by Chris Harris
As Denham Phoenix’s Korean sensation attracts unprecedented attention, the club finds order amid the chaos, while Economical Tony uncovers suspicious goings-on at Pear Tree Farm.
Greg believed they needed someone who wouldn’t just handle the publicity but would work directly alongside Stephen. With the interest now surrounding the club, Wired Communications’ £ 5,000-a-week fee for a tiny non-league club’s media communications seemed ridiculous, but Greg reckoned it would pay for itself.
For Greg and Catherine, who had only just started a relationship, it was all so overwhelming. This should have been the period when they were getting to know each other properly, sneaking off for dinners and generally enjoying the excitement of something new. Instead, someone had landed like a bomb from Korea and completely taken over their lives. Catherine was philosophical about it.
“Let’s just get through it and enjoy it. This is never going to happen again.”
Wired Communications’ first move was to take control of all the club’s social media content. Dean wasn’t particularly happy about that because he had always generated most of it himself, but they reasoned that he now had to focus on the football. His job was the footballing project. For now, Wired Communications dictated that multi-tasking was out of the window; for ten weeks, everyone needed to focus solely on their specific area of the club; they would do the rest.
Colin, Sandra and Keith seemed to spend most of each day on their phones, presumably communicating with somebody pivotal to the operation. Nobody was entirely sure what any of them were doing because there didn’t seem much of a chain of command. Their basic remit seemed to be replacing the chaos with some sort of structure, and presumably working with Stephen to optimise marketing opportunities.
Whatever they were doing, though, everyone noticed the difference by the weekend. They were no longer being bombarded with emails, messages and questions every five minutes. The pressure had lifted.
Wired Communications began lining up a series of interviews for the Korean. He had always made it clear that publicity was something he could happily live without, but he was prepared to spend one day a week doing television and newspaper interviews, particularly when the sort of fees being offered were numbers Greg and Catherine could scarcely believe and Seo-jun was happy to do them if the money went to the club.
He loved earning money for the club because Piotr and Dean had spent evenings with him in the clubhouse, whiteboard propped up in front of them, explaining exactly what they wanted to do. They showed him the plans for the ground, the football operation, the infrastructure and everything else, and then explained how the money now pouring in could catapult the whole project forward by years
That changed the Korean’s view of the media attention. Until then, publicity had largely been something to endure. Something to bat away. Now, with the communications company turning interviews, appearances, and access into serious money for Denham Phoenix, he could see the point of it: his love of grassroots football, and his affection for the first grounded people he had met outside his family, began to bring some levelling out and reality to his pampered career.
As Stephen had told them, the work Wired Communications was to carry out would mean they were not only going to pay for themselves, but could conceivably bring in four or five times what they were costing. Much of that came from the extraordinary financial demand they had created by the Korean’s sudden explosion of publicity.
Gradually, the constant police presence, security and general intrusion surrounding him began to feel less like a nuisance and more like part of this bizarre little machine that was suddenly making the club a small fortune.
On the Friday morning an SOS came in from Hastings Football Club. Interest in the game had grown so much that, after speaking to the local police, it became increasingly obvious the club simply didn’t feel capable of handling the potential influx of people and traffic. The police were the first to agree it was becoming a tricky situation.
Stephen and Greg spent most of the morning in contact with the Welex Waste Products League, the local police, and Lewes Football Club, and by lunchtime the fixture had been moved to the Dripping Pan on Saturday. Thankfully, it was an FA Cup weekend, and Lewes had already been knocked out, so the ground was free.
Having sussed out how straightforward fixture changes could be when everyone wanted the same thing, Greg and Stephen spent the afternoon speaking to the other four clubs Denham still needed to visit. Would they be prepared to move their games to the Dripping Pan and play them on Friday nights instead? The sweetener was half the gate money, which would probably mean an extra few thousand pounds in each club’s coffers.
Then, largely to annoy Stephen, Greg rounded it up to five thousand pounds per club for the inconvenience, which would more than cover hiring a couple of coaches to bring their supporters down.
Non-league football supporters are generally very pragmatic. They know their clubs are permanently one bill away from financial crisis. If someone offers you free coach travel, free admission to an away game, and, at the same time, drops a few thousand pounds into your club’s bank account, you tend not to get too precious about whether the home fixture is being played on the originally designated ground. The relief the board felt was palpable as the whole project became more manageable. One place for press conferences, media, the police and the games and within a few days, with the new communications team firmly installed and the remaining fixtures beginning to fall into place, the weight and pressure on everybody at the club had noticeably lifted.
Economical Tony was sitting in his car just outside on the verge, about fifty yards up from the entrance to Pear Tree Farm, because something confusing was going on. The only downside of the games being moved to the Dripping Pan was that he was no longer able to catch up with the labourers from the farm who went to the matches, and in all honesty he was starting to obsess about the whole thing a little. Not in a bad way, more that he felt like he was playing a part in some sort of detective novel, with the added benefit that, if he got to the bottom of it, he might also be able to help secure the Gold Dust field.
He had managed to kill two birds with one stone. He had been putting on a bit of weight recently, spending more time at the football club and less time mucking in on the building jobs his operatives were carrying out, so it seemed like a good idea to plot the public footpaths around Pear Tree Farm and really get to know the place. And hell, why not have his lunch sitting in the car observing what was going on? He could do his paperwork there as well.
There was one thing he had started to notice. On each of the three occasions he had sat there for a couple of hours, one of the people he knew from the ground had left in a taxi. He didn’t think too much of it at first. It was the middle of winter and they had all said they weren’t working full-time at the moment, so presumably they were going out somewhere. But it didn’t tally with what one of them had told him when he bumped into him in the Red Lion and asked whether they would be going to the games at the Dripping Pan. The answer had been no, because it was another four pounds each to get in, they would need two taxis and the beer was more expensive, so by the time the four of them had gone it would cost about fifteen pounds each, which they couldn’t afford. That didn’t quite fit with the fact that they were apparently getting taxis on their own into town.
The more Tony walked around, the more curious he became. He had his little map with him and gradually worked out which fields belonged to Pear Tree Farm, but before long he realised he didn’t really need it. If there was an unproductive-looking field with overgrown hedgerows, broken fencing and gates hanging at odd angles, invariably it belonged to Pear Tree Farm. So how exactly was the place sustaining a staff of nearly ten people, and how was the owner driving around in a brand-new thirty-eight-thousand-pound car? All of it simply whetted his appetite to keep digging.
Truth be told, because Greg knew Tony was heavily involved in trying to find a solution to the ransom field, he had largely escaped all the crap the other directors were going through, all the pressure, the phone calls, the media and the constant work involved in keeping the club running properly. For Economical Tony, this was almost a get-out-of-jail-free card, and better still it was work he actually enjoyed. But as things stood he was no nearer reaching any firm conclusion. All he could really report back to Greg was that Pear Tree Farm appeared to be a rundown agricultural business which didn’t look capable of making much money at all, quite the opposite in fact, yet somehow employed nearly ten people and seemed to have a surprising amount of money sloshing around. Greg agreed he was definitely on the right track and told him to keep persevering. Something would come up, and if it meant avoiding the maelstrom, all the better.
