Albino Rego has kept the pitch of a small club in the Alentejo for thirty years. He cuts it to twenty-five millimetres, waters it at four in the morning, and on that fast, true grass the club's teams have learned to pass the ball along the floor. When the cup draw sends a Primeira Liga club to town, the president sees a fifth of the season's budget in one gate, and the new trainer wants the grass long and dry to slow the visitors down. Told in sections headed by the height of the grass, the story by Wengeresque Development Simulacrum weighs a single afternoon against the months the grass will take to recover, and follows a young midfielder who has to learn to play on a pitch made to stop him.
by Wengeresque Development, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
Albino Rego never took more than a third. Whatever height the grass stood at, he took a third of it off and no more, because the leaf is what feeds the root, and a plant that loses more than a third of its leaf at one cut stops growing its root while it mends the leaf. Under a football pitch the root is everything. The root is what holds the surface together when twenty-two men turn on it.
He had learned the rule from a Scotsman at a golf course near Vilamoura in 1988, the summer the municipality of Vale do Sabugo sent him on a course about irrigation, and he had kept it ever since the way other men keep a saint's day. He cut the pitch of the Atlético Clube de Vale do Sabugo on Mondays and Thursdays, at twenty-five millimetres, with a cylinder mower the club had bought second-hand from that same golf course in 2009. On the mornings after he cut, he knelt at six places on the pitch, always the same six, and set a prism gauge on the turf, a little steel stand with a mirror in it and a scale, and read the height of the leaf against the scale. Twenty-five. Twenty-five. Twenty-six by the near corner flag, where the shade of the eucalyptus lay until ten.
The water came from the club's borehole, which had cost eleven thousand euros to drill in 2011 and was the reason the pitch was green in September when every field round the town was the colour of bread. The sprinklers came on at four in the morning, for forty minutes, so that the water went into the ground before the sun could take it. Albino lived on the Rua do Chafariz, two hundred metres from the ground, and on still nights he could hear them from his bed, a sound like a man brushing a coat.
Twenty-five millimetres is a short pitch for a club of that size. Most of the clubs Vale do Sabugo played had synthetic surfaces now, paid for by their municipalities, and the rest had grass that was cut when somebody remembered. On Albino's grass the ball ran true and fast and did not hop, and so for nine years the club's teams, from the under-elevens up, had played it along the floor, short, from one man's foot to the next. Nobody had decided this.
On the second Monday in October the draw for the third round of the Taça de Portugal was made in Oeiras, and Vale do Sabugo, who had beaten a district club from Évora on penalties in the second round, drew a club from Lisbon. The Primeira Liga clubs came into the cup at the third round, and they played away. Albino heard the draw on the radio in the shed, with the mower's blades in pieces on the bench.
Torcato Barbosa, the president, sold building materials from a yard on the road to Évora, and he did the sums that afternoon on the back of a delivery note. The ground held two thousand. With the scaffolding stand his yard could put up along the far touchline, three thousand two hundred. At twelve euros a ticket that was more than thirty-eight thousand euros, before the bar. The club's budget for the whole season, players' expenses, the bus, the referees' fees, the electricity for the lights, was a hundred and ninety thousand.
"One match," said Torcato, in the shed, holding up the delivery note so Albino could see the figure. "One afternoon. A fifth of the year."
"It's a lot," Albino agreed.
The trainer came on the Wednesday. Fernando Brás had arrived in August from a club in the Algarve that had sacked him in March, and he had a contract until June, and he wore a club tracksuit with his initials on the breast, which none of his predecessors had done. He stood in the door of the shed out of the sun.
"Senhor Albino. For the cup. I want it long."
"How long?"
"As long as it will go in ten days. And dry. I want the ball to stop when it lands. I want their little men to have to kick it twice."
Albino put down the cloth he was wiping the blades with. "Long or dry," he said. "Not both. Grass with no water doesn't grow. It stands still and goes brown."
Brás considered this. He was not a stupid man. "Then water it until the Wednesday, and stop."
"I can do that."
"And then?"
"And then after the match you'll want it back at twenty-five for the league."
"On the Sunday. We have Torrejanos on the Sunday."
"I can't do that," said Albino. He explained the third. He explained it the way the Scotsman had explained it to him, with his hands: the leaf here, the root there, the one feeding the other. If the grass stood at sixty on the day of the match, he could take it to forty the day after, and to thirty a few days after that, and to twenty-five the week after; and every time, the cut would show the bottom of the leaf, which had been in the shade for a fortnight and would be yellow. In October that would grow out. In November, with the nights cold, it would not grow out until March.
"March," said Brás.
"About March."
Brás looked out of the shed door at the pitch, which lay striped in the sun, dark and light, like a flag. "I have a contract until June," he said, not unkindly, as a man states the price of something. "And we are playing Lisbon."
Torcato came over from the bar in the afternoon, and Albino told him what it would cost. Not the seed; the seed was nothing. He would overseed the worn places in March whatever happened, ten sacks of ryegrass at a hundred and twenty euros a sack. The cost was the four months in between, when the under-thirteens and the under-fifteens and the under-seventeens and the first team would all play on a yellow pitch with the ball sitting down in it.
"Four months," said Torcato, "against thirty-eight thousand euros."
"I said it was a lot," said Albino.
That night he did not cut. On Thursday he did not cut either, and in the morning he went down on his knees at the six places with the prism gauge and read thirty, thirty-one, thirty.
Albino found that he did not know what to do with his Mondays. He serviced the mower, which did not need it. He painted the white lines, which had to be painted anyway, and painted them a second time, because the long grass took the paint badly and the lines came out furred.
Brás changed the training. For three years the first team had begun every session with a rondo, eight men in a circle and two in the middle, the ball going round the circle on the ground, one touch, as fast as the grass would let it. Brás stopped the rondos. He put up a line of mannequins on the halfway line and had the centre-backs hit the ball over them, long, for the two biggest men in the squad to head down. He had the full-backs throw the ball long. He had the whole team practise standing in two lines of four in front of their own penalty area, close together, and moving left and right together, like a curtain.
Leandro Mota was nineteen and played in the middle of the field. He worked at the Padaria Central from three in the morning until ten, and he was small and thin, with the forearms of a baker and the legs of a boy. On Albino's grass he was the best player in the club. He received the ball already turning, and gave it away before the man marking him had arrived, and he almost never lifted it off the ground, because on that grass he had never needed to.
On the long grass, the ball did not arrive at his feet when it should. It arrived late and slow, and the men marking him arrived first. Albino, painting the touchline, saw him lose it three times in ten minutes in a practice match, and then saw Brás take him out of the eleven in yellow bibs and put him into the eleven in red, with the reserves.
He did not complain. He went on playing with the reserves. After training, when the others had gone up to the changing room, he stayed out on the pitch with a bag of balls, by himself, and passed them against the wooden board behind the far goal, and watched them come back to him through the grass, slowly, and fetched the ones that did not.
On the Monday after, Albino went over to him with the prism gauge in his hand.
"How long will it be on the day?" Leandro asked.
"Sixty. Maybe more, if it stays warm."
Leandro looked at the ball at his feet. It was sitting in the grass the way an egg sits in straw.
"It stops," he said.
"On the ground it stops," Albino said. He had not meant to say anything else. He was not the trainer; in thirty years he had never told a player anything except to keep off the goalmouths on a Monday. But he had spent a week on his knees looking at this grass, and so he crouched and pushed the ball a little with his finger, so that Leandro could see it. "Look where it sits. It's not on the ground. It's on top of the grass. There's air under it."
Leandro crouched too, and looked. The ball sat up on the long blades, two fingers clear of the soil.
"On short grass," Albino said, "you have to dig for it. Here you can get your foot under it. You don't need to kick it hard. You only need to lift it, a little, so it goes over the grass and not through it."
He stood up, because his knees hurt, and went back to the shed. From the shed door he watched Leandro try it. The first balls went too high, and the board behind the goal boomed, and the old men drinking at the bar terrace looked round. Then they began to go lower. By the time the lights came on, the balls were leaving Leandro's foot at the height of a man's knee and travelling over the grass, not through it, and dropping, and reaching the board on the first bounce.
On the Wednesday Albino turned off the sprinklers at the valve in the pump house and hung the key on the nail. The weather held: blue, dry, twenty-four degrees in the afternoons, the wind from the east, off the plain. The grass slowed, as he had said it would, and began to lose its shine, and by Friday there was a pale cast over it, as if somebody had breathed on it.
The scaffolding came on the Thursday on two of Torcato's lorries, and was up by Friday night: eleven rows of planks on steel tubes along the far touchline, with the club's name on a banner across the front, newly painted by the girls' team. The federation sent a man on Friday to look at the floodlights and the changing rooms and the stand. He walked the pitch with Torcato and stopped in the centre circle and pushed at the grass with the toe of his shoe.
"It's long," he said.
"It's within the rules," said Torcato.
"It is within the rules," the man agreed, and wrote something down.
Albino walked it himself on Saturday at dawn, the day before the match, before anybody came. There was dew on it, the last of the dew there would be until the weather turned. When he looked back from the far goal he could see his own footprints all the way across, dark in the grey, each one exact. On his grass at twenty-five they would have been gone in a quarter of an hour. These would last until ten.
He did not sit in the stand. He never had. He watched from the door of the shed, behind the near goal, on a plastic chair, as he had watched every home match for thirty years, because from there he could see where the studs went in.
There were three thousand two hundred people in the ground, which was more than lived in the town. The Lisbon club came in a coach with tinted windows, and their players walked out to look at the pitch before the warm-up in the club's training tops, and one of them knelt and put the flat of his hand on the grass, the way Albino did, and looked up at the others and laughed.
For an hour, Brás was right. Vale do Sabugo stood in their two lines of four in front of their own area and moved left and right together. The Lisbon players passed the ball among themselves, and every pass arrived a fraction late, and twice their winger knocked the ball past his man and ran after it and found it had stopped behind him in the grass. When the ball came to a Vale do Sabugo player he hit it long, for the two big men, and the crowd roared every time it went over the halfway line, whatever happened to it afterwards. At half-time it was nothing each. In the bar, Albino heard afterwards, Torcato had bought a round for everyone standing at it.
The goal came in the sixty-third minute. Their number eight took a ball on his chest twenty-five metres out, let it drop, and hit it on the volley before it reached the grass. It went in under the bar. It had not touched the pitch from the moment it left the Lisbon goalkeeper's hands.
Brás put Leandro on with fifteen minutes to play. He went into the middle, in front of the two lines of four, and the first ball he got he lost, because he tried to play it along the ground out of habit, and it stopped. The second ball he got, he did not play along the ground. He got his foot under it, the way he had done against the board every evening that week, and lifted it over the grass, at the height of a man's knee, into the space beyond the Lisbon full-back; and the ball dropped and bounced once, and sat up for the winger, who had never had a ball like it in his life and did not know what to do with it, and put it into the scaffolding stand.
He did it four more times before the end. Once, in the eighty-ninth minute, the winger knew what to do with it, and crossed, and the bigger of the two big men headed it against the post. Three thousand two hundred people made a sound that Albino felt in the plastic chair.
It finished one-nil. The Lisbon players shook hands and walked off. On the Tuesday the Diário do Sul said that Vale do Sabugo had made it very difficult, which was true, and that the pitch had been a disgrace, which was true also; and Torcato cut the piece out and pinned it to the board in the bar, under the photograph of the full stand.
On Monday, at seven, Albino turned the sprinklers on again by hand, and let them run an hour. Then he set the mower's cutting height at forty and went up and down the pitch until noon, and the box filled with long grass every forty metres, and he emptied it each time on the heap behind the shed, where it lay smelling of hay.
Under the cut, the pitch was yellow. Not brown; yellow, the yellow of a leaf that has been in the dark, with green above it where the tips had been. The studs of twenty-two men and the boots of the referee and the knees of the Lisbon player who had put his hand on it had left the long grass flattened in great swirls, like hair on a pillow, and where he could not lift it with the mower's brush he had to go back and rake it up by hand.
Brás came at four. He stood at the edge of the pitch in his tracksuit with his initials on it and looked at the colour.
"Sunday," he said.
"Thirty on Sunday," said Albino. "Twenty-five the week after."
"Torrejanos have a synthetic pitch. They're used to it fast."
"Then let them have the ball," said Albino, "and give it to Leandro when they lose it."
Brás looked at him for a moment, as though Albino had walked into the changing room at half-time and begun to talk.
They drew with Torrejanos, two each, on the Sunday. Leandro started in the middle, in the yellow bibs, and lifted the ball over the yellow grass, and made one of the goals that way, and on the very next attack played the ball short, along the floor, to the left-back, and it stopped, and Torrejanos scored from it. In the stand afterwards they argued about whether that was his fault or the grass's. Albino, who had watched it from the shed door, thought it was both.
By the end of November the nights went down to four degrees and the grass stopped growing. It stayed the colour of straw at the base, with a thin green fur over it, all winter, as he had said it would. The under-thirteens played on it on Saturday mornings and the ball sat down in it, and the boys, who had grown up on twenty-five millimetres, kicked it twice and complained to their fathers, and their fathers complained to Torcato, who told them about the thirty-eight thousand euros, and about the new boiler for the changing room showers that it had paid for, and about the lights.
Brás was sacked on the fifteenth of January, after four defeats in five, and went to a club in the Beira. The new trainer was a man of fifty who had played for Vale do Sabugo twenty years before, and the first thing he did on his first morning was put out ten cones in a circle and start a rondo. The ball would not run. He stopped it after a minute, and walked over to the shed, and asked Albino how long.
"March," said Albino.
He overseeded the worn places in the second week of March, the goalmouths and the centre circle and the long strip down the middle where the ball had gone up and down in October: ten sacks of ryegrass, as he had said, scattered from a spinner on the back of the little tractor, and rolled in, and watered twice a day. The seed came up in nine days, fine and pale. By the first of April the whole surface was green again from the soil up, and on the second Monday in April, for the first time since October, he set the mower's height at twenty-five and cut it.
On the Tuesday he knelt at the six places with the prism gauge, and read twenty-five, twenty-five, twenty-five, and twenty-six by the near corner flag, where the eucalyptus was.
That night he set the timer in the pump house again, for four in the morning, forty minutes, and went home to the Rua do Chafariz, and went to bed. The window was open; the nights were warm again. A little before four the motorbike from the Padaria Central went past the end of the street, going down to the ovens, as it did every night, and after it there was nothing for a while, only the dogs; and then, across the two hundred metres of dark between the house and the ground, the sprinklers came on.
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THE END
Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Nōnās Octōbrēs (4 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Wengeriānō Prōgressūs per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Wengeresque Development Simulacrum, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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