The Milk Round

by Franz Beckenbauer, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The tanker leaves the dairy at Weidach at twenty to five, and by five Korbinian Strobl is out on the Moosstraße with the heater on full and the wipers on their slowest setting, because the fog off the peat does not fall, it stands.

He knows the road. That is not the same as seeing it. Before the Kreuzbauer bend he lifts off the throttle, not in the bend, because the field drain there freezes a fortnight before anything else in the valley, and it is the twenty-sixth of October and the dashboard says one degree. At Obermaier's he stops forty metres short of the yard and lets the engine idle. After half a minute the Obermaiers' dog comes out of the barn at a run and crosses the place where the tanker would have been. Then he drives in.

Eighteen thousand litres when the tank is full. You do not brake hard with that behind you. Everything has to be decided early.

At Huber's the gate is shut. It is always shut. Strobl climbs down, opens it, drives through, climbs down again and closes it, because Sepp Huber once had a heifer out on the Staatsstraße and has not forgotten it. In the milk room the cooling tank hums. Strobl reads the gauge, checks the temperature, three point eight, fills the sample bottle and sticks the label on it, couples the hose and starts the pump. While it runs he stands in the doorway with his hands in his jacket.

Lukas Huber comes across the yard from the milking parlour in his overalls with a bucket in each hand. He is seventeen. He plays left-back for SC Weidach, and he runs more than anyone Strobl has ever played with, and about a third of the time he runs the wrong way.

"Today we get them," Lukas says.

"Maybe."

"Reiter says if we hold the line, Ostermoos have nothing. He showed us on the tablet."

"Then we hold the line."

Lukas puts the buckets down. "You don't believe him."

Strobl looks at the meter on the pump. Eleven hundred litres. Huber's cows are milking well for October. "I believe what I see," he says, and goes to uncouple the hose.

---

The pitch at Weidach lies between the sewage works and the river, which is why it drains well and why nobody stands on the north side. At half past two there are ninety people: the parents, the old men from the Stammtisch in their loden jackets, two girls on the barrier with their phones, and Strobl's wife Moni in the kiosk, selling Leberkäse rolls at three euros fifty and beer at three. It smells of mustard and wet grass, and of the sewage works when the wind turns.

Dominik Reiter has been their coach since July. He is twenty-nine and studies sports science in Rosenheim. He brought with him a tablet in a rubber case, a bag of coloured bibs, and a back four that stands in one line and moves in one line, like a curtain on a rail. In the summer he took Strobl aside and showed him a clip of a Bundesliga centre-back. "Ball in, ball to the six, done. Two touches. You don't carry it. If you carry it and lose it, there's nobody behind you." He was polite about it. He was right, as far as it went. Strobl is thirty-eight, and his knees know the weather a day before the radio does.

So Strobl plays in the curtain, on the right of the two centre-backs, with Emre Kaya on his left.

For twenty minutes the curtain works. Ostermoos play long, the line steps up together, and their number nine, a heavy lad called Brunner with tape round his left wrist, is given offside four times. The old men at the barrier shout at the referee for the fifth, which he misses. Then Ostermoos stop playing long. Brunner begins to drop off the line into the space in front of it, and every time he drops, Weidach's six follows him, and every time the six follows him there is a hole the width of a garage door where the six was standing.

Strobl sees it the third time. From the back you see the whole pitch at once: its shape, which way it is tilting, where the grass is empty. You also see who is going to be late. Lukas is going to be late. Ostermoos's right winger is standing very still on the halfway line, the way a winger stands when he already knows where the ball is going, and Lukas is twenty metres upfield because Reiter wants his full-backs high.

"Lukas. Back."

Lukas looks round. Comes. Is in time, just, and the winger's first touch runs into his shins.

Twenty-five minutes, thirty. Strobl does not shout. He says one word at a time, in the voice of a man reading out the next stop on a bus. "Stay." "Inside." "Now." Lukas goes where the words send him, and each time he arrives a little earlier, and once, near the half hour, he arrives before the winger has decided what to do.

On thirty-eight minutes Brunner drops, the six goes with him, the ball comes through the garage door, and Ostermoos's ten hits it low into the corner from eighteen metres. The line had held perfectly. That was the trouble.

---

At half time the dressing room smells of Franzbranntwein and of the radiator, which has two settings, off and too hot. Reiter has the tablet on his knees. He shows the goal twice. Then he shows each of them his heat map, which the app builds from the camera on the clubhouse roof that the Raiffeisenbank paid for. Lukas's is red from one end of the touchline to the other. The six's is a red smear across the whole middle of the pitch. Strobl's is one round patch of orange, a little bigger than the centre circle, just inside his own half.

"Korbi," Reiter says. Not unkindly. "Six point one kilometres. Lukas did eleven."

Strobl unlaces his left boot and laces it again, tighter. Gruber, the goalkeeper, who is forty-one and sells tyres, says to nobody, "He was standing where they were going to be."

Reiter lets it go. He turns the tablet round and draws on it with his finger. "The six doesn't follow Brunner any more. Whoever is nearer, Korbi or Emre, steps out to him. The line shuffles across behind. Like this." Three arrows, one curved. Strobl looks at it and nods, because it is correct.

It is correct for twenty-five minutes. Brunner drops and finds a centre-back on his back, and the garage door stays shut. But Weidach cannot get out. Ostermoos have worked it out too: their nine and their ten stand on Weidach's six like two men on a manhole cover, so the ball from the centre-backs to the six is never on, and Emre and Strobl knock it long, and the long ball comes back. Twice, three times, four times.

Nobody presses Strobl. Why would they? Centre-backs in the Kreisklasse do not carry the ball. Ostermoos's coach has seen the same video as Reiter.

At fifty-five minutes Brunner drops and Strobl is already there. He has not run. He is simply standing where Brunner wants to put his foot, and he takes the ball off Brunner's toe and gives it to Emre, two touches, the way Reiter wants it. On the bench Reiter claps twice. Four minutes later Strobl does it again, and this time, in the moment between winning the ball and giving it away, he sees that there is nobody in front of him. Brunner is behind him. The ten is standing on the six. The Ostermoos midfielders are waiting in their own half for the long ball, with their hands on their hips, like men waiting for a train they have been told is late. He gives it to Emre anyway. Emre knocks it long. It comes back.

On the hour Lukas wins a loose ball near his own corner flag and, because nobody comes to him and he does not know what else to do, he runs with it, thirty metres up the left, until a midfielder fouls him. Strobl watches him go. Then he looks at the grass in front of himself: thirty metres of it, green and empty, all the way to the halfway line. He looks at the bench. Reiter is looking at the tablet.

On seventy minutes Gruber rolls the ball out to him. Brunner and the ten are standing on the six. Strobl takes a touch forward instead of passing. Then another. Nobody comes. The old men at the barrier go quiet, the way a room goes quiet when someone stands up who does not usually stand up. At the halfway line two Ostermoos midfielders have to turn round to see what is happening behind them, and while they turn Strobl plays the ball into Lukas on the left and goes for the return.

It does not come. Lukas has never in his life been given the ball by a centre-back who wanted it back. He puts his head down, cuts inside, and runs into the ten.

Then Strobl has to run. Forty metres, back, with the knees. Ostermoos break three against two, and Emre slides in on the edge of the area, and Gruber gets a hand to the rebound and pushes it round the post. On the touchline Reiter is shouting. "Korbi! Two touches! Two!" Strobl lifts a hand without turning his head. His breath is coming in pieces.

At seventy-nine minutes an Ostermoos midfielder goes down holding his calf, and while their physio jogs across with a spray can, Strobl walks over to the left touchline.

"When I give it to you, you give it back," he says. "First time. Don't look at it. Then go."

"Go where?"

"Anywhere. They'll be watching me."

Lukas wipes his nose on his sleeve and nods.

---

The ball comes to him again in the eighty-eighth minute, a header out from Emre that drops at his feet five metres inside his own half. This time Brunner comes. He has seen it once; he is not going to be made a fool of twice. He comes hard and a little early, and Strobl waits for him, a half step, until Brunner is committed and has his weight going one way. Then Strobl plays it into Lukas, short, and steps past Brunner on the other side.

Lukas does not look at it. The ball comes back off the inside of his foot, first time, and arrives in front of Strobl in his stride. Brunner is behind the ball. The ten is behind the ball. Ostermoos's midfield is facing its own goal and running.

Lukas goes. Anywhere, Strobl told him, and Lukas, who does not know how to run anywhere slowly, goes up the left touchline flat out, and Ostermoos's right-back goes with him because a right-back always goes with the man who is running. Between their right-back and their right-centre-back the grass opens like a door left on the latch. The right-centre-back, alone now, has to decide whether to step out to Strobl. He steps. Florian Ertl, Weidach's nine, is standing on the edge of the space he has just left, and he is the only one on the pitch who is not looking at Strobl.

Strobl does not hurry. He takes one more touch, so that the defender has to come one more metre, and then passes the ball along the ground into the gap with the outside of his right foot, at the speed of a man walking. Ertl does not need to break stride. He takes it across himself and puts it under the keeper.

The old men at the barrier shout. Moni comes out of the kiosk with a roll still in her hand. Strobl turns and walks back to his place in the line, on the right of Emre, and stands there with his hands on his hips. On the touchline Reiter has stopped writing on the tablet. He holds it against his chest like a tray.

One each. Ostermoos kick off, the referee looks at his watch, and two minutes later it is over.

---

In the car park, in the dark, Reiter catches him at the boot of his car.

"If you lose it there," Reiter says, "we've got nobody."

"I know."

"You lost it the first time."

"Lukas didn't know the first time."

Reiter thinks about that. He does not argue with what he has seen. "Monday," he says. "Training. Show me what you were looking at. I'll put it in. A pattern. Centre-back steps in, wall pass with the full-back, then the gap."

Strobl puts his bag in the boot. "If it's on the tablet," he says, "Ostermoos will have it by Christmas."

Reiter laughs. "Ostermoos haven't got a tablet."

"They've got eyes."

At home Moni empties his bag into the washing machine in the cellar and holds up his shirt to the bulb. There is a little mud on one shoulder, where he fell in the run back, and grass on the left sock. The rest is nearly clean.

"Every week," she says. "You'd think you hadn't played."

---

On Tuesday the tanker leaves the dairy at twenty to five. The fog is lying on the Moosstraße again, and at the Kreuzbauer bend Strobl lifts off before the bend, and at Obermaier's he stops short and waits for the dog.

At Huber's the gate is open.

Lukas Huber is standing beside it in his overalls with the chain in his hand, and the end of the chain is still swinging. He does not wave. He stands where the tanker is going to be in a moment and steps back to let it through.

Strobl drives in without stopping. In the mirror, as he swings round to the milk room, he sees Lukas pull the gate shut behind him and drop the chain over the post.

THE END

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

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Franz Beckenbauer, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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