Back in 1987, James Finch had bought Camden Football Club with a notable chunk of his first billion pounds and has had, frankly, fuck all to show for his efforts since. So, on a Sunday morning last November, he’d called the team in—from Anthony Moss to the newest nutrition intern—after a dismal showing away at Everton, after they’d already gotten kicked out of England’s interleague tournament. Over conference room tea service, he’d announced, grandly, that even a patient man must have his limits. He’d said this with Willem, former star of Atlético de Madrid and Manchester United and current steward of theDutch national outfit, standing indomitable at his side, with Camden’s former manager conspicuously absent. Willem’s job, Finch had said, was to make sure the coming year went better than the previous one. Since then, the changing room has changed very much and the scoresheets have changed not a whit.
Oliver has no doubt Willem is a genius on the pitch. There’s that one goal from 2006 against Real Madrid, the one where he controlled a loose cross and flicked the ball past the goalkeeper without it ever touching the ground, and it loops in Oliver’s mind whenever he’s on the treadmill. But his arrival, his first big shot at the Premier League, was an open warning to every person at Camden Crossing:Everything is about to be remade. If you don’t get with the program soon, there will be no program for you to get with.
There’s not a great history of championship runs beginning with ultimatums. So it’s obvious what Willem was hired to do, with his business degree and his chilly Dutchness: fuck the season in front of them, build something for himself and for Finch next year with a clean slate. He’s given to long silences during tactical meetings and enigmatic looks at training. Sebastian was given a dream promotion; Oliver got himself expelled from the pitch with a two-match ban in December that de Boer didn’t even bother to appeal. It doesn’t seem to bother Willem when they lose or please him when they win. But Oliver can’t afford to be patient or to be injured in the second half of a season when it feels like a lot more than their rank in the Premier League is on the line. Camden is in his blood and his heart and his ruined hamstring. Where is it to Willem, save for his pay stubs?
Oliver wants to fight him on it, to storm into the office, high on his newly volatile reputation, and tell Willem exactly what he thinks: that he can get in the long line of people who think they can do better. He knows he won’t. The only thing in this worldhe loves too much to ever risk losing is the patch of grass a few streets over, so he’ll go to that meeting and he’ll listen, he’ll smile, he’ll nod, and then he’ll go to physiotherapy.
• • •
Monday arrives with a sense of reassuring normalcy, a frosty gray London dawn alight with the bustle of everyone returning to work for the first real day of the new year. Camden is alive when the low tide of tourist season rolls out, friendlier and less frantic, all Christmas decorations without anyone crowding around the tree. Oliver loves it best this way, when the cold air is warmed by the smell of Indo-Chinese takeaway mingling with chip oil and lock water, somehow impossibly pleasantly.
He stays sacked out until he wakes without an alarm. Off days are the only times that belong to him alone; sometimes he sees Maggie or his mother or his teammates, but just as often he passes them happily alone. They’re even better in the winter, when he can tuck away into long coats and knit hats and plaid scarves, hiding his form and his features just enough to ride the tube unnoticed and go for a bite or to the cinema without anyone tweeting about it. Well, withouttoomany people tweeting about it.
Today, dread sets in anyway, from something bigger than the traffic. It sticks in his ribs as he parks and fetches the crutches, makes his way into the building. It sits thick in his stomach down the main hall toward Willem’s office. No one else is around the day after a win to distract him or waylay his progress, so he limps up the stairs to the manager’s office and knocks with his crutch on the heavy oak door that’s sitting slightly ajar.
Despite the turmoil he’s wrought, Oliver can’t deny that Willem looks perfectly at home reading from his tactical notebook at the old writing desk, a Dutch philosopher king in luxury athleisure. He’s strong and well-built even as he gets closer to fiftythan forty, and frankly still rather handsome. Willem sets down his notebook and steeples his fingers, regarding Oliver intently for an arduous, silent moment.
“Well, how are we?” Willem asks, an eternity later.
“It’s uncomfortable, but I trust Anna when she says that it won’t be too long a recovery,” Oliver says, quickly and with what he hopes is assuredness: a media soundbite. Willem dips his head once and waits for a beat, expecting more. He tries again when Oliver doesn’t go on speaking.
“And how do youfeel?” he probes. “A new year is the time to take stock of things. To be introspective. So that one doesn’t make the same mistakes.”
Oliver freezes. Willem saidonebut he meantyou,Oliver is certain. There are going to be consequences for the last month, for his injury and his red card. The last thing he wants is to be introspective—to be vulnerable, in reach of the past. He might as well be nine years old, haunting the cancer ward with his dying father, or seventeen, standing in the first team changing room alone, or newly eighteen, explaining to Maggie why he’s breaking up with her.
“I won’t make the same mistakes this year,” he murmurs.
“Oh, I’m sure you won’t,” Willem replies. “You’ve never struck me as careless, Harris, recent events aside.” Oliver’s leg twinges in acknowledgment. “Listen: I know my presence here is unsettling. I’ve seen how it’s affected the dressing room. And I’ve been in your boots. I’ve been in Anthony’s and now I’m in the manager’s chair. There’s much to do and precious little time to do it, especially without you…but we do have an opportunity to finish well in the Prem, and perhaps it’s a silver lining that we have nothing else to focus on. So let’s focus, shall we?”
“I am,” Oliver mutters, still stung byrecent eventsand all the different things Willem might have meant by saying it.
“I’m certain you are, and I’m glad to hear it,” Willem saysevenly. “Now, before you go—I’m going to take advantage of the transfer window and recall one of our players on loan while you’re recuperating. He came up through the academy, younger than you are, and he’s been wasted ever since. Excellent potential, deployed ineffectively. You can show him the ropes, help him adjust, get in fighting shape. Let’s give him a good debut and find a place for him to be of use, instead of abroad and on our pay sheets.”
The other shoe drops, studs up, right into the tender flesh of Oliver’s wounded leg. He won’t even get the chance to avoid repeating last year’s mistakes, because Willem wants to make use of Oliver just enough to sell tickets and prepare someone to supplant him. The whole meeting has been a pretense for Oliver learning this, without Willem ever having to say it aloud.
“You want me to…train my replacement?” Oliver asks, working to keep his voice level. He’s a footballer, he can play dumb. The manager will have to spell it out for him. “I know I’ve been off my game, out of line, sir, but I’ll fix it. There’s no need to threaten me.”
Willem appears surprised at this wording but furrows his brow thoughtfully.
“In a sense, he’ll be your replacement, that’s true, in the short term,” he responds. “But more than that, I want you to have a hand in his career here, and I want you to have a partner in the midfield. You’re the best example of promotion from within that this club’s ever had. Your trajectory is seen as more a novelty than a priority. That’s a colossal waste. There’s far too much talent languishing in the academy and across the sea on loan, particularly when results are wanting at home. I’d like to set a new precedent. None of this is a threat, Harris.”
That’s absolute shit,Oliver thinks savagely. He can’t be buttered up. If Willem wants a new midfielder, he should train one himself, or actually use one of the ones he has. He’s not everbeen in any of their boots, he won a goddamned Ballon d’Or.Oliver, meanwhile, has been injured less than twenty-four hours and is already relegated to a babysitter, when he should really only be thinking about returning to the kind of form he knows is still somewhere inside him. There’s not a chance in hell Willem is seriously trying to win the Prem this year. They’re barely clinging to sixth place and even that feels like luck. He’ll keep Oliver around just until he’s shaped a new starting eleven in his own image, and then he’ll be on the chopping block too.
“Right,” Oliver mutters, fight gone out of him like a deflating balloon, as he picks at the fraying maroon thread at the edge of his chair. “If that’s what you want.”
“It is,” Willem says, almost gently, acting as though the atmosphere in the room hasn’t changed at all. “This should be fruitful for both of you.”
“Hutchinson, is it?” Oliver asks, already hating the idea of him.
“Oh, no,” Willem replies. “Davies-Villanueva. Poor boy has been bouncing around, at Valencia, then Getafe, then Valencia again. He’s a born playmaker, but they keep trying to make him play defensively, do the holding. It’s not done him any favors—he’s been all right in Spain, but it’s time to bring him home and see if he can play for Camden, finally put some shots on goal. He certainly wants to try.”
The name rings a bell—he remembers a skinny teen at academy events, years ago, with a wisp of an accent. He can picture Davies-Villanueva’s face. He’s got to be just aging out of the under-23s now, floating between loan spells until he can get himself a proper contract.
Maybe he will, by taking it from Oliver.
Tuesday, January 3, 2017: Camden at Bournemouth
Matchday 20
