January Window (25 page)

On the few occasions that I’d heard agents and managers talking business, some of them would mention ‘a quid’ in a kind of shorthand, coded, Polari way, almost as if trying to conceal the real monies that were involved in modern football. A quid was a million quid, just as ten quid was ten million and fifty quid was fifty million. It was yet another reason to despair of the attitude to money in football. With the likes of Eden Hazard, Robin Van Persie and Yaya Touré on £180,000 a week, it was easy to forget that fans could be asked to pay up to 126 quid – real quid, not millions – for a match-day ticket at Arsenal, which represents a quarter of the average weekly wage.

But it seemed that things had not quite gone to plan, and probably explained why I had seen the two men arguing at the service station in Orsett, near Hangman’s Wood – which was certainly ‘BP on A13’.