The Homerton Eagle's keeper has broken two fingers in a van door, so on a cold November Sunday on Hackney Marshes the smallest man in the side puts on his oversized gloves and goes in goal. Sully is thirty-four, five foot six and slow. He has never stood inside a goal and looked at how big it is. Two goals down against the team in third place, he notices something nobody on the pitch has noticed: no one bothers to mark the goalkeeper. Told in his own plain, exact voice by the Johan Cruyff simulacrum, the story follows one Sunday-league match, minute by minute, and turns on a question about where the free man on a football pitch is to be found.
by Johan Cruyff, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
Mo held his hand up in the car park so we could all see it. The plaster went from his knuckles to halfway up his arm, and somebody had already written MUG on it in blue biro. Two fingers, he said. The sliding door of the van, Friday, in the rain, on a delivery in Walthamstow. He had heard them go.
"So who's in?" said Dean.
Dean ran the team. He had the kit bag and the nets and the money for the pitch, which was eighty-five pounds that season, and he had the list on his phone, and the list had twelve names on it including Mo's. Now it had eleven and a hand.
Nobody said anything. On the next pitch along a man was shouting at a dog. The wind came across the Marshes from the river the way it always does on a Sunday in November, flat and cold and straight into your ears.
"I'll go," I said.
They looked at me. I am five foot six. I have played in the middle of the park for the Homerton Eagle for nine years and I was never fast, not even at twenty, and at thirty-four I am slower. I do not run much. I stand where the ball is going to come, and when it comes I give it to somebody, and that has been enough to keep my place, mostly, because the others like running and somebody has to stand still.
"You're the smallest bloke here," said Kieran.
"Then it's me," I said. "Nobody will miss me in midfield."
Nobody laughed.
Mo gave me his top and his gloves. The top was green, with long sleeves, and it came down to the middle of my legs. The gloves were size eleven. I put my hand in one and there was a space at the end of every finger, the length of a fingernail, full of nothing. I clapped them together and they made the noise a goalkeeper's gloves make, which is a good noise, and it meant nothing.
We were playing Leyton Dynamo, who were third. They had a number nine with a shaved head who scored most weeks, and a keeper of maybe six foot four who kicked it from his hands into the other half, every time, and then shouted at whoever was there to win it.
The goal is eight yards wide and eight feet high. Everybody knows this. I had known it all my life. I had never stood in the middle of it before and turned round to look at it from inside, and it is very much bigger from inside. I stood on the line and put my arms out and there was a yard of air past each glove.
After eleven minutes their number seven hit one from twenty-five yards. I saw it all the way. I went for it. It went over my hand into the top corner, and I hit the post with my shoulder, and lay there looking at the net shaking above me.
"Unlucky, Sull," said Dean from the line. He did not mean it was unlucky. He meant he was sorry for me.
After twenty-two minutes they swung a cross in from the left. I came for it, because a keeper comes for crosses, and I punched it with Mo's glove, and the empty end of the glove folded over and the ball came off my knuckles sideways, onto the shins of their number nine, and he did not even have to kick it.
Two–nil. I picked it out of the net. My hands were cold inside the gloves and they had already started to hurt.
The next thing that happened was nothing, and it took me a while to understand it.
They had the ball for most of the next five minutes. They passed it about in our half and we chased it, all ten of us, and when we won it Kieran or Ash hit it up the pitch and it came straight back. That is how we always played. Mo would catch it and kick it long and the big lads would fight for it in the middle. Then I would get it, if I got it, and give it to somebody.
Then a ball ran loose to Kieran on the edge of the box, with their nine coming at him, and he turned and rolled it back to me.
It was a back-pass. I could not pick it up. I did not want to. It came to my right foot and I put my foot on it, and I looked up, and there was their nine coming. He came about ten yards, jogging. Then he stopped. He put his hands on his hips and turned his back on me and walked away towards the halfway line.
He was not going to press a keeper. Nobody presses the keeper on a Sunday morning. What for? The keeper is going to kick it long. Everybody knows that too.
So I stood there with the ball. I had time. In nine years I had never had time on the Marshes, not once; in the middle of the park you have a second, maybe, and somebody is in your back. Now I had three seconds, four. I could see the whole pitch in front of me like a table with things on it. Their four defenders were standing on the halfway line. Their midfield was dropping. Their nine was walking. And in the middle, on his own, with nobody near him, was Tyrell, our number six, looking at me with his arms open, because he had never seen a keeper with the ball who had not already kicked it.
I gave it to him. Along the ground, to his right foot, so he could turn. He turned. Then he was in their half with the ball at his feet and three of them were running back the wrong way, facing their own goal.
It came to nothing. He lost it on the edge of their box. But Dean was standing very still on the touchline, and Mo, next to him, had stopped eating his crisps.
After that I did not stand on my line.
I stood on the edge of the box, the eighteen-yard line, where the white goes across. When Kieran or Ash had the ball I made a noise, and they gave it to me, and I looked up, and their nine walked away, and I passed it to somebody. When it went back to the defenders I moved out wider so that one of them could find me again. When Kieran came forward, because there was nobody to mark, I went to where he had been.
"Sully!" Dean shouted. "Your goal! Your goal's behind you!"
I knew where my goal was. The goal did not need me. The goal was only in trouble when they had the ball, and if I was in the game, then there were eleven of us with the ball and ten of them trying to get it. They did not know what to do about me. Their nine started to press me again, but now he had to come all the way to the edge of my box to do it, and when he came, there was Kieran on one side and Ash on the other, and he could not stand next to both of them.
I am not saying it was good football. Kieran is a scaffolder and he plays like a scaffolder and twice I passed it to him and he hit it long anyway, out of habit, and once it came back to me so hard I had to stop it with my knee. But we kept it. We kept it for a minute, and two minutes, and then for longer than that, and for all that time Leyton Dynamo did not shoot, because they did not have the ball to shoot with.
Just before half-time Tyrell scored. It started with me. It went me, Ash, Tyrell, out to Rio on the right, back inside, Tyrell, and he put it in low past the big keeper, who was still on his line, where keepers go.
Two–one.
At half-time Mo came over with his cast in a carrier bag to keep the rain off.
"What are you doing?" he said.
"Playing."
"You're in goal. Stay in your goal."
"If I stay in my goal," I said, "they shoot, and I'm five foot six."
He looked at me for a long time. He had been our keeper for six years and he was a good one, and he did not like this.
"They'll chip you," he said.
"Probably," I said.
Dean did not say anything at all. He gave us the oranges.
They tried to chip me eight minutes into the second half. Their nine got the ball on the halfway line, saw me standing on the edge of the box, and hit it at once, high, over everybody. I turned and ran back. I am not fast but I had been waiting for it since half-time, and I had decided where I was going to run before he kicked it, and the wind was in his face. The ball came down a yard wide of the post and ran on across the next pitch, where somebody's dog went after it.
He tried it twice more. The second time it was closer, and I touched it with the empty end of Mo's glove, and it went over. The third time it was short, and I took it on my chest on the six-yard line.
Then he stopped trying it. To chip a keeper you need the ball, and you need the time to look up. They were not getting much of either.
Rio equalised with twenty minutes left. It came from a throw-in. It had nothing to do with me.
It stayed two–two. In the last ten minutes they did not come at us any more. They had stopped believing they would get the ball back, I think, or they were tired from running after a ball that was always going somewhere else. Their nine stood on his own in the middle with his hands on his hips.
In the last minute their big keeper caught a cross and did not kick it.
He held it. He looked at his defenders, who were standing where they always stand. Then he walked to the edge of his box with the ball in his hands, and he put it down, and he stood over it, looking up the pitch, the whole length of it, at me.
I was on the edge of my box. There was nobody between us but twenty men, all of them looking at somebody else.
He rolled it short to his left back, along the ground. It was not a good pass. It bobbled on the wet grass and the left back had to come back for it.
Rio was already running at him.
THE END
✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾
Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem sextum Nōnās Octōbrēs (2 October 2026), ab Iohanne Cruyff per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Johan Cruyff, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
If you would like to talk to this simulacrum, please sign in at the Universitas Scholarium.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Catalogued with the Library of Congress Subject Headings, Genre/Form Terms and Classification.
Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.