Handover

by Ancelottian Composure, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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It took four minutes. Emilio Ghirardini knew because the clock on the boardroom wall at Am Hüttenweg was the kind with a second hand that jumps, and he had been looking at it when Dr Termeer began, and he was looking at it when Dr Termeer stopped.

The president said the things that are said. The table. The run. Six points from nine matches, seventeenth, the play-off place gone tonight with the second goal. Respect for his work. A difficult decision, taken unanimously. Jens Kowalczyk, the sporting director, sat beside the president with his hands flat on a closed folder and did not open it. Somewhere under the floor the stewards were stacking the crowd barriers, and each time one went on the pile the water in the jug on the table shivered.

When it was over Ghirardini said thank you. He meant it for the fourteen months, and Termeer seemed to understand that, because he looked down at the jug.

"Two things," Ghirardini said. His German was correct and slow, with the verbs where the teacher in Bochum had told him to put them. "Can I speak to the players?"

Kowalczyk shook his head. "We think it's better not. Timo takes the session Monday. We'll tell them Monday morning."

"They know already," Ghirardini said. "They were in the dressing room with their phones." He let it go. "Second. Hubert. His contract, is it with me or with the club?"

Kowalczyk had to open the folder for that. He turned two pages. "With the club."

"Good."

He took the car key out of his coat pocket, the black fob with the dealer's sticker still on the back, and put it on the table beside the jug. Kowalczyk said there was no hurry, he could keep the car till the end of the month, it was in the agreement. Ghirardini said thank you, but he had a lift. He kept the other ring in his pocket, the training-ground keys, office and side gate, because his things were at Lohfeld.

"Put those through the letterbox when you're done," Kowalczyk said. "Whenever. No hurry." He stood up and held out his hand, and Ghirardini took it, and then the president's, which was dry and cool. At the door he turned back and said that Timo Brandt was a good coach and they should let him do it for a few weeks before they decided anything. Termeer said they would certainly consider that.

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The kit van was in the tunnel bay with its back doors open and the engine running for the heater. Hubert Schwieters was throwing the last of the laundry sacks in, one at a time, two-handed, the way you throw a sack of feed. He was sixty-seven and had been kit man at Krämerbach under eleven managers. He had a knee that the club doctor wanted to replace and Hubert did not.

He did not ask. He looked at Ghirardini's face and then at the space in Ghirardini's hand where the car key was not, and he shut the van doors and went round to the driver's side.

The van smelled of grass and wintergreen and wet nylon. Hubert drove the way he always drove, ten under the limit, both hands, out past the floodlights and the shuttered sausage stand and the Lidl and on to the Lohfelder Straße, where the streetlights were orange and then white where the town had started changing them. Neither of them said anything for two kilometres.

"Eleven," Hubert said, at the lights by the canal bridge. "You are eleven."

"I know."

"Rademacher took his office chair. It was the club's chair. Hollmann made a speech in the car park to Bild." Hubert's jaw worked. "Wenzel cried."

"Wenzel was young."

"Wenzel was fifty-two."

The lights changed. Ghirardini watched the canal go under them, black, with a single barge tied up below the lock and a light on in its cabin.

"How's the knee?"

"Same."

"And the boy? The exam?"

Hubert's grandson was doing his master's certificate in electrical installation, the practical part, in Dortmund, on a Saturday in November. Hubert had told him this once, in August, at the water break of a pre-season session, and had not mentioned it since.

"The twenty-second," Hubert said. Then, after a while: "He's nervous of the wiring board. They give you a fault and you've got forty minutes."

"He'll find it."

"That's what I tell him."

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At Lohfeld the security light over the side gate came on when the van turned in. Hubert went to the laundry room to start the machines, because the kit had to be clean for Monday whoever was standing on the touchline in it, and Ghirardini went up the outside stairs to his office with the second key.

It was a small room. The club had offered him the bigger one at the stadium, with the leather sofa and the view of the pitch, and he had asked instead for this one, above the dressing rooms at the training ground, because you could hear the players coming in. He took his coat off and hung it on the back of the door and stood for a moment with his hands in his pockets.

He started with the windowsill. There was a pot of basil there, the second of the year, grown from seed his wife had sent from the garden in Luzzara in a paper envelope with non troppa acqua written on it in her capitals. He had overwatered the first. He put the pot in a cardboard box from under the desk that had once held cones. Then the photograph of Paola and her mother on the bench outside the house, the mother in sunglasses, both of them laughing at something to one side of the camera. Then the coffee: the little aluminium pot, the gas ring he was not strictly allowed, the half-kilo bag folded over and pegged. Then four books he had not read and one he had, a mug from the Christmas party with his name spelled Girardini, and a pair of boots, old, black, with the studs worn down at the toes.

He did not touch the whiteboard. On it, in his own hand, in blue, was the plan for the week: Mon recovery / Tue without ball 4+2 lines / Wed set pieces / Thu 11v11 / Fri light. Brandt would want something to start from on Monday, even if it was only something to rub out.

He sat down at the desk and took a sheet of the club's paper from the drawer and wrote at the top Für Timo, and under it, Kraft, and then sat with the pen above the paper.

Below him the first washing machine began to turn, a slow rumble through the floor, and then the second.

He wrote a few lines. He crossed them out. The trouble was that they were tactical, and Brandt knew the tactics; Brandt had drawn half of them. He took a new sheet. He looked at the boots in the box. At the bottom of the stairs Hubert called up that he would be twenty minutes with the wash and then he would drive him home, and Ghirardini called back that there was no hurry, and folded the sheet in half and put it, and the pad, in his coat pocket with the keys.

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The flat was in a new block by the canal basin, two rooms and a balcony, rented by the club. Hubert carried the box up the stairs and would not be stopped, and set it down on the kitchen table, and stood in the doorway with his cap in his hands.

"Monday," he said, "the boys will ask me."

"Tell them Brandt is a good coach."

"They know that."

"Then tell them to train well." Ghirardini thought. "And tell Ruhnau he left his gloves in the physio room. The black ones. They're on the radiator."

Hubert looked at him for a moment as if he were going to say something else. Then he put his cap on and went down, slowly, one step at a time on the bad knee, and Ghirardini heard the van start in the street and go.

His phone, which he had turned face down in the boardroom, had thirty-one missed calls on it, most of them from numbers he did not have saved, two from his agent in Milan, one from Paola. There were messages. He read the one from Dennis Kraft, the captain, sent at 23:02 from the players' car park: Mister is it true?

He typed with one finger. Yes. Thank you for everything. Monday train well, Timo is a good coach. Give my regards to Sanne and the little one. He read it through, took out an exclamation mark he had put at the end by accident, and sent it. Then he rang Paola, who had been watching on the internet in the kitchen in Luzzara and had stayed up. They talked for twenty minutes, mostly about her mother's hip and about whether the walnut tree by the road needed taking down before the winter. Near the end she asked if he was all right, and he said yes, and she said good, then she would go to bed, and he should eat something.

He made eggs. He ate them standing up at the counter. Then he opened the laptop on the kitchen table beside the box, and found the match on the analyst's server, which nobody had yet thought to lock him out of, and watched it again from the beginning with the sound off.

---

He watched it the way he watched every match, with the notebook open, a line down the middle of the page. On the left, what we did. On the right, what they let us do.

For twenty-six minutes they had been the better side. He had known that on the touchline and he could see it now. Yusuf Demir had found the half-space behind Lindhorst's midfield three times in the first quarter of an hour; the third time Noah Adjei, who was nineteen, had gone round the left-back as if the man were a coat stand, and the cross had been half a metre too high for Kowalczyk's expensive striker and exactly right for nobody. Ghirardini wrote it in the left column. 26' — Demir between lines x3. Adjei 1v1 won x4. He wrote good, and underlined it, and went on.

The first goal was a set piece, a corner flicked on at the near post and turned in at the far one, where Bartosz Wilk had been blocked by his own centre-back. He watched it four times. Nobody had done anything stupid. A man had been half a yard where he should have been a yard. Near post — Kraft stands. Wed. He wrote that, and then remembered that on Wednesday he would not be there, and left it.

In the sixty-fifth minute he had taken Demir off and sent on Mats Ruhnau.

He watched Ruhnau's twenty-eight minutes twice. Ruhnau was twenty-six and slow and had a right foot that did whatever he asked of it. He had come to Krämerbach two summers before, from a club in the Netherlands that had played through him, and in fourteen months Ghirardini had started him five times. He did not press. He could not; he did not have the legs for the running Brandt's numbers asked for, and the side was built on the running. Every week, at the board on Friday, his magnet went to the edge.

In twenty-eight minutes Ruhnau had touched the ball thirty-one times, which was more than anyone else on the pitch in the same period. He had lost it twice. Ghirardini stopped the video at seventy-four minutes and went back. Ruhnau, in the centre circle, with a Lindhorst player arriving on him from behind, had not turned. He had not needed to. He had put the ball first time with the outside of his foot into the channel for Adjei, forty metres, along the ground, before the man arrived, and Adjei had been so surprised to receive it that he had taken a touch too many and the chance had gone. On the touchline Ghirardini had not seen it; he had been talking to the fourth official about the time. He watched it a third time, and a fourth. Then he let the match run to the end, to the second goal, a breakaway in the eighty-ninth minute with Kraft up for a corner, and the Lindhorst players running to their supporters in the corner, and the camera finding him, still, on the touchline with his hands in his coat. He shut the laptop.

It was twenty past three. He took the folded sheet out of his coat pocket, flattened it, put it to one side, and on a clean sheet wrote Für Timo again, and this time he did not stop.

Kraft. Captain because the others listen to him, not because he talks. Don't make him talk more. His daughter starts Kita in January; he will want to do the drop-off on Mondays, let him come at ten.

Wilk. If you shout at him he gets worse. If you say nothing after a mistake he is better in the next match. Tell the goalkeeping coach.

Demir. Fasting next spring, Ramadan, he will tell you himself in February. Last year we moved the double session to the morning and he was the best in the squad in April.

Adjei. He is nineteen and lives alone. Ask about his mother in Accra. Don't give him instructions with the ball. Without the ball, as many as you like. He likes to know where to stand.

Hubert. The knee. He will not say. When the session is on the far pitch, don't let him carry the bags. It is three hundred metres across the car park.

He wrote a line for each of the twenty-four. Some were one sentence; Kraft's ran on to the back. He did not write about systems. He wrote that Demir played better when his brother was in the stand, and that the young centre-back from the second team was frightened of the Saturday crowd and was not frightened at all on the Thursday when it was eleven against eleven and nobody was watching, and that it might be worth starting him in an away match first. He wrote that the dressing-room radio was the players' business and Brandt should not touch it.

He came to Ruhnau last. He sat with the pen for some time.

Ruhnau. He crossed out the full stop. Ruhnau: I did not find a place for him. The side was built for running and I did not change it, and every week I put him at the edge of the board because it was easier than changing the side. That was my mistake, not his. He is the best footballer at the club. See the 74th minute last night. You are younger than me and you are cleverer with the numbers. Find him a place. If you have to change the side, change the side.

He read it through twice. Then he added, under it: His gloves are on the radiator in the physio room.

He signed it, E.G., and folded the pages into three and put them in an envelope from the drawer in the hall, and wrote Timo Brandt — persönlich on the front.

---

It was almost six when he went down. The streets by the canal basin were empty, and a dog in a lit window watched him go. He walked. It was three kilometres to Lohfeld along the towpath and the Lohfelder Straße, and the air smelled of the canal and of bread from somewhere behind the bus depot. He had not slept, and found that it did not matter. At the lock the barge was still tied up below the gates. The light in its cabin was off now, and a man in a vest was on the deck, standing with a mug and looking at the water.

The security light came on over the side gate at Lohfeld. The building was dark. Hubert's van was not there; the machines would have finished at one, and Hubert would have hung the kit on the racks in the drying room and gone home to his wife and his knee. On the first pitch the automatic sprinklers were going, turning, throwing their water out in long slow arcs that caught the light and fell.

He stood at the letterbox in the side door. It was the old kind, brass, stiff on its spring, that the postman complained about. He took the envelope out of his coat and held the flap up with two fingers and pushed it through, and heard it land on the mat inside.

Then he took the ring of keys out of his other pocket, the office and the gate, and looked at them, and put them through after it.

They landed on the envelope.

He turned his collar up and went back the way he had come, along the fence, past the sprinklers, towards the canal, where somebody on the barge had started an engine.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Nōnās Octōbrēs (4 October 2026), ā simulācrō Ancelottian Composure per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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Ancelottian Composure, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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