Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Hamish
The earpiece is trying to kill me.
It's called an IFB, which stands for interruptible foldback, and it's a tiny plastic device that sits inside my ear canal and allows the producer to speak directly into my brain while I'm meant to be speaking directly into a camera, which means two conversations are happening at once and neither of them is the one I want to be having, which is: "Can I go home now? "
"Thirty seconds, Hamish. Straighten your tie."
That's Malcolm. Malcolm Rees, senior producer.
Mid-fifties, gray at the temples, black everywhere else, suit jacket over a jumper because the studio is kept at the temperature of a meat locker to protect the LED wall, which costs more than my first three years' salary combined and stretches fifteen metres across the back of the set.
It is currently displaying a montage with my own face from six years ago, scoring against Sunderland, which is the specific match they've chosen for my first ever live-to-air segment.
They're making me commentate on myself at peak performance.
Fuck my life.
Rather, fuck my knee.
"Twenty seconds. And stop touching your ear. You look like you have a rash."
"It itches," I whisper.
"It's a two-gram receiver, not a hornet. Leave it."
The studio is enormous. Four cameras, three manned, one locked off.
The floor is an LED screen that currently shows the Str1kecast Sports logo in a slow, pulsing blue.
There's a curved desk—they call it "the pod"—where the anchor sits, a woman named Roshani Desai who's been doing this for eleven years and has the unshakable calm of someone who stared into a camera while a former England captain called another former England captain a "tactical wank" on live television
She didn't even blink.
I, by contrast, have been doing this for four hours and my armpits are a Louisiana swamp.
Massive LED volumes curve around the pod, surrounding us in light and color that changes depending on the match. Right now, the walls glow in Sunderland red and my old club's blue, and the floor has changed to a tactical pitch layout with my name and number floating over the striker's position.
I'm looking at a ghost of myself. The me who ran. The me who scored. The me whose knee didn't sound like a bag of walnuts being crushed by a lorry just walking from the bed to the toilet.
"Ten seconds."
I straighten my tie, my suit jacket tight across my shoulders because wardrobe insisted on a slim fit that makes me look, in Amy's words, "like a sexy investment banker who moonlights as an actor, but the drycleaner shrank his jacket.
" My knee brace is hidden under the desk.
No one in the viewership will know I'm wearing one. That was the deal.
On camera, I'm Hamish McCormick, world-class footballer.
Off camera, I'm Hamish McCormick, man whose right knee predicts rain more accurately than the Met Office.
"And we're live."
Roshani turns to camera two with a smile that could defuse a bomb.
"Welcome back to Str1kecast Sports. This afternoon, we're looking at one of the most dramatic comebacks in Premier League history.
The 2019 Sunderland match—two-nil down at the half, and then, well.
.." She pivots to me. "Hamish McCormick was there.
In fact, Hamish was the reason the second half happened at all.
Hamish, what do you remember about that changing room at halftime? "
The red light on camera three holds my gaze. My heart is going like a snare drum. My hands are flat on the desk, steady. I've held a football under pressure in front of eighty thousand screaming humans and a camera is just a smaller, quieter version of that.
"Och, it was grim," I say, and my voice comes out warm and easy, the voice I didn't know I had until three months of media training revealed it.
"The gaffer walked in and didna say a word fer about ninety seconds.
Just stood there. Let the silence do the shouting.
We were meant ta be title contenders and we were playin' like we'd been on a stag do the night before. "
"Had you been?" Roshani grins.
"I plead the Fifth. Wait, I've lived in America a bit too long now.
Is that a thing here?" This gets a laugh from the floor crew, which Malcolm will hate.
He believes laughter is a distraction and the studio should operate with the joyless efficiency of a German railway.
"But truly, something changed in that room.
It wasna tactical. It was emotional. The gaffer looked at us and said, 'Ye've got forty-five minutes ta decide who ye are.
' And I remember thinkin', aye, I ken exactly who I am. "
The highlight reel rolls on the LED wall behind me.
I watch myself, seven years younger, heavier by five kilograms of muscle I've since lost, sprint down the right flank and cut inside.
The first goal was instinct. A ball played low across the box, one touch to settle, a half-turn that I can still feel in my hip if I close my eyes, and the shot, low and hard past the keeper's left hand.
"That first goal," Roshani says. "You were offside by the width of a whisker."
"I was onside by the width of a whisker," I correct her. "VAR agreed."
"Barely."
"There's no barely in football. Ye're either on or ye're off."
I watch the second goal. A header from a corner, pure power. And the third. A free kick from twenty-three metres. Top corner. The keeper didn't move. Not because he was slow, but because there was no point. The ball was already past him when his neurons fired.
Watching it now, from this side of the screen, is like watching home video of a dead relative. He's there, alive and brilliant and burning, but he's also gone. That body, that speed, that knee, that version of Hamish McCormick who believed the pitch would always be his home—
Gone.
"Good," Malcolm buzzes in my ear. "Keep it moving. Don't go soft."
I smile at the camera and talk about the tactical shift—the three-at-the-back formation the gaffer sprung at halftime, the way Sunderland panicked when we pushed our wingbacks high, how the entire complexion of the match changed in seven minutes.
And here's the thing:
My commentating flows.
Not the way football flowed, with my lungs and legs and the grass under my boots and the crowd at my back.
This is a different current. But it's a current nonetheless.
My brain reads the footage the way it used to read the pitch—angles, space, timing, what happened next and why—and my mouth translates it into language that makes sense, that entertains, that teaches. That connects.
I'm good at this. Not "decent for a former footballer, bless him." Good. The real kind of good.
Flow state good.
I've been chasing this feeling since my knee popped and Dr. Jelshi gave me the news. In the gym, on the pitch, in conversations, I thought flow was gone, buried under the rubble of the career it belonged to.
But it's here, in a meat locker studio in West London with a plastic bug in my ear and Malcolm telling me to stop being funny.
I am a natural broadcaster.
If I think about that too hard right now, I will cry on live television, and Malcolm will murder me with his clipboard.
"That hat trick changed the narrative of your entire season," Roshani says. "Did you know in the moment?"
"Ye never ken in the moment," I say. "Ye just play. The knowing comes later, when ye're on the team bus and someone shows ye the stats and ye think, aye, that was somethin'. And then ye eat a kebab and fall asleep and do it again on Saturday."
Roshani laughs. Malcolm does not.
The segment wraps. The floor director calls clear. I exhale and remove my hand from the desk. There's a faint sweat outline where my palm has been, a crime scene for my nerves.
"Good," Malcolm says through the IFB, which is his version of a standing ovation. "Two minutes, then the analysis walkthrough. Tighter on the tactical points. Less banter."
"Less banter" is Malcolm's catchphrase. He's said it to me eleven times today.
He said it during the camera test. He said it during the lighting check.
He said it when I made a joke to the makeup artist about my foundation shade being called "Bonnie Prince Charlie" and she laughed so hard, she spilled mascara remover on the table.
Malcolm wants me to be a pundit. I want to be a person. The gap between those two things is where the conflict is brewing.
I stand to stretch my knee and a production staffer appears with water.
Not Roshani's PA or the floor director. This woman is mid-level, headset on, clipboard gripped firmly.
She moves with the brisk efficiency of someone who's been in television long enough to know there's going to be a screwup no matter what.
She's also someone I've slept with.
Gemma Holt. Bristol. 2015. We met at a players' charity gala after a match and spent a weekend together that I remember in vivid, specific fragments—room service at four a.m., her laughing at a terrible film while lying on my chest, the way she said "again" three times in one night in a voice that made me feel like I'd unlocked a new level in a game I was already winning.
She was a firecracker. Funny, sharp, and absolutely, unequivocally temporary. We both knew it. We shook hands on Sunday morning like professionals closing a deal, and I never saw her again.
Until now.
"Hamish McCormick," she says, setting the water down. Her eyes do a full sweep. Head to toe, with a stop in the middle that lasts a beat too long. "Look at you in a suit."
"Gemma. Didna ken ye worked here."
"Five years now. Senior production coordinator." She tilts her head. "You look incredible. That suit is criminal."
"Wardrobe's competent."
"I wasn't talking about wardrobe." Her voice drops half a register and her hip shifts against the desk in a way that broadcasts intent. "I still think about Bristol, you know."