BooksBarbecue
Back Homesickness
Chapters (16)
  1. Homesickness
  2. Also by Colin Barrett
  3. Title Page
  4. Copyright
  5. For
  6. Contents
  7. A SHOOTING IN RATHREEDANE
  8. THE WAYS
  9. THE ALPS
  10. WHOEVER IS THERE, COME ON THROUGH
  11. THE SILVER COAST
  12. ANHEDONIA, HERE I COME
  13. THE LOW, SHIMMERING BLACK DRONE
  14. THE 10
  15. Acknowledgements
  16. Back Cover

You do know the boys want u back

B

‘You do know the boys want u back.’

Danny had to smile at that. B was Budgie McAllister, one of Danny’s old youth coaches, now Ballina Town FC’s senior team coach, and ever since Danny had returned to Ballina the man had been only dying to get Danny into the fold. Half the lads on the team had been in touch, most no doubt at Budgie’s behest, begging Danny to come back and play.

All through his childhood, Danny Faulkner had been the best footballer on any pitch, at any level he played at. That wasn’t something Danny was ­big-­headed or boastful about, it was just a sentiment that had been expressed to him so many times, by so many people, that he could only accept it as true, a fact as prosaically ­self-­evident as the fact that he was five ten and had green eyes. By the time he was eight there were scouts flying in from England to watch him play and when he was nine he was offered a trial at Manchester United’s academy. He was invited back regularly over the following years. He would travel with one of his parents, usually JJ, stay a few weeks and come home. When he turned sixteen he made the decision to move to Manchester and attend the academy ­full-­time. The club placed him with a family, sorted him with tutors for schooling, but it wasn’t long after he moved over that things began to go wrong; not wrong exactly, it was just that certain of Danny’s peers began to progress beyond him, physically, technically and even in their mentality, at a pace he could not match.

He did what he could to catch up. He stayed behind after training, booked double gym sessions, counted every last calorie that went into his body. At night, in the lonely bedroom of his Manchester digs, he listened to mindset audiobooks and studied ­academy-­supplied video footage of his performances with prosecutorial dispassion, hunting only for the weak points and flaws in his game. But the gap between him and the other lads continued to grow. The coaches could see it. Danny had always played as the 10, the playmaker and attacking focus of the team, but they started moving him into other positions in order to, as they put it, ‘expand his game’. They tried him on the wing, but he wasn’t quick enough; up front, but he wasn’t big enough; at the back, but he did not have the defensive discipline.