The Ball Boy

Gethin Pryce did the touchline at Cae Bryn for thirty-one years and never once played.

He was a ball boy at eleven, which was normal, and then he was a ball boy at fifteen, which was slightly less normal, and then he was — the club never worked out a title — the person who did the balls, the corner flags, the cones, the half-time oranges when that was still a thing, the kit that needed washing again, and the bit of the touchline where the away supporters stood.

Thirty-one years of a Saturday.

Cae Bryn play in the fourth tier of Welsh football, which people who do not follow Welsh football will need to understand is not a career. There are two hundred people at a good game. There is a clubhouse. There is a man called Dilwyn who does the announcements and has never got a single away team's name right in twenty years, on purpose, as a bit.

Gethin never played because Gethin could not play. This is not modesty on his part; he was, by every account including his own, one of the worst footballers ever produced by the village, and there is a story about a trial in 1996 that the clubhouse will still tell you if you buy the round.

What he could do was everything else.

He knew where the spare net was. He knew which of the floodlights would go if you switched them on in the wrong order. He knew that the referee's room door sticks and that you have to lift it, and he told every referee for thirty-one years and about a third of them didn't listen and he let them find out.

He drove the minibus. He drove the minibus to away games from 2001, unpaid, in a vehicle the club could not really insure, for two decades, and there are men of forty now who learned to swear properly on that minibus and who have never told their mothers.

The retirement

In March the club announced it was retiring the number 12 shirt.

This caused, in the first instance, confusion, because Cae Bryn's number 12 in the current squad is a nineteen-year-old called Osian who is very much still alive and playing and who found out about this on the club's social media at the same time as everyone else.

Osian, to his enormous credit, posted a photograph of Gethin within four minutes.

The number 12 is the substitute. That is the joke and it is not really a joke. In the old numbering, 1 to 11 are on the pitch and 12 is the one on the bench, the one who is there, the one who comes on when something goes wrong.

Nobody in the club can remember whose idea it was. Everybody in the club claims it was theirs.

The presentation

They did it before the Llanfaes game in April, on the pitch, at half two, in the kind of rain that makes a public occasion feel like an endurance event.

Gethin was told it was a photograph for the programme.

He arrived in his coat and his boots, carrying, because he did not know, a bag of balls.

Two hundred and forty people. Which is not a number, until you know that Cae Bryn's average gate is a hundred and ninety, and that the extra fifty had come back from Cardiff and Bristol and, in one case, Toronto.

Dilwyn read the announcement.

He got the away team's name wrong. Deliberately. Gethin laughed before anybody else did, because Gethin has been waiting twenty years for that bit.

Then they gave him the shirt in a frame, and the number 12 on it, and his name across the back, and there was a noise from the terrace that people who were there still cannot describe properly.

Gethin said eleven words. Everyone agrees on the number because it was so few.

He said: "Right. Well. Kick-off's at three, so if everyone could—"

And they went, laughing, and he put the bag of balls down and did the corner flags, in the rain, because they still needed doing.