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Even when it’s what you don’t want to hear. Especially when it’s what you don’t want to hear. Which in this particular case is that you’ve got to try harder.’
    ‘Fuck off.’
    It had been a while since anyone had really seen Zarco raise his voice in what was popularly known – with apologies to Phil Spector – as the wall of sound. Possibly it really wasn’t as loud as it seemed, on account of the fact that Zarco usually spoke quietly; but it was loud enough when he was right in your face and you were close enough to see the plate on the roof of the big man’s mouth, not to mention what he’d eaten for breakfast.
    ‘Try harder!’ he screamed. ‘Try harder! Try harder!’
    The best thing to do in these circumstances was close your eyes and take it; I’d seen some take it and cry afterwards – big men, hard men. Now Taylor was a senior player, a hard lad originally from Liverpool, and not used to people screaming in his face, so he turned and walked away, which was possibly an even worse idea than answering back.
    Zarco picked up the nearest thing to hand, which happened to be a plastic training cone, and hurled it at Taylor. The cone hit Taylor between the shoulder blades and almost knocked the man off his feet, which had him coming back at Zarco with strangler’s hands and real malice in his eyes.
    ‘You fucking bastard,’ he screamed as some of the other players caught him by the arms and held him close. ‘I’ll fucking kill him. I’ll fucking kill that smart bastard.’
    Zarco just stood there as if he hardly cared if Ayrton Taylor came at him or not and it was easy to see how, when he was a centre back at Celtic, he’d taken a punch almost without flinching from the Hibernian centre forward, Billy Gibson – a punch that had cost him two teeth. Gibson had been sent off, but not only had Zarco not retaliated, he had stayed on the pitch and even headed the winning goal. Famed for his brutal scything tackles, Zarco had put many a player back into the stands and it was no surprise that the Bleacher Report still listed ‘Butcher Zarco’ as one of the hardest men ever to play soccer, ‘because of his chops’.
    ‘You’re dropped,’ said Zarco. ‘Dropped for being a cunt. You’re always tweeting things to your seven thousand followers. Now tweet that, you childish cunt.’
    But this wasn’t the end of it; the very same afternoon Zarco put Taylor on the January transfer list and I quickly formed the conclusion that the Machiavellian Portuguese had engineered the whole incident so that he could make an example of a senior player to encourage the others. So much for sportsmanship in the beautiful game, you might say. But Zarco was right about one thing: Ayrton was lazy – perhaps the laziest player in the team. There were quite a few who thought that Didier Cassell might not have been injured if Alex Pritchard had not been allowed the space to shoot because Taylor hadn’t tackled him the way he should have done. Besides, everyone knew we had younger strikers who were just as able as Ayrton Taylor and on less than half the money. Sometimes getting rid of one player can be as effective a way of improving the team as buying a new one.
    When I got back to my office I made a note of what Zarco had said, not because I disagreed with him but because I used to jot down as much of what he said about football as I could remember – especially the more colourful stuff; one day, I was planning to write a book about the Portuguese. Most football bios are as dull as arseholes, but that was one thing you couldn’t ever say about my boss. Next to Matt Drennan, João Gonzales Zarco was easily the most fascinating figure in English football and, probably, European football too. He didn’t see that, of course, and probably he would have disapproved of me writing anything at all about him – even a note in the programme. Zarco might have been outspoken but he was also a very private man.
    That night I watched