The Last Match

Marsh Lane has a slope. Everybody who has ever played on it knows the number, because somebody measured it in 1998 and the figure has been repeated ever since: one metre and eighty from the north corner to the south. In the second half you are either running uphill or telling yourself you aren't.

Obi has been the goalkeeper of the Marsh Lane Rovers for nine seasons. He is thirty-four, he works in a warehouse from Monday to Friday, and he has never been paid a penny for standing in that goal. He plays because Sunday morning would otherwise start at eleven.

The letter was read out in the changing room in March. The land had been sold. Twelve months from the summer there would be houses on it, and the club had been offered a pitch four miles away which two of the squad couldn't reach without a car.

Nobody argued with the letter, because there was nobody in the room to argue with. The club secretary, Dot, who has done the paperwork since before Obi joined, said only that if they wanted to keep going, somebody else would have to drive the kit bags.

The last match on Marsh Lane was set for the twelfth of April, against Beckton Social, who are eighth in the league and have a substitute called Gaz who has scored against Obi four times in nine years and mentions it every single time.

Twenty-eight people came. That is not many, but it is about twenty-two more than usual, and most of them were people who had played there at some point and had heard from somebody else that it was the last one. Two of them brought folding chairs, which nobody had ever done before.

In the changing room the smell was the same as it has always been: wet grass, deep heat and the particular damp of a building put up in 1964. Somebody had taped a photograph of the 2011 side above the door. Half of them had put on weight and were standing outside.

The referee, who is called Malcolm and has been shouted at on that pitch for twenty years, blew the whistle at half past ten. It rained from the fifth minute. Obi says he has played in worse, and he is telling the truth, but not by much.

They went one behind after twenty minutes. Beckton scored from a corner that came off the crossbar, off a defender's shoulder and in, which is the kind of goal that Obi has always said should be given to the weather rather than to a player.

Ryan equalised on the hour, running downhill, which everybody agreed afterwards was the correct way for the last goal on that pitch to be scored. He is nineteen. He will play somewhere better next year, and he knows it, and he didn't say so.

It finished as a draw. Nobody had wanted a draw beforehand and everybody was satisfied with one afterwards. Gaz came over and reminded Obi about the four goals, and Obi told him the fourth had been offside, which it had, and both of them enjoyed this enormously.

Afterwards the boots were knocked out against the wall for the last time and the small trophy from the 2016 cup, which had been standing on the window ledge for years, was taken down and given to Dot, who protested about it for four minutes and then took it home.

Obi worked out that evening, on the back of an envelope in the car park, that he has played on Marsh Lane one hundred and ninety-one times. He had never counted before. He says he wishes he still hadn't, and that the Rovers are going to the new pitch, and that he'll drive the bags.