On His Heels

by George Best, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The lad stopped.

He didn't slow down. He stopped, with his right sole on top of the ball, thirty yards out from Phil Barlow's goal and a yard in from the touchline, and he stood there with his arms loose by his sides like somebody waiting for a bus that was late but not very late.

Barlow stopped too. That was the job. Twenty-two seasons of Sunday football and he had never once been beaten by a winger who stood still, because a winger who stands still is going nowhere, and you let him go nowhere until his own side get fed up and come for the ball. He stood off two yards. Knees bent. Side on, right foot back, so that everything about him said down the line, son, towards the corner flag, where there was nothing but white paint and the dog-walkers' path and the back fence of the bus depot.

The lad looked at him. Not at his face. Lower. Barlow knew where, because he did it himself: at the feet, at the knees, at where the weight was.

"Phil! Show him outside!"

"I am showing him outside," Barlow said, not loud, to nobody.

The lad did nothing. Four seconds, five. It is a long time on a football pitch, five seconds. Barlow could hear Gaz breathing through his nose on the touchline and somebody's dog barking at the depot fence and his own heart going in his ears. His calves began to burn in the crouch. He let his heels down, just to ease them, just a quarter of an inch onto the cold grass.

The lad went.

Not outside. Inside, off the right foot, through the gap Barlow had been leaving open, because a left winger goes down the line on his left foot, and this one had gone off his right. Barlow came up off his heels and turned and he was quick enough, he was always quick enough; he was half a stride late. Half a stride is nothing. You couldn't measure it with a tape. The lad was already past the place where Barlow's foot came down, and he didn't shoot. He laid it square to the number nine, who leaned back and put it over the bar into the long grass behind the goal, and Stu Bagnall went to fetch it, swearing.

"Kept him outside there, Phil," said Deano Wooliscroft, jogging past, and Barlow didn't answer him.

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It was the first Sunday in October, half past ten, the bottom pitch at Northwood. The Dresden Arms against Abbey Hulton Colts. The Colts were a youth side somebody's dad had pushed up into the adult league because the lads had outgrown the under-eighteens and wouldn't split up, and they'd won four out of five and lost the other on a penalty. The Dresden Arms had won two out of five. They paid six pounds a head into Gaz's bum bag for the pitch and the ref, and the bum bag said TRENTHAM GARDENS on it in a typeface from before any of the Colts were born.

Barlow was thirty-eight. He drove a forklift at a pallet yard in Longton, Monday to Friday, six till two, and on Sundays he played right-back, as he had since he was sixteen, for whichever pub had a side. He was not fast and never had been. What he had was this: he didn't dive in. You could put the best winger in Stoke against him and the winger would run, and Barlow would run alongside him with his body between the winger and the goal, and in the end the pitch would run out. The line was his twelfth man. He'd told Gaz that once and Gaz had put it on the team's WhatsApp, and they still said it to him when he went off in a sulk. Line's your twelfth man, Phil.

The lad's name was Ollie. Barlow had heard their manager shout it, a big man in a wax jacket with a voice like a car alarm. Seventeen, maybe. Not big. Thin legs in long socks pulled over the knee, the way they all wore them now, and a pair of black boots with nothing on them, no colour, no stripe, worn white across the toes.

He came again in the twentieth minute.

This time Barlow was ready. He stood off, side on, and he stayed up on the balls of his feet. Heels off the grass. The lad stopped with his sole on the ball and looked at him and Barlow looked back and kept his heels up. Let him wait. Barlow had been waiting for wingers for twenty-two years.

His calves burned. He kept them up.

The lad rolled the ball back a foot under his sole. Only a foot, an easy, nothing kind of movement, as if he'd got bored and was going to turn round and pass it back to his centre-half. Barlow stepped after it. One step, a small one, to close him down, because a winger who's rolling the ball back is a winger who's lost his nerve, and you get up him before he finds it again.

The lad's sole came off the top of the ball and the outside of his left foot came round the side of it, and he went past Barlow on the outside, down the line, exactly where Barlow had been showing him all morning. The step had taken Barlow forward. Forward is the wrong way. By the time he'd turned, the lad was at the byline and pulling it back along the ground, and the number nine, who'd learned something from the first time, side-footed it into the corner.

Nil–one.

"Bloody hell, Phil," said Gaz.

Deano came over with his hands on his hips. "Kick him next time."

"Catch him first," said Barlow.

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At half-time they stood in the corner by the flag and Gaz passed round a bag of satsumas from Morrisons.

"First time he does that," Gaz said, "you go through him. Not dirty. Just through. He's seventeen. He'll not come back for more."

"He's not doing anything," said Barlow. "He's standing there."

"Then stand on him."

Barlow sat on the grass and took his left boot off. One of the studs had worked loose, and he screwed it back in with a twenty-pence piece, and while he was doing it he watched the Colts. They were in a ring round the man in the wax jacket, who was pointing at a whiteboard. The lad wasn't in the ring. He was on his own by the far goal with a ball, keeping it up. Left foot, right foot, left. Thigh. Left. Not fancy. Just the same thing over and over, counting under his breath, Barlow could see his lips going, and when he dropped it he stopped and picked it up and started again from nothing. The man in the wax jacket shouted Ollie, twice, the second time like a car alarm. The lad got to whatever number he was getting to, caught the ball on his instep, and jogged over.

Barlow put his boot back on and laced it. He laced it twice round the ankle and tied it at the back the way he'd tied it since 1999.

"You're quiet," said Deano.

"I'm thinking."

"Well, stop," said Gaz. "You're a right-back."

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The second half started with rain, the thin, sideways stuff that comes over from the direction of Bucknall, and the ball started to skid. Barlow liked that. A skidding ball is a ball you can't stop dead with your sole.

The lad didn't come at him for ten minutes. The Colts went down the other side instead, and Deano headed everything that came in, and the Dresden Arms got a corner and wasted it.

When the lad did come, Barlow went to meet him. He went the way Gaz wanted, fast and square, to arrive at the same moment as the ball and put a hip through the pair of them. He hadn't done that in years, and the lad saw it coming from twenty yards. He didn't stop this time. He didn't even look at Barlow. He let the ball run across him and touched it inside, first time, with the side of his heel, to a midfielder Barlow hadn't known was there, and Barlow's hip went through the place where the lad had been and found rain. He went down on his backside on the wet grass and slid a yard.

"That's it, Phil," said Gaz. "Through him. Lovely."

The midfielder lost it, as it happened, and Deano won it back. Barlow got up with his shorts soaked through and cold, and the lad was already jogging back to his place by the touchline, looking at nobody, like a man walking away from a cashpoint.

Barlow found he was watching the lad even when the ball was a long way off. The lad wasn't watching the ball much. He was watching the Dresden back four: their feet, how they stood, who turned which way when the ball went over their heads. Deano always turned to his left. Barlow had played next to Deano for six years and never noticed that.

In the fifty-eighth minute Stu Bagnall kicked a ball out from his hands straight to a Colts midfielder, who knocked it over the top of Deano, who turned to his left, and the lad was on it before it bounced.

Barlow was on the wrong side of the pitch. He went anyway. He went across and back with his head down, the way you do when you know you're too late and you're going to go anyway so you can say you went, and his knees were telling him about it and his lungs were telling him about it, and he looked up in time to see Stu come off his line.

Stu was big. He came out spread like a man trying to stop a wardrobe falling. The lad didn't do anything clever. He knocked the ball a yard to the left and went round him, and Stu's hand came down a foot behind his heel on the wet grass, and then there was nobody between the lad and an empty goal, eight yards, the rain blowing across the mouth of it.

The lad ran the ball to the goal line. He didn't shoot. He ran it there, and he stopped it with his sole on the line, on the white paint, and he stood on it.

"Put it IN!" That was the wax jacket. "Ollie! PUT IT IN!"

The lad turned round and looked back up the pitch, at Barlow, coming.

Barlow had been going to slide. He'd been going to throw himself the last three yards along the wet grass and hope. He didn't. If you slide, you're gone. You've told him everything, where you'll be and how long you'll be there, and all he has to do is lift it over your shin and walk it in. Barlow stopped a yard from him instead, on the goal line, between the lad and the post. On his toes. Side on. Knees bent.

The ball was on the line. It wasn't over it. It wasn't a goal until the whole of the ball was over the whole of the line, and Barlow had nothing but that half-inch of paint, and a lad with his foot on top of the ball who was smiling at him.

Not smirking. Barlow had been smirked at by wingers. This was a different thing. The lad looked like somebody who'd been told a joke and was waiting for the end of it.

The lad dropped his left shoulder. Barlow's weight stayed where it was. He dropped his right. Barlow's weight stayed. Behind Barlow, Stu was getting up out of the mud, and the Colts number nine was screaming for it square, and on the touchline Gaz had gone so quiet Barlow could hear the rain on his hood.

The lad bent his knees. Slowly, as if he was getting down to tie a lace, he went down. One knee to the wet grass. His foot was still on the ball. His head came down towards it. He was going to head it in. He was going to put his forehead on a football on the goal line in front of a man who was standing a yard away and nod it into the net, on the bottom pitch at Northwood, in the rain, in October.

His weight was all going down. Down and forward, onto the knee, and out of the foot on the ball.

Barlow put his right foot in and took the ball out from under him. Not a tackle. He just reached in with the outside of his boot and tapped it, the way you tap a cat off a chair, along the line and round the post. It went into the long grass where Stu had fetched the first one from.

The lad stayed on his knee. He looked at the place where the ball had been. Then he looked up at Barlow, and he laughed. He had the kind of laugh that comes out of someone before they've decided to do it.

"Nearly," he said.

"Nearly's not a goal," said Barlow.

He had nothing left in his legs. He stood with his hands on his knees on the goal line and breathed. The man in the wax jacket was making a noise that wasn't words. The lad got up, wiped the wet grass off his knee with the palm of his hand, and trotted out to take the corner himself, and while he was setting the ball down by the flag he looked over at Barlow again and shook his head, still grinning, as if they'd both been in on it.

Stu caught the corner. Stu caught everything that came in high.

---

The Dresden Arms got one back in the seventy-fourth minute. A free kick, a scramble, Deano's knee. One–one. Gaz went running along the touchline with his arms out like a plane and had to stop at the corner flag to get his breath.

After that the man in the wax jacket moved the lad. He put him up front, on his own, and told him to press, and the lad pressed. He ran at the Dresden back four whenever they had the ball. He wasn't good at it. You could see he didn't like it; he ran at people too straight and too fast, like a dog let off a lead, and they passed round him.

In the eighty-sixth minute the ball came to Barlow at right-back, in his own half, with time.

"Get rid!" Gaz shouted. "Phil! Get rid of it!"

The lad was coming. Straight at him, fast, too fast, the way he'd been coming all the last ten minutes, and Barlow knew what to do: hit it long, high, down the line, into the Colts' corner, and let the line be his twelfth man. He'd done it ten thousand times. His right foot was already going back to do it again.

He didn't. He put his sole on the ball.

The lad saw that and slowed. He came down from full pelt to a jog to a walk, and two yards off he stopped, side on, knees bent, right foot forward. Showing Barlow down the line. Doing Barlow.

Barlow stood on the ball. He'd never in his life stood on a ball in his own half with somebody in front of him. It felt like standing on a chair in somebody else's house. Behind him Deano was saying Phil, Phil, Phil in a voice that got higher every time.

He looked at the lad. Not at his face. Lower.

The lad was up on his toes. The lad was seventeen and he'd been running for eighty-six minutes, and the last ten of them at a speed he didn't like, and there was rain in the grass. One second, two. Barlow counted, the way the lad had counted keeping it up behind the goal. Three. Four.

At five the lad's heels came down. A quarter of an inch, no more, onto the wet grass. Barlow saw it.

He went. Inside, off the left foot, which he never used, through the gap the lad was leaving him. The lad came up off his heels and turned, and he was quick, he was a lot quicker than Barlow. He was half a stride late.

Then Barlow was past him, and there was grass in front of him, wet and green, and nobody on it for thirty yards. He heard Gaz shouting something. He heard the lad behind him, laughing again, coming after him. He pushed the ball on, not far, a foot in front of him where he could get it back, and went after it.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Nōnās Octōbrēs (4 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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