Closing the Angle

by George Best, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The first one came back off his own leg.

Gareth Spence came off his line the way he had come off it for twenty-three years: low, quick, arms out, making himself a wall. Close the angle. Every coach he'd ever had said it, and it was true; a striker who sees a big man coming at him sees less goal. The girl had the ball on the edge of the area, nobody near her, and she'd slowed nearly to a stop, as if she'd forgotten what she was meant to do with it. So he went. He was four yards from her and set to spread when she touched the ball, not past him and not over him, but into him, a firm little side-foot against his right shin. It came straight back to her like a ball off a wall. He was still travelling forward, the way your body keeps going when there's one more stair than you thought. She stepped round the place where he'd been and rolled it into the empty net.

"Unlucky, big man," said Davy Mairs, from behind him.

Gareth got up. There were black rubber crumbs stuck to the palms of his gloves and the side of his face. On the touchline somebody from the other team was laughing, not unkindly. The girl had already turned and was jogging back to her own half, pulling her hair tie tighter.

It was a Thursday in October, ten past eight, the pitch behind the leisure centre on the Comber Road, seven-a-side, fifty-six pounds the hour. Gareth booked it. Gareth always booked it. He collected the money, four pounds a head, in a plastic pint glass he kept in the boot of the van, and he paid the odd pound himself when they were short, which was every week. His team played in shirts that said HANNA'S KITCHENS & BEDROOMS across the front because Ronnie Hanna paid for them and because four of them fitted kitchens for him, Gareth included. He was forty-one. His knees made a sound like a drawer runner when he crouched.

The other lot were a pick-up side from Moneyreagh who called themselves Moneyreagh Rovers when they had to write something down. They were one short tonight and a man called Colin Agnew had brought his daughter. She was sixteen, Colin said, as if somebody had asked. She was small. She had on a pair of boots too good for the rest of her kit, and a grey school PE top with the badge unpicked.

Moneyreagh's men were still clapping her when Davy kicked off. Gareth stood in his goal and thought: fluke. A ball hits your shin. It happens. You come out, you spread, sometimes it hits you on the wrong bit and goes the wrong way. He'd been scored on off his own backside once at Ballyoran, years ago, and they'd talked about it in the pub for a month.

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Hanna's got one back, then went ahead. Big Stevie Kerr, who drove for Ronnie, scored both, the first a toe-poke and the second a header off a corner that came in so badly it was almost good. Gareth didn't have a lot to do. He clapped his gloves and shouted at Davy to get tight, and he watched the girl.

She didn't run much. That was the first thing. The Moneyreagh men ran everywhere, as men in their thirties do when they've been sitting in a van all day, and she drifted about out wide like someone waiting for a bus. When the ball came to her she took it with whichever foot it arrived on. He noticed that and then forgot it, and then noticed it again on the third or fourth time.

Twenty minutes in, Davy got caught on the half-way line trying to beat a man he had no business trying to beat, and the ball came across to her with the whole of the left side open.

Gareth came out.

He did it right. He knew he did it right, because he'd watched himself on Davy's phone once and been surprised at how much he looked like a keeper. He came hard for ten yards and then shortened, little steps, so he'd be balanced when it mattered. She was coming at him slowly. Slower than slowly; she was almost walking. Her head was up. And because she was walking, he kept coming, because the gap was there to be shut and nobody was shutting it but him, and he wanted to be on her before she lifted her head and found the corner.

He had his weight on his left foot, setting to go down to that side, when she touched it.

Same thing. Off his shin, his left shin this time, the one with his weight on it, the one that couldn't move because it was holding him up. He felt it go off the bone through his sock and his shin pad and he was already turning his head, already knowing, and it had come back to her right foot and she'd taken one touch round him and passed it in.

Two-two.

Davy said nothing. Stevie said, "Ah, for f—", and remembered there was a sixteen-year-old in it and finished, "—for goodness' sake, Gaz."

Gareth stood up slowly. His knees did their drawer runner. He looked at the girl, and she wasn't celebrating, and she wasn't looking at him either. She was looking at the ball in the net, the way you'd look at a shelf you'd just put up, checking it was level.

All the way to half-time he kept seeing it. The dander. Himself coming on because she was dandering. His weight going down on the left leg, and the ball going off the left leg, the one that couldn't get out of the way.

He wasn't the wall. He was the other half of a one-two.

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At half-time they stood about at the goal at the leisure-centre end and drank from bottles. Stevie was talking about a job in Holywood, a woman who wanted a quartz worktop with no join in it, eleven feet long. Davy was on his phone. Ronnie's nephew, who was nineteen and on the team because Ronnie paid for the shirts, was lying on his back on the plastic grass with his arms out.

Down the other end, on her own, the girl had a ball. Her dad and the Moneyreagh men were in a huddle by the gate, smoking and arguing about something on the telly, and she was in the corner where the floodlight was weakest, playing the ball against the bottom board with her left foot. Only her left foot. Pass, it came back, pass. Little ones. Then she'd let it come back past her and stop it dead with the sole, and go again. When it went wrong, which was not often, she didn't look round to see if anyone had seen. She just went and got it.

Gareth watched her do forty or fifty. He lost count. He thought of his own father, who had stood him in front of the garage door in Knockmore Park in 1993 and kicked a size-four Mitre at him for an hour every evening of one summer, every evening, until the door had a dent in it the shape of nothing in particular and his mother made them stop. He had not thought about that door in years.

"Gaz," said Stevie. "Are you right?"

"I'm right," he said.

---

The second half began, and he decided he would not come out.

It was a reasonable thing to decide. If she wanted his shins, she could have them where they were, on the line, under the bar, with the whole goal behind them to land in. Let her shoot. She was sixteen, she was small. He was six foot one and he'd been doing this since before she was born. He'd make himself big where he stood, and she'd have to beat him the old way, and she wouldn't.

Ronnie's nephew had the same idea about her, from a different direction. Early in the half she took a ball on the touchline in front of the Hanna's bench, which was a holdall and two coats, and the nephew went through her. He didn't mean anything by it. He was nineteen and the game had got away from him and he wanted to do something about it with his whole body. He came in from the side, shoulder and hip, the way you'd shift a fridge.

Gareth was forty yards off and he still flinched for her.

She didn't go down. She went sideways, a foot, maybe more, and her left arm went out like somebody steadying themselves on a bus, and her right foot never left the ball. It stayed on it. It came with her. The nephew bounced off and kept going the way he'd been going, which was over the holdall, and she was already upright and already slow again, already looking up the line, and she knocked it inside to her dad as if nothing had happened, because as far as the ball was concerned nothing had.

"Free kick!" Colin Agnew shouted, from five yards away, with the ball at his feet.

"Ah, play on," said one of his own men.

The nephew got up off the coats with his face red. He didn't go near her again. For the rest of the night, when she got it, he stood off her two yards and watched her feet, and she walked past him every time, because two yards was plenty.

It came at the hour, near enough. Moneyreagh had a throw on the left, and it went short to her, and Davy went with her, and she went slow, slow, slow, and then she didn't, and Davy was looking at the back of her and she was in on the angle of the box.

Gareth stayed. He set his feet. He bent his knees, which complained, and put his hands out low and wide, and he stayed.

She came on. Ten yards. Eight. Six. He waited for her to look up and pick a corner, and he'd read her hips and go. That was all he had to do. He'd done it ten thousand times. Five yards. She hadn't looked up. Four. He realised that her head had been up the whole time and she'd been looking at him, at his feet, not at any corner. Three.

He shifted his weight. He didn't mean to. He would have sworn on a Bible he didn't, but his body had been standing and waiting for something to happen for long enough, and it decided, the way bodies do, that it had better go somewhere, and it went a little bit left. A little bit was enough. She side-footed it to his right, without hurry, and it went in about a yard inside the post, rolling, and he watched it go past him close enough to touch and couldn't.

Three-two to Moneyreagh.

So staying was coming out too. Staying was just coming out slower.

He picked the ball out of the net himself. The girl was walking back up the pitch. Colin Agnew had his hands on his head on the far side and was saying something to the man beside him that Gareth couldn't hear, though he could see the shape of it, the proud uselessness of a father who'd had nothing to do with it.

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Hanna's equalised from a mess in the six-yard box, nobody sure afterwards who'd touched it last. Stevie claimed it. There were six minutes left on the clock above the leisure-centre doors, and then four, and then Ronnie's nephew gave the ball away in the middle of the pitch to a Moneyreagh man who fell over, and the ball rolled on to the girl, and she was through. Nobody near her. Davy fifteen yards off and blowing.

Gareth came out.

He came out slowly. He'd never come off his line slowly in his life. It felt like walking into a room in the dark. Five yards off the line, he stopped. He stopped dead, with his feet square and his weight on nothing in particular, in the middle of himself, and he didn't put his hands out to make himself big. He just stood.

She stopped too.

She was eight yards out with the ball under her left sole. Her shoulders dipped right. He saw them dip and he felt everything in him want to go right with them, the whole of the garage door, the whole of Knockmore Park, and he didn't go. He stood. She dipped left. He stood. Somebody on the touchline was shouting, "Shoot! Shoot it, love!" and Davy was coming back across, roaring at nobody, and Gareth stood on the plastic grass with the rubber crumbs in his socks and did nothing at all, with great effort.

She rolled the ball an inch forward. He stood.

And then she laughed. Not at him. It came out of her like something knocked loose, and he heard himself laugh as well, a big stupid bark in the cold, and still neither of them moved, and Davy arrived, and she clipped the ball sideways off the toe of Davy's boot as he lunged in, and caught it on the rebound, and played it gently against Gareth's right shin, and it came back to her, and she played it against his left. It came back again. Davy was on the ground. She did it a third time, off the right, tock, and it came back, and Gareth put his foot on it.

The hooter went on the wall of the leisure centre, flat and long, the way it did at nine every Thursday so the next lot could come on.

She stood looking at the ball under his boot.

"Next week?" she said. Her accent was flatter than her dad's.

"It's fifty-six quid the hour," said Gareth. "It's four quid each."

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He came the next Thursday at half past seven, which was half an hour before he'd booked it for, and the pitch before theirs had cancelled and the floodlights were on over nobody. He had the pint glass in one hand and a ball in the other and he walked out onto the plastic grass and put the ball down.

At the far end, in the corner where the light was weakest, somebody was already there, playing a ball against the bottom board with her left foot.

He didn't call down to her. He went and stood in his goal and bent his knees. After a while she stopped and turned round and looked up the length of the pitch at him, and then she put her foot on the ball and began to dribble it towards him, very slowly, and he came out to meet her, slower.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ā Georgiō Bestō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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George Best, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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