The Long Game

David Rees is thirty-six and running out of road.

He's a goalkeeper — nineteen years professional, the last seven as first choice at Trentside FC — and he can see the end from here. The young German in training is faster, sharper, and inevitable. David is separated from his wife, living in a flat that still looks like nobody's moved in, and dropping his children at Grace's house on a Sunday with nowhere to go afterwards.

One Sunday in September he turns down a side street and walks into a café. The man behind the counter makes good coffee and says there you go as though it matters. David goes back. Then again.

Cal Marsden is thirty-two and hasn't left West Bridgford in four years. When his father had a stroke, Cal walked out of his job and behind the counter of Marsden's, the café Jimmy opened twenty-two years ago.

The season gives the novel its shape. The café gives it something else: two men circling something they don't yet have words for.

The Long Game is a novel about what happens when a life built around one thing stops, and who is already there when you look up.

Book 3 of The Beautiful Game series. Can be read as a standalone.