lenny on one side and Sid on the other and I gave them the whole of it. The covenant. Sully’s bid. The cliff edge. The Friday meeting. The chair I was going to be stood on with eighteen-stone Maureen holding my ankle.

Sid said nothing for a long moment. Then he reached over with one massive arm and put a hand round my forearm and squeezed it once. That was Sid. That was the whole thing.

Lenny chewed his lip. "Friday, what time?"

"Two o’clock. Premier Inn off the A13."

"I finish on the scaff at twelve."

"You can make it?"

"I can make it. I’ll bring the lads."

"Lenny, you absolute beauty."

He almost smiled. Almost. "You’d best not bottle it, Mr Mercer."

Which, from Lenny Marsh, was more or less a love letter.