The PA logs every announcement with the microphone it came from, because the safety announcements have to be provable. Every night at nine minutes to nine, which is sixty seven minutes into a half past seven kick off, the PA logs an announcement from the announcer's microphone in the empty box. The recording is a substitution. A number, a name, coming on. The name is a boy who was on the bench once in 1994 and was never sent on, and the crowd noise under the announcement is a crowd that is not there, and they cheer.
I am the matchday announcer at a football club and the PA is my voice, and once a night it is somebody else's.
The system.
A microphone in the announcer's box, speakers round the ground, and a logger that records every announcement with the time and the source, because the safety announcements are a legal thing and the club has to show they were made.
Every night, with no match, at nine minutes to nine, the logger records an announcement from my microphone.
The announcement.
The recording is a voice. Not mine. A man's, older, with the cadence of the announcers from before they were personalities, when they were a man with a microphone and a list. He says, substitution for the home side. He says a number, fourteen. He says a name. He says, coming on, and the name again, and then, under it, the ground. A crowd. Applause and a cheer, the cheer a home crowd gives a young player coming on for the first time, which is a particular cheer, warm and a bit surprised, and it goes on for the time it goes on, and stops, and the logger stops.
Sixty seven minutes into a match that kicked off at half past seven. There is no match.
The name.
The club historian had it in a minute. A boy, a youth player, on the bench for one match in 1994, a league match, midweek, and the historian had the team sheet and the boy was on it, number fourteen, and he had not come on. The historian said that was the only time he was ever named in a squad, and that he had been released that summer, and that he had died in the years after, young, not of anything to do with football, and that the historian had not thought about him in thirty years until I said the name.
Sixty seven minutes was when the manager had put a substitute on, the historian said, from the match report. A different one. Number twelve. The boy had been told to warm up, the report said, and then the manager had changed his mind.
He warmed up. His name was not said. He is still on the bench.
What has been checked.
The logger, replaced. It records the announcement.
The box, at nine minutes to nine, by me, at the microphone, with it switched off at the desk. The speakers round the ground came on. His voice said, substitution for the home side, and I was in the box with a dead microphone and the voice was coming from the microphone in front of me, and the ground, dark, empty, cheered, and I looked down at the bench, which is a row of seats in the dugout with a roof, and the seat at the end, nearest the pitch, where the youngest sub sits, was down, and there was a tracksuit top on it, the old kind, the club's, from the nineties, and I did not go down.
What is done about it.
The announcement is on the PA log every night with my microphone as its source and the safety auditor has asked why I am announcing substitutions in an empty ground at nine minutes to nine, and I have said that I am not, and he has played me the recording, and I have said, that is not me, and he has said, it is your microphone, and I have said, yes.
What I do.
I announce.
He warmed up. He was told he was going on, in the way a manager tells a boy, a nod and a word, and then the manager changed his mind, and nobody told the boy that either, and the substitution was made and his name was not said, and he sat down.
So I say it. At nine minutes to nine, before the recording, I switch the microphone on, properly, and I say, substitution for the home side, number fourteen, and his name, coming on, and then I say the thing an announcer says when a player is making his debut, which is, making his first appearance for the club, and then I switch off, and the recording plays, his name in the old voice, and the crowd cheers, and the cheer is longer than it was.
The tracksuit top on the bench is not there in the morning now. It used to be. It is not. And the seat at the end of the dugout is up, the way a seat is when the player who was on it has got up, and gone, onto the pitch, in the sixty seventh minute, thirty years late, because two men said his name.