The Club. Simon Akam

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СКАЧАТЬ footballers at this level occupy two positions simultaneously. Down in the fourth tier of the English game they are – in parallel – in the gutter and among the stars. Given that the aspiration of so many boys is to play professional football even these men, at the bottom of the professional game, are hugely highly selected. It is widely agreed that the increase of foreign players in the Premier League, where less than a third are now English, has driven better domestic players down the pyramid. Yet League Two players have also fallen short of the great pools of money and fame.

      Between the gutter and stars then, and all the time in Luton.

      Wall is the other man of the hour. If Walker’s day is about arrival Wall’s speaks of redemption. Moments after he comes on, he finds himself unmarked at the edge of the area. He curls the ball into the bottom corner of the net. The score is 2-1; Luton take victory from the jaws of draw, three points rather than one.

      Their shaky start to the season, winning only four in 10 league games, seems to be fading. But for Wall the result is personal too. He was recently sent off in a reserve fixture. He has a temper; he does not seem a young man at peace with the world, unlike the mellow Walker. He keeps his hair aggressively oiled back over his scalp. But now Wall has scored. He is redeemed, if only temporarily; a goal is a goal but it is also only a goal. There is always another game.

      After the match Wall stands by the touchlines.

      “I was happy to get on the end of it and put it in, and that’s what I’m there to do, and that’s what hopefully I can show the gaffer I can do that week in, week out,” he says. “I’ve had some bad press recently. I’ve been working even harder. I always work at 100% but I’ve been given even more time on the training pitch and luckily today it paid off.”

      Like many of these young men, their educational prospects grievously curtailed by adherence to the god football, Wall is not highly articulate. A local reporter pushes at the salvation narrative – “has that helped you and turned you around?” he asks. Wall seems unconvinced: “As I say, I work at 100% all the time. Maybe a kick up the backside just made me give an extra 10% and that 10% will get us more goals, and make me a better player. So it’s all good in the end.”

      It is easy to be mock the logical impossibility of a cumulative 120%. Yet, as with the stadium here, I wonder if the confusion indicates a greater truth. There is something real at stake here; the question of what is the most that can be given. What is the feasible maximum output of players, muscle and skin, so far below the big-time fame? Many of these men nurse hopes of rising up to the higher echelons of the game. But others seem to play because it is what they do and always have done, since childhood. It is their identity and their love and – more or less – they have found a way to make a life of it.

      There is a lavish bus with leather – or at least leather effect – seats for the short journey back to Luton, 15 miles into Bedfordshire. The management settle around tables in the front, joshing club analyst Peter Booker to see if he has the video of the game ready. There is some problem; the tape has not spun up. The grown-ups lose their patience.

      “Pete, we’re getting off, you’ll have to stick that up your arse,” one says.

      “I tell you what, fucking scrub it,” adds Still.

      “I tell you what, let’s go back to Stevenage. They’ll have it.”

      I will see much more of this, the joshing of Booker and Alisdair Kerr, the young sports scientist who works for Richardson. Booker and Kerr wear tracksuits but are not footballers. They occupy an awkward limbo, moving with the coaches but of the players’ age. Mockery of them is also sacrifice to a greater god; to banter, a form of interaction between men based on invective and here in football refined to an art form. John Still is not a cruel man. But he mercilessly teases the young assistants, because that is what the banter god requires.

      Later on, when half the squad have disembarked, I sit at a table of four with three players. Opposite are rightback Curtley Williams and midfielder Jonathan Smith, to my right defender Alex Lacey. Smith is 27 years old, originally from Preston. Later, he explains, he will drive up north to see his girlfriend. He arrived at Luton in 2012 following spells at York City, Forest Green Rovers and Swindon Town. Like Cullen, Smith’s vernacular is still northern: ‘lad’ suffixes his sentences.

      As we approach Luton’s ground I ask Smith what his plans are when he leaves football. Later he will explain to me that he has some qualifications, and even once had a place at Liverpool John Moores University that he did not take up. He could probably make it to university. Now though he looks out the window, towards the “One Stop Cash and Carry.”

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