Cover Shadow

by High Press Philosophy, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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By twenty to ten the rubber crumbs were already in Nives Montanari's shoes. They came over the low board at the side of the artificial pitch whenever a boy went to ground, black and small as peppercorns, and settled in the turn-ups of her trousers, and that night she would find them on the bathroom floor at home, as she did every Saturday from September to May.

The grass pitches at the training centre were white with frost, so the trial was on the synthetic, the one beside the ring road, with the tile warehouse on one side and the bare pear orchard on the other. Forty-four boys born in 2012 had come in their parents' cars from as far as Mantua and Rovigo. They wore bibs in four colours, and under the bibs black vests, and in each vest, between the shoulder blades, a pocket holding a GPS unit the size of a box of matches. When the boys bent over to get their breath, the units stood up on their backs like small humps.

Two teams were on the pitch, yellow and blue. The other two sat on the benches in their tracksuits, watching the ball.

Nives was watching yellow's number 14.

She did not know his name. Names came later, on the sheet that Bruno Cattani would hand round at lunch, and she preferred not to have one until she had decided whether she needed it. He was a thin boy with a big head, dark, his socks pushed down round his ankles in a way the club would stop by Easter if it took him. He played in the middle of the yellow team's midfield, slightly to the left of centre, and in the first eleven minutes he had touched the ball four times.

She had her notebook open on the top of the board, the squared one, and her pencil. Every time blue's right centre-back had the ball and looked up, she watched where his eyes went. They went first to blue's number 8, who was standing between the lines in a good place, and then they came off him and went sideways, to the full-back, and the ball went to the full-back. Every time that happened she drew a short arrow on the paper and put a stroke through it.

There were nine crossed arrows.

It was not that number 14 was marking the blue 8. He was nowhere near him. He was eight or nine metres from him, and when the centre-back had the ball he took one step, never more than two, not towards the ball and not towards the 8, but to the side, so that he was standing on the line between them. That was all. From where the centre-back stood, the 8 was behind number 14. You could have passed to him over the top, if you were thirteen and could lift a ball nine metres onto a moving foot with a boy coming at you. Not many of them could. So the ball went to the full-back, and the full-back had the touchline on one side and nowhere much to go.

Then 14 moved again. He moved across with the ball, and as he moved he said something, and the yellow boy on his left came with him, half a beat late at first, then not. Nives could not hear what he said over the ring road. She watched his left hand. It came down by his side, flat, and pressed at the air, twice, the way you calm a dog.

---

"Lodi," said Davide Ferraresi.

He had come out of the club hut with two coffees in paper cups and his tablet under his arm, and he put one of the coffees on the board beside her notebook without looking at the notebook. He was thirty-eight. He had a degree in sports science from Bologna and a job title in English, Head of Recruitment, and he was the first person at the club in eleven years who had asked her opinion and then written it down.

"The nine in yellow," he said. "Christian Lodi. Look at this."

He tilted the tablet towards her. On the screen there was a green rectangle and twenty-two dots, yellow and blue, moving on it. The dots moved very smoothly, more smoothly than the boys. There was no ball. The ball had nothing in it to send a signal.

He touched the yellow dot with 9 on it and a panel came up. Top speed, 27.4 kilometres an hour. Sprints, six. High-intensity distance. Touches, which an assistant was entering by hand from the hut window.

"Thirteen years old," said Ferraresi. "Twenty-seven four."

On the pitch Christian Lodi took the ball from the yellow left-back, turned, went past one blue boy on the outside and another on the inside and was brought down on the edge of the area. The parents on the far side made a noise. He got up and pulled his bib straight and looked at the bench.

"He's good," said Nives.

"He's very good."

"Look at fourteen."

Ferraresi touched the yellow dot with 14 on it. She did not look at the screen; she looked at the pitch, where blue's centre-back had the ball again and number 14 had taken his step.

"Lowest distance on the pitch," said Ferraresi. "Of both teams. No sprints. Four touches." He turned the tablet so she could see. "Top speed nineteen something."

"Yes."

"Is he injured?"

"No."

He waited. She drew another arrow and crossed it through, and he looked at the notebook then, at the row of small crossed arrows down the squared paper, and did not ask.

Blue's goalkeeper had the ball. He rolled it out to the left centre-back, who passed it square to the right centre-back, who looked up and saw the 8 behind number 14 and turned and played it back to the goalkeeper. And number 14 went.

He did not go at the goalkeeper; Christian Lodi did that, late and fast and straight, as he had been doing all morning. Number 14 went at the right centre-back, who had just given the ball away and was still facing his own goal. He arrived as the goalkeeper's pass came back, a hurried pass because Lodi was on him, and the centre-back had to take it with his back to the play. Fourteen took it off him on the turn. It was not a tackle. He put his foot where the ball was going to be, and the ball went there. Then he gave it to Lodi, who had nothing to do but put it past a goalkeeper on the ground.

Bruno's assistant clapped at the hut window. The parents on the far side stood up. Lodi ran to the corner flag with his arms out.

Number 14 walked back to the middle of the pitch. When he got there he turned round and pointed at the yellow right midfielder, who had gone to celebrate with Lodi, and then pointed at the place where the right midfielder should have been, and the right midfielder went.

"Lodi again," said Ferraresi, and touched the dot.

---

At ten o'clock Bruno Cattani blew the whistle and the two teams changed with the two on the benches. Bruno ran the under-14s in the week and the trials on Saturdays, and he had done it for twenty years, through four owners and six presidents and the year the club went down to Serie C and nearly out of business. He wore a woollen hat with the club badge on it and carried a clipboard he never wrote on.

Nives went round the end of the pitch to him, stepping over the hose that the groundsman had left out by the gate. Bruno was handing out water bottles.

"When are yellow and blue back on?" she said.

"Eleven. Green and red first."

"Could you put the yellow fourteen in blue for the second game? And blue's six in yellow. Straight swap."

Bruno looked at her, and then across the pitch at the bench where number 14 was sitting with a bottle between his knees, not drinking from it. The boy's back was to them. The GPS unit stood up between his shoulder blades.

"Why?"

"I want to see yellow without him."

Bruno looked at her for a little longer, the way he looked at a boy who had told him his hamstring was tight. Then he went over to the bench and touched number 14 on the shoulder and said something, and the boy got up and pulled the yellow bib over his head and took a blue one from the bag. It had 17 on it. The blue number 6, a tall boy with a fringe, took the yellow 14 without being asked, as if this happened every week. Perhaps it did.

When she got back to the board Ferraresi had taken her coffee cup and his own and was standing with both, one in each hand, the tablet under his arm.

"You moved him," he said.

"Bruno moved him."

"It won't change the numbers. He'll run the same wherever you put him." He gave her back the cup. The coffee had gone cold. "That's the point of numbers."

"Yes," she said. "Watch yellow."

---

Green and red played for half an hour, and she watched them, because that was the job, and wrote down two colours and two numbers. A left-footed centre-back in red who stepped up a fraction before the other three did and pulled them with him. A green goalkeeper who came for a cross through a crowd and caught it. She drew nothing for either of them. She wrote the numbers and the minute.

Then yellow and blue came back on.

The blue 6 now wore the yellow 14, and he went to the place in the middle of the yellow midfield, slightly to the left of centre, where the other boy had been all morning, and he stood in it. He was a good player. You could see that in the first minute. He wanted the ball, and when it came to him he took it on the half-turn and played it forward, and he got his head up when he did it.

Nives did not watch him. She watched the place he was standing in.

Blue's right centre-back had the ball at the end of the second minute. He looked up. His eyes went to the 8, who was where he had been all morning, between the lines and to the right; and the eyes stayed there. The yellow 14 was three metres from the line between them, watching the ball. The centre-back played it. It went along the ground through the gap the size of a door, to the 8's left foot, and the 8 turned.

Now yellow's back four had a boy running at them with the ball and his head up and nobody in front of him. Two of them went to him and two did not. The yellow left-back dropped, and the right-back stepped up, and for a moment the line was a slope instead of a line, and the 8 put the ball into the slope, and a blue forward ran onto it and hit it at the goalkeeper's chest.

Nives drew an arrow. She did not cross it through.

By the eighth minute there were four arrows not crossed through. Christian Lodi had the ball twice in that time, and the second time he beat three men and shot over. But between those two times yellow did not have it, and the yellow midfield ran. The four of them ran from the left side of the pitch to the right after the ball and back again, each one a fraction behind the ball and a fraction apart from the next, so that each time they got there the ball had gone through the space between them. The new 14 ran most. He ran harder than anybody on the pitch. He went after the ball in four directions in ninety seconds and did not get near it, and when he came back to the middle he put his hands on his knees.

"Fourteen's working hard," said Ferraresi, beside her. He had the tablet up.

"Look at the other one."

He found blue's new number, 17, on the screen, and she watched him on the pitch. For the first five minutes blue had looked no different. The boy had gone into the blue midfield, left of centre, and taken his one step and his two, and nothing had come of it, because the blue boy beside him did not know to come across with him and the gap simply opened on the other side. He had walked over to that boy during a throw-in and talked to him, close, with his hand on the boy's arm, as if he were telling him something private about his family. Since then they had gone across together. By the tenth minute the blue midfield was moving like a curtain on a rail, the four of them, the same distance apart going left as coming back, and the yellow centre-backs, who had found the pass into midfield easy in the first game, no longer looked for it, and passed to each other instead.

He touched the ball once in those ten minutes, when a yellow midfielder took a pass with his back to the blue goal: he came in from behind and to the side, took it, and played it simply to the blue full-back, two metres away, and then walked back to his place.

At eighteen minutes the blue 8 received between the lines for the sixth time, turned, waited for the yellow left-back to come to him, and slipped the ball through the space where the left-back had been. Blue scored. It was 1–0 to blue. None of the yellow parents stood up, and on the far side a father said something loud about the defence.

Nives drew the sixth arrow. She had stopped looking at the boy in blue. She was looking at the yellow back four, at the left-back with his hands on his hips, who had gone to the ball because there was nobody else to go, and who now stood in the space and looked round at the others, as though one of them would tell him where he ought to have been.

---

When Bruno blew at thirty minutes Ferraresi did not say anything. He was scrolling. He took the summary page for the first game and laid it next to the summary for the second, using two fingers, and made the columns line up.

"Yellow's gone up," he said.

"Yes."

"Total distance. Eleven per cent, team average, against the first game." He moved his finger down the column. "The four in midfield are up seventeen. The back four's up. High-intensity's up nearly a third. Lodi's the same." He scrolled. "The new fourteen is top on the pitch."

"He ran very well," said Nives.

Ferraresi looked at her. Then he went back to the screen and found the blue column, and she watched him find it: blue's total down a little, against the first game; blue's midfield down. The boy in blue 17 at the bottom of the list again, lowest distance on the pitch, no sprints, one touch.

"He's still bottom," said Ferraresi.

"Yes."

"Lowest on the pitch twice. Both teams. And the team he's on runs less and the team he's left runs more." He said it slowly, reading it out, as though he were checking somebody else's figures.

She did not answer. On the pitch the boys were pulling off their bibs, and the kit man had come out with a grey plastic case on wheels and was taking the GPS units out of the vests one by one, laying them in the foam. Each one went into its slot and a small light came on in it, red, then green.

Number 17 in blue came off last. He had stopped by the blue 8 on the way and said something to him and pointed at the ground near the halfway line, and the 8 had nodded. Then he came over to the case and turned round, and the kit man reached into the pocket between his shoulder blades and took the unit out. The boy went on towards the changing rooms with his bib in his hand. The kit man put the unit in the foam with the others.

Ferraresi was looking at the case. There were forty-four slots, and the lights in them were the same colour.

"What's his name?" he said.

"I don't know yet. Bruno has the sheet."

He held out his hand for the notebook. She gave it to him. He turned back through the squared pages to the morning and looked for a long time at the first column of arrows, each one crossed through, then at the second column, six arrows, not crossed. He did not ask what they meant.

Then he laid the notebook open on the top of the board, flattened the page with the side of his hand, and held the tablet over it, square, until the camera found the lines of the paper, and took the photograph.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Nōnās Octōbrēs (4 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Philosophiae Pressiōnis Altae per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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High Press Philosophy Simulacrum, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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