Before the Ball Comes

by Johan Cruyff, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The word was kijk. It means look, and on the nineteenth day it was still the only word Wim Bakels had.

He said it to the nurse who brought the tea. He said it to the tea. He said it to the television on the bracket in the corner of the room, which showed a cooking programme with the sound off, and to the man in the next bed, a retired bricklayer from Osdorp who had lost the use of his left arm and none of his opinions, and who said, "Yes, Wim, I'm looking. There is nothing to see." He said it at night. Anouk heard him say it once in his sleep, quietly, two times, the way a man calls a dog when he does not want to wake the house.

The neurologist was a young woman with a pen that she clicked while she talked. She called it a recurring utterance. When a stroke takes the part of the brain where the words are put together, she said, sometimes one word stays behind. Nobody knows why that one. Often it is the last thing the person said before, or the thing they said most in their life. It is not a sign. It does not mean he is trying to tell you something.

"He understands," said Anouk.

"Most of it. Short sentences. Ask him things he can answer with his hand. Thumb up, thumb down." Click. "Don't ask him to say it. He can't say it."

Wim lay with his right arm on a pillow, where the nurses had put it, because it did nothing now on its own, and he looked at the neurologist with great interest.

"Kijk," he said.

---

He had the stroke on a Saturday at a quarter past nine, on the touchline of the second field at SV De Werf in Amsterdam-Noord, during the warm-up of the under-nines. He had trained that team, or the team that had that name, for forty-one years, since the shipyard closed and he had his mornings free. One of the fathers caught him before his head hit the ground. Another one rang 112. The children, Anouk was told afterwards, had stood in a line in front of the goal and watched the ambulance come across the grass, and then somebody's mother took all of them into the canteen and gave them pancakes, and the match was not played.

Ton Hoekstra, the club secretary, rang her on the Wednesday.

"How is he?"

"He says one word."

"Which word?"

"Kijk."

Ton was quiet for a while. "Yes," he said. "That's Wim."

Then he told her why he was ringing. The under-nines had eleven children and no trainer. The parents had jobs, or said so. The trainer of the under-elevens could take both teams together, but then he had twenty-five children and one pair of eyes, and that is not training, that is a playground. If nobody came, the club would have to withdraw the team, and then the eleven children would go to other clubs, or they would go nowhere.

"I don't know football," said Anouk.

"It's the under-nines," said Ton. "Nobody knows football."

She was forty-six. She was the assistant manager of the supermarket on the Waterlandplein and she did the early shift, six till three, so her afternoons were free, and her Saturdays she could change. She had grown up in a flat that smelt of liniment and wet nylon on Saturday nights. She had not once in her life kicked a ball on purpose.

"Until you find somebody," she said.

"Of course," said Ton. "Until we find somebody."

---

The bag was in the hall of her father's flat, where it always was, against the wall under the coats. Twelve balls in a net, some soft. A pump. Forty flat plastic cones in yellow and orange, stacked on a stick. A set of bibs that had once been green. A notebook with the children's names in it and their birthdays and, under the names, nothing at all.

The next Wednesday at half past four she put the cones out in a big square because she had seen squares on television, and she divided the children into two teams, and she gave them a ball.

What happened then was what happens. Eleven children and one ball. They went after it all together, in one heap, from one end of the square to the other, like starlings, except that starlings do not run into each other. When the ball came out of the heap, the heap followed it. Inside the heap there were kicks and shins and somebody crying, and around it, at a distance, three or four children who were not in the heap and did not want to be.

"Spread out!" Anouk shouted.

They spread out. Then the ball came, and they came back together again, like water.

"Pass it!"

The fastest of them was a boy called Bilal, eight years old, thin, with very new boots. When he had the ball he put his head down and ran, and he ran until somebody took it from him, and then he turned round and ran after the one who had taken it. He did this for forty minutes and did not pass once. Anouk did not blame him. To pass, you have to know somebody is there.

In the far corner of the square, every time, stood a girl called Lieke with her hands in the sleeves of her coat. Nobody was near her. Nobody had been near her all afternoon. She was always free, and nobody ever gave her the ball, because nobody ever looked up and saw her.

At a quarter to six Anouk blew her father's whistle, which tasted of his coffee, and the children went home, and she picked up forty cones, one by one, bending down forty times.

---

On Thursday she went to the speech therapy.

The logopedist was called Malika Haddou. She sat across a small table from Wim with a pile of cards, each one with a picture. She held up a card. A cup.

"Kop," she said. She said it slowly, and she let him see her mouth make it. "Kop. Like a kop koffie. Kop."

Then she pointed at him.

"Kijk," said Wim.

She did not tell him it was wrong. She did not explain anything. She held up the card again and made the word again with her mouth, slowly, and pointed at him again.

"Kijk."

The third time he opened his mouth and the beginning of it came out, a hard K, and then it stopped, as if it had come to a door that was locked. Malika made a small mark on her sheet. She put the cup at the bottom of the pile and took the next card. A key.

"You don't tell him what's wrong?" Anouk asked her afterwards, in the corridor.

"How would I tell him?" said Malika. "With words?"

When Anouk went back into the room Wim was sitting by the window in the wheelchair, with his right hand in his lap and his left hand on the wheel. She sat on the bed and told him about the square and the starlings and the boy with the new boots, and the girl in the corner with her hands in her sleeves.

He laughed. Half of his face did it. The other half watched.

"Kijk," he said.

"Yes. Kijk. I know you say that, Pa." She heard her voice and did not like it. "I'm asking you what I have to do."

He looked at her for a long time. Then he put his left thumb up. She did not know what question it was the answer to.

---

On Tuesday she came at two, because the physiotherapy was at two and Rob, the physiotherapist, had said she could watch.

The gym was on the ground floor. There were parallel bars for walking between, and a set of four wooden steps that went up and down again and led nowhere, and big soft balls in a basket, and in the corner a stack of plastic cones in four colours, like her father's, but cleaner. Wim did ten minutes between the bars with Rob holding his belt from behind. His right foot came forward each time a little late, as if it had been called and had to finish something first. Then Rob put him back in the chair and went to the office to fetch a strap.

Wim pointed at the cones.

"You want them?"

Thumb up.

She brought the stack. He could not bend to the floor, so he pointed, and she put them down where he pointed. One there. One there. One there, behind her. They made a triangle on the floor of the gym, each side about four metres long. Then he pointed at her and at one of the cones, and she went and stood by it.

He pointed at the basket. She brought him a ball. He held it on his knee with his left hand.

She waited for him to throw it. He did not throw it. He held it and looked at her.

"What?"

He lifted the ball a little, as if he was going to throw it to her, and with the same hand, still holding the ball, he pointed past her. Behind her. At the third cone.

"Kijk."

She turned her head and looked at the third cone. There was nothing there. A yellow cone on a grey floor.

He threw. It was not a good throw; it came low and bounced once and she caught it against her stomach. He shook his head. He pointed at the ball, at her, at the third cone. She understood that she was not supposed to keep it. She threw it to the third cone, where there was nobody, and it rolled on and hit the wall bars.

Thumb up.

She fetched the ball and gave it back to him and went back to her place. He lifted it. She stood and waited for it.

He did not throw.

He held it there, on his knee, and he waited, and the clock over the door of the gym went on, and still he did not throw, and then she understood that he was not going to throw it until she had looked. She turned her head and looked at the third cone. As soon as her head moved, he threw. The ball came. Now she knew where it was going after her, and so when it came to her hands it did not stop there. It went on through them to the cone, as if she were a piece of pipe.

Again. He held it. She looked. He threw. Through.

Again.

The fourth time, she looked before he had even lifted the ball.

"Before it comes," she said.

He put his left thumb up and kept it up.

Rob came back with the strap and stopped in the door. "What's this?"

"Training," said Anouk.

---

On Wednesday she put out four cones only. A small square, ten big steps along each side. She put three children in it with one ball and stood behind the one who was going to receive it.

"When the ball comes to you," she said, "before it gets there, I'm going to hold up some fingers behind you. You shout how many. If you shout it right, and you pass it on, that's a point."

"Why?" said a boy called Daan.

"Because it's a game," said Anouk.

She did not tell them why. On the tram she had tried every way of telling them why, and every way was longer than the game.

The first time, the child with the ball passed it, and the child receiving it turned round to look at her fingers when the ball was already at his feet, and it ran past him and out of the square. They all laughed. The second time, the same. The third time, Lieke, who had her hands out of her sleeves for once because it was a game with numbers, turned her head when the ball was only halfway, and shouted "Three!" and stopped it, and passed it, and it was a point.

After that they all wanted points.

They began to look early. They looked too early, some of them, and stood with their heads round over the shoulder like owls, and the ball hit them on the ankle. That was all right. Then they began to look at the right moment, when the ball had left the other foot and not before, and it went quicker. Anouk added a fourth child to the square, and then a fifth, and two in the middle who had to try and take it. She said nearly nothing. When somebody did not look, she held up her fingers anyway, and said nothing, and the child heard the others laughing and next time looked.

Bilal hated it. He wanted to run. In a square of ten steps there is nowhere to run, and every time the ball came to him he put his head down out of habit and the two in the middle took it off him. He went red. He kicked the cone. Then, on the tenth or the twelfth time, he stopped with the ball under his foot and lifted his head and saw, for the first time in the session, all of the others: where they stood, which of them was free. He passed to Lieke. He passed it too hard and she had to run, but she got it.

He looked at the ball going to her as if somebody else had kicked it.

---

Wim had weekend leave in the sixth week. On the Saturday morning Anouk brought him to the club in the regiotaxi, which had a ramp at the back, and Ton and one of the fathers pushed him in the wheelchair across the gravel and the grass to the second field and put a blanket over his knees. He had a flask of coffee and could hold it. The chair stood on the touchline eleven metres from the place where he had fallen. He did not look at the place.

The under-nines play six against six on a quarter of the full pitch, with small goals. The other team had come from Zaandam. They were bigger, or seemed so, and they were better, and after fifteen minutes it was three–nil to Zaandam.

On the other side of the field the parents shouted. They shouted what parents shout. Shoot. Run. Go on. Get it, Bilal, get it. Don't just stand there, Lieke. The children of De Werf still made a heap, often. There had been four weeks of the small square, two afternoons a week, which is nothing. Most of what happened on the field was what had always happened, and Anouk, standing beside the wheelchair with the whistle on its string round her neck, did not mind it.

In the second half Lieke got the ball near the line on the left, where she had been standing alone, because she was always standing alone and now, sometimes, somebody saw it. A Zaandam boy came at her. Bilal was in the middle with his back to the Zaandam goal, and behind him, very close, was another Zaandam boy, the biggest of them.

Lieke passed it. Along the grass, to Bilal.

"Turn, Bilal!" shouted a father. "Draaien!"

Beside Anouk, under the blanket, Wim lifted his left hand from the flask.

"Kijk," he said. Not loud. Nobody on the field could have heard it.

Bilal had already looked. While the ball was still halfway he turned his head over his left shoulder, the way you look for a tram, and he saw the big boy behind him, and on the other side, where nobody from Zaandam was standing, he saw Daan. The ball came. He did not stop it and he did not turn. He played it with the inside of his right foot, once, without looking down, into the place where he had looked.

Anouk did not see what happened after that. She was looking at her father, and her father was looking at the place where the ball was going to be.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem octāvum Kalendās Novembrēs (25 October 2026), ab Iohanne Cruyff per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Johan Cruyff, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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