Harbinger Of Glory

The days blurred into each other at the Wigan training complex.

Twelve days had passed, but for Wigan and its fans, it was beginning to feel like months instead.

Football had a way of being unmerciful with momentum, and Wigan had found that out in the cruellest possible fashion.

They had played three games in the space of two weeks, but even with those 3 games having been played with an interval close to 4 days, all they had managed were three draws.

Three times they had gone to the well and come back with something, but not enough.

The points trickled in ones instead of threes, and with every share of the spoils, the table shifted just slightly further out of reach.

Sixth place.

That was where they sat now, and they were only there because the goals they had scored outnumbered the goals of the team directly beneath them.

It was the kind of position that told you nothing and everything at once.

They were still in it.

But barely, and by the thinnest of margins, and everyone at the club knew it.

One slip-up more, and they could drop to 7th, 8th, possibly, and that showed how close it was in the upper half of the table.

Around the town, you could feel it.

Wigan was not a city that hides its feelings about its football club; it never had been.

The sport was woven into the fabric of the place too tightly for that.

And right now, the fabric was fraying at the edges.

The conversations in the cafés and the pubs and the street corners had taken on a quieter, more anxious tone.

It wasn’t a peaceful kind of quiet, but rather one that sat heavily on the shoulders of everyone who cared, and that meant almost every living soul in the town.

And then there was Dawson.

If the mood around the club was sombre, the mood around its manager carried something heavier still, the particular weight of a man who had given everything and was watching a section of his own support begin to turn on him for it.

It was not the majority.

But it was loud enough to be heard, and in football, loud is often all that matters.

The criticism, if you could call it that, made little sense when you looked at it closely, but landed with full force regardless.

Some portion of the fanbase had looked at three consecutive draws and decided that the manager’s hands were not clean.

That something in the setup, something in the approach, something in Dawson himself was responsible for the points that hadn’t come.

What those voices were less inclined to discuss was the injury list.

After Cousins’s injury had been announced, the day after he got injured, most of the fans couldn’t help but think about what was next.

First, Leo, followed by a couple more veterans and now, the one who had also been a sort of controller sitting just ahead of the defence was also out.

The team was never going to be okay with all these players out, but it hadn’t stopped there.

In the weeks that followed, the treatment room at the Wigan complex had filled up in the way that nightmares are made of, quietly and then all at once, until Dawson stood in his office looking at a squad sheet that bore very little resemblance to the one he’d started the season with.

Six.

That was how many players remained from what had been his first-choice starting eleven.

Six from eleven.

The rest were either on the physio table, on crutches, or somewhere in between.

In total, he had 11 senior players to call upon.

Eleven.

It may have looked like it wasn’t the best, but 2 out of these were keepers, meaning he had just 8 outfield players.

For a run of fixtures that would have tested a fully-fit squad with depth and options, and the luxury of rotating without losing quality.

Instead, Dawson was rotating necessity, shuffling bodies into positions, asking players to stretch beyond their natural roles, asking the fit ones to carry the load of the ones who weren’t, and even calling up close to half a dozen U23 and U21 players.

And yet the draws had come.

Hard-earned, grinding, honest draws that another manager, one with a full squad and a fully functioning spine to his team, might have turned into defeats and called them moral victories.

Dawson had turned them into points and was being blamed for not turning them into more.

The week ahead offered no softening of the schedule.

In 5 days, two more games loomed on the horizon, the fourth of their remaining eight league fixtures, a match they simply could not afford to approach with anything less than full conviction, and then the FA Cup semi-final against Manchester United.

Manchester United, who would arrive at this tie healthy, rested, and well aware that the team standing across from them was playing on fumes and willpower in roughly equal measure, aside from not even being on the same playing field.

There were no easy answers inside the Wigan complex.

There rarely were when the injuries mount, and the table tightens, and the voices outside grow louder.

But Dawson was still there.

Still working with the eleven he had, for the games that were coming, whether he was ready for them or not.

That, at least, had not changed.

But even in the midst of adversity, there was always a way, sort of?

On his office desk, sheets were spread across like he was trying to dry a wet patch.

On them were names, positions and fitness updates scrawled in the margins.

Dawson had read through them enough times by now that he could have recited them from memory.

He read them again anyway, and the sigh that followed was the same one that had been escaping him all afternoon.

When he finished reading, he wasn’t even sure what he could do next.

He set the sheets in his hand flat on the desk, pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, and then leaned back into his chair, slowly, like he wasn’t sure the seat could even hold him.

For a moment, the office was quiet.

Then the door opened.

No knock came, just the handle turning and the hinges giving way and the sudden intrusion of corridor light across the floor.

Dawson didn’t look up immediately.

He let a moment pass, the moment of a man gathering the particular brand of patience required to deal with whoever had just decided his closed door was an open invitation.

Then he raised his head.

”I’m sure there’s a knock before you enter sign outside,” he said, his voice carrying that dry, measured tone that sat somewhere between a reprimand and a warning, ”so—”

But at the end, the last word died in his mouth.

Leo was standing in the doorway and, in a few steps, right in front of his desk.

Dawson straightened almost without realising it, his eyes moving instinctively, not to Leo’s face, but downward when he didn’t see Leo’s crutch by his side.

It had been a while since he last saw the kid, so his first thought, arriving before any other, was that something had gotten worse that made them swap the crutch back for his thigh brace.

But there was no brace.

He looked back up at Leo’s face.

And then Leo spoke.

With the kind of certainty that doesn’t leave much room for the conversation to go anywhere else.

”I want to play, and I am playing!”