Twelve Metres

by Johan Cruyff, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The water board left orange pegs. There were twenty-one of them, one every five metres, from the corner flag by the road to the corner flag by the sheep gate, and each one stood twelve metres inside the old touchline. Dirk Schoenmaker counted them twice. Then he ran the string.

You do not paint a line by eye. People think you can, and you can't. The eye is lazy over distance. It forgives a curve of ten centimetres at the far end because it wants the line to be straight, and then on Sunday the linesman stands on a line that bends and nobody knows why the flags are wrong. So: a peg at each corner, the string pulled tight between them, a small stone on the string every twenty metres against the wind off the Markermeer, and the marking cart's wheel kept two fingers from the string the whole way. Then it is straight.

He pushed the cart along the string. The wheel turned in the tray of white and laid it on the grass, ten centimetres wide. The rule says not more than twelve. Dirk did ten because it lasted the same and cost less.

Behind him, where the old line had been, there was no grass any more. There was clay, grey and new, rising to the foot of the dyke, which had been made fatter that summer by machines that worked from six in the morning. The dyke had been too thin for the water it held back. Now it was the right thickness, and the price of that was twelve metres of the pitch of VV Kalverdam, which had been sixty-four metres wide since 1971 and was now fifty-two.

Ruben Kroes stood on the clay with his hands in his jacket. He was thirty-one and coached the first team on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, and in the week he fitted kitchens.

"It looks like a corridor," Ruben said.

"It looks like a pitch," Dirk said. "Fifty-two metres. The minimum is forty-five."

"I know what the minimum is."

"Then you know it's a pitch."

Ruben kicked a lump of clay. It broke. He looked down the new line to the far corner, where the sheep gate was, and the line was straight, and this seemed to make him angrier.

"Jesse won't stay," he said. "What is a winger going to do here? He gets the ball and he is already out."

Dirk did not answer this. He was watching the wheel.

---

In the canteen on Wednesday evening the board sat at the long table under the photographs. There were four of them and Dirk, who was not on the board but painted the lines, and so came. Henk Pronk the chairman had the letter from the water board, and the letter from the bank about the compensation, which was forty-one thousand euros and could not be spent on anything except the pitch.

"There is nothing to spend it on," said Henk. "We cannot buy twelve metres. On that side is the dyke and on this side is the canteen."

"Move the canteen," said Marga, the treasurer, and nobody laughed, because she had once suggested it seriously in 2009.

Henk had another letter. It was from Monnikmeer, the club eight kilometres away, which had two full pitches and an artificial one with lights, and which had read about Kalverdam in the regional paper. Monnikmeer would be happy to discuss a combination. A combined first team. A combined youth. The name could be discussed.

"The name could be discussed," Marga said. "That means the name is Monnikmeer."

"We lost four out of four," said Henk. "Since the line moved."

"We lost four out of four last October too," said Dirk. "The line was in the old place."

Henk looked at him. "You have a point to make, Dirk?"

Dirk thought about it. He was seventy-one. He had driven the bus from Kalverdam to Amsterdam-Noord for thirty-three years, and in that time he had learned that if you explain a road to a person they forget it, and if you drive them down it once they know it for life.

"No," he said. "Saturday the under-elevens play at nine. Come and watch."

"I have seen the under-elevens," said Henk.

"Not on this pitch."

---

The under-elevens play eight against eight, across half of the big pitch, so the touchlines of their pitch are the halfway line and the goal line of the big one. Dirk had painted their lines too, on Friday, in blue, so they would not be confused with the white. The dyke had taken twelve metres from them as well, and nobody at the club had said one word about it, because for children a pitch is a pitch.

That was what Dirk wanted Henk to see. Not the children. The size.

Henk came at a quarter to nine with a coffee from the canteen and stood next to Dirk at the corner. Femke, Dirk's granddaughter, was ten and played on the left of three in midfield. Against her was a team from a village on the other side of Purmerend that had come in two cars.

It was not good football. It was children. The ball went out of play a great deal and somebody's father shouted zakken, zakken the whole time, meaning drop back, at a boy who was already as far back as a person could be without leaving the field. But after a quarter of an hour, Dirk said, "Look at the girl with the ball."

"Femke."

"Not Femke. Look where Femke is when the other girl has the ball."

Henk looked. The girl with the ball was the Kalverdam right back. Femke was not near her. Femke was in the middle, a little to the left, with nobody close. The other midfielder was a little to the right. So the right back had two people to pass to, and they made, with her, a shape like the corner of a roof.

"She has two," said Dirk. "If the defender goes to the one, she gives it to the other. If the defender stands in between, she gives it to either. The defender cannot stand in two places."

"That is the coach," said Henk. "Ilse tells them this."

"Ilse tells them nothing about it. Ilse tells them to enjoy themselves. Watch."

The right back passed to Femke. As the ball travelled, the girl who had been to the right ran forward a few metres and the right back ran forward a few metres, and now, when Femke received, she had two people again. It happened without a word. It happened again. The children from the other side of Purmerend ran after the ball, which was always just leaving.

"On a big pitch," Dirk said, "the two people are too far away. Thirty metres. A child cannot pass thirty metres. So she kicks it long and runs after it. On this pitch the two people are always close enough. So she passes. She has been passing like this since she was six. All of them have. On a pitch their size."

Henk drank his coffee.

"So it is a children's pitch," he said.

"Yes," said Dirk. "And now the men have one their size."

---

On Tuesday it rained. Ruben had the first team running lengths of the pitch with the ball, in pairs, wide, one pair after another, and every pair reached the far end with the ball having gone out once or twice over the new white line.

Dirk did not go to Ruben. He went to the shed behind the canteen, filled the small cart, and in the corner of the pitch by the sheep gate, where the grass was still good, he painted a square. Ten metres by ten. He ran no string for this. For ten metres the eye is enough.

Then he took a ball out of the bag at the side and stood in the square, and waited.

The first to come over was Jesse Brouwer. He was twenty-three and the fastest man at the club and possibly in the village, and he came because he was the most bored. He had already said in the dressing room that he was going to Monnikmeer if the combination did not happen and also if it did.

"What is this?" he said. "Training for pensioners?"

"Get six," said Dirk.

Jesse looked at him for a while. He was wet. Then he whistled, and because he was Jesse, five people came.

"Five outside," said Dirk. "Two in the middle. One touch. The two in the middle win the ball, the one who lost it goes in."

"I know a rondo," said Jesse. "We did this when we were eight."

"Good. Then it's easy."

It was not easy. The square was small and the grass was wet, and men who have not done a thing since they were eight have forgotten that one touch means one touch. The two in the middle, who were the centre backs because they were the biggest and Dirk had put them there, won the ball four times in the first minute. Somebody swore. Somebody laughed. Ruben came over with his whistle in his hand and did not blow it.

After five minutes it began to go round. Not every time. But there were passes now that went across the square and arrived on the right foot of the man who needed it, and the man was already turned, because he had looked before the ball came, because there was no time to look after. Jesse was in the middle. Jesse was quick. In a square of ten metres his speed was no use to him at all. He ran to the ball and the ball left.

"You see it?" Dirk said to Ruben. He said it quietly.

"I see a rondo."

"You have twelve metres less," said Dirk. "So does everybody who comes here. They come once a season. You are here three times a week. On the big pitches they play long. Here, long goes out. The ones who come here, they will kick it long, because that is what they know, and it will go out, because the line is where it is. And you will have it."

Ruben looked at the square. Jesse had won the ball at last and was standing with his foot on it, breathing.

"And Jesse?" said Ruben.

"Jesse is fast," said Dirk. "On a narrow pitch, where does a fast man go?"

Ruben thought about it. Dirk let him. If you tell a man the answer he has your answer. If you wait, he has his own.

"Inside," said Ruben. "Not along the line. Behind."

"Ask him," said Dirk, and went to put the cart back.

---

The match on Sunday was against Oosterkoog, who were fourth, and who had a big, quiet pitch beside a ring canal and played on it the way people play on big pitches, which is that the left back gets the ball and hits it to the right winger, who is forty metres away and very fast.

The first time he did it, the ball went out over the white line by the sheep gate and rolled down the new clay towards the dyke. The second time, it was the same. The third time the winger checked, and stopped it, and by stopping it he gave Kalverdam half a second, and the Kalverdam left back was on him, and there was no space for him to go into, because there was no space.

Kalverdam did not play beautifully. Dirk would not have said that. He stood by the corner flag with the line bag at his feet in case a line had to be touched up at half time, and he saw a great deal that was wrong. The centre backs still wanted to hit it. The goalkeeper still wanted to hit it. But the midfield had found, in two training sessions in a square in the rain, that a man in possession needs two others near him, and on a pitch of fifty-two metres the others are always near, if they go there. They went there. Not always. Enough.

Jesse did not stand on the line. Ruben had asked him, on Thursday, and Jesse had said that it was stupid, and then on Sunday after twenty minutes, when the line had given him nothing, he came inside, between their full back and their centre back, where nobody had been told to stand because on a big pitch nobody has to. The ball came to him there from Femke's cousin Thijs, who played in the middle and who had done the rondo for longer than anyone else on the team, because he had done it at nine o'clock on Saturdays since he was six. Jesse took it on the turn. He was fast. In the channel between two defenders, when he was already turned, his speed was of every use to him in the world.

One–nil.

They let in two before half time, both from corners, because they were short and Oosterkoog were not, and the width of the pitch had nothing to do with corners. At half time Henk came down from the canteen and stood with Dirk.

"Two–one," he said.

"Yes."

"So."

"So nothing," said Dirk. "The second half is also forty-five minutes."

In the second half Oosterkoog stopped hitting it long, because it kept going out, and tried to pass it, which they did not do every week, on a pitch where they did not know where the lines were. Kalverdam scored twice. Oosterkoog scored once more from another corner, in the eighty-eighth minute, and it finished three–three, and the visiting coach shook Ruben's hand and said something about the pitch that Dirk did not hear and did not need to.

It was a draw. It was one point from five matches. Dirk was not stupid; a draw at home to the team in fourth is a draw. But he had watched both halves, and in the first the ball had gone out over the line by the sheep gate eleven times and in the second it had gone out twice. That was the number he kept.

---

On Monday morning he came with the cart to repaint. Lines on grass last a week in October; the dew takes them, and the boots. He ran the string from the corner flag by the road to the corner flag by the sheep gate, and laid the stones on it, and filled the tray.

Out on the strip of grass between the new touchline and the clay, where the old pitch still was for a metre or two and was now nobody's, there were jackets on the ground. Four jackets, a square. Femke and four others from the under-elevens had come before school and were inside it and outside it, with a ball, one touch, the two in the middle getting angry, all of them shouting.

Nobody had painted it for them. They had used the jackets.

Dirk put the wheel two fingers from the string and began to walk.

THE END

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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

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