They said you either mess up once, or you mess up a thousand times and become a legend. And I, Jamie Harrington, was well on my way to becoming a legend . . . if it weren’t for those muckers at the Sports Compliance Authority.

  Match fixing was easy then. You’d get yourself a late booking, the sort of yellow managers write off as ‘getting stuck in’, a harmless shove in the box, a stray header that goes where everyone expects it not to, a clearance that grazes the boot of the nearest man and drifts out for the corner.

  Dunsvale were a proper side back then. Tight at the back, disciplined. We didn’t give much away. That’s what made it so easy: the odds were low, and no one looked twice when the reliable defender lost his footing at the death.

  Pissed the fans right off whenever I sliced one out for a late corner. ‘Proper mug’s game’, ‘typical Harrington’, and ‘the reason why I’d never get a transfer to the Championship’, that was what the lot would say. What they didn’t know was I was winding up a whole different set of bastards. The ones betting under on the corner count. Those lads must’ve been tearing their slips in half every time I shanked one into Row Z.

  After the match, it was all routine. Lads mucking about, gaffer pretending he hadn’t noticed the late corner. Then you’d get the text: Same place, half eleven. No name, never had one, but more often than not it’d come from this bloke called T.

  The chippy was down by the old cinema, the one that still had the ‘coming soon’ posters from two years ago. I’d sit out front in my hatchback, radio low, pretending I was waiting for someone. It was always raining, somehow; it felt like it was part of the deal. Or maybe it just came with living in Dunsvale.

  Some bloke built like a wardrobe and coat zipped to the chin would tap twice on your window. Sometimes it’d be the smaller Asian guy, but no matter who it was, the routine was the same: I’d pop the lock, and he’d slide into the passenger seat without a word. The plastic bag in his hand would be white and unmarked. He’d drop it on my lap, nod once, and stare straight ahead like we were waiting for the lights to change. He never said what was inside, and I never asked. It would always be the same old: a thick wad of notes, maybe two weeks’ graft. He’d be gone before the song on the radio finished, off into the dark like he’d never been there. I’d sit a bit longer, watching the steam fog the glass, thinking about how something so simple could feel so wrong and so easy at the same time.

  Then I’d drive home, bag on the seat beside me, trying not to look at it. Trying not to think about how I’d already started checking the fixtures for the next one.

  Funny thing about guilt: it doesn’t kick in till the knock comes. Funnier thing: I had never been a betting lad. If I had been, I might’ve been able to clock how something was off about the way corners ticked up on the markets whenever I’d get a stupid yellow, or the odd big lay on ‘under’ that made bookies frown. Phone logs, CCTV from the chippy, the club’s own CCTV that somehow caught me letting a bloke in the car, and a banker with a nose for odd deposits. Someone in the pub had seen me with the bag and thought to tell. It all folded neat as an envelope. I remembered the suspension notice arriving with the words ‘PENDING INVESTIGATION’ slapped on in biro, and the way the lads looked at me on the bus after training, like a smell you can’t walk past. They didn’t need to shout. They just showed me the slips, the transfers, and the footage. That’s how it goes: you think you’re clever, and then you watch a screen where every tiny thing you did looks like confession.

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  Never felt guilt until then. And I had the audacity to tell them I’d never done proper result fixing because I had conscience and couldn’t let the fans down. The compliance bloke just looked at me like I was thick. Maybe I was. But no thick lad would earn five thousand quid for a corner.

  I got seven years, but might as well’ve been a lifetime. They didn’t call it that, of course. “Prohibited from all footballing activity,” the letter had said, like I was some disease they had to quarantine.

  My girlfriend then, Miley, packed her things the same night the story broke. She didn’t even wait for me to come home; just left me a text that said, I can’t live with a cheating man. Funny, that. I’d never cheated on her a day in my life. Couldn’t even look at another woman without feeling like I was nicking something that wasn’t mine. But try explaining that the only thing I ever cheated on was a bloody corner count.

  To her, a cheat was a cheat, whether it was hearts or football or the bookies. You couldn’t fault a lady for having standards.

  For the next seven years, I tried to scrub football out of my life. Thought I could, too. You can quit drinking, you can quit smoking, but you can’t quit something that lives in the air. You hear it in the telly in the shop window, some lad in a pub arguing about offsides, kids booting a flat ball down an alley. It just gets in your ears.

  I couldn’t go near a stadium without feeling like every pair of eyes was clocking me. Couldn’t turn on Match of the Day without my stomach twisting at the sight of some defender taking a corner properly. Even the smell of wet grass set me off; imagine that, a lad from Dunsvale developing a phobia of turf.

  I got good at stacking shelves and bad at small talk. You’d be surprised how often football comes up when you’re trying not to think about it. “Who do you support?” “Play a bit yourself?” “Ever thought you could’ve gone pro?” I’d just laugh and say, “Not quite.” Never said my name if I could help it. Too many blokes still remembered the headlines.

  When the ban finally ended, I was on the tail end of thirty and felt like I’d been retired for twenty years and forgotten to tell my knees about it. My brother, Callum, was twenty-six then, and had become a proper athlete, built like a spring, playing for Burnley FC up in the Prem. Burnley, bless ‘em, were proper rubbish and (before and after Kompany) played the most woeful football known to men, but Prem football still beat your average Sunday League muppet any day.

  Speaking of Callum, he was the golden one. Always had been. He’d been in the academy since he was ten, the coaches loved him, the papers called him “the local lad done good.” Mum still had his shirts framed in the sitting room. Mine used to be up there too, back when Dunsvale were in League One and I was still something she could mention to the neighbours.

  Callum still came by on weekends sometimes. Said it was for the barbecue, but I knew it was to check I hadn’t turned into one of those blokes who shouted at pigeons from the window. He’d pull up in his fancy SUV, engine growling like it was allergic to silence, and act like parking it on my old estate didn’t make him twitch.

  “Alright, big man,” he’d say, stepping out in some designer trackie that probably cost more than my bloody telly. “You still burning sausages to death?”

  “Adds flavor,” I’d tell him. “You Prem lads wouldn’t understand.”

  He’d laugh, proper belly laugh, the kind that made me forget for a second that he was everything I was meant to be.

  Speaking of which, here he came now.