Voy

by Johan Cruyff, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The ball rattled. It had small steel pieces inside it, in a little cage, and when it rolled it made a noise like a tin of nails being carried by somebody in a hurry. When it stopped, it made no noise at all.

Nil Ferrer stood behind the goal at the far end of the pitch and talked.

"Quim, ten metres. The goal is straight. A bit left. There's a man on your right, he's coming, he's coming, another one behind, go left, left, the post is left, five metres, shoot, shoot now—"

Quim Albà put the sole of his boot on the ball. The rattle stopped. The two defenders, who had been moving towards the noise, stopped too, and stood with their arms out in front of them, as the rule says you must, and turned their heads a little, listening.

"I can't hear it," said Quim.

"Hear what?"

"Anything."

Montse Rius, who coached the team from the halfway line, blew her whistle. It was a Tuesday in October, eight in the evening, on the artificial pitch behind a secondary school in Badalona. The pitch was forty metres long and twenty wide, and on both long sides were wooden boards as high as a man's waist, so that the ball came back instead of going out. There were four outfield players on each side and all of them wore black eyeshades, padded, with patches under them, even the ones who could see a little light, because the rule makes everybody the same. The goalkeepers could see. Nil could see. Montse could see. Everybody who could see was told exactly where they had to stand.

"Nil," said Montse. "Come here a minute."

---

He had played in the Tercera until he was twenty-nine. Central midfield, for a club in the Vallès with a stand of eleven rows. He was not fast. He had never been fast. What he had was that he knew, before the ball came to him, where it should go next, and for nine seasons this was enough, and then the left knee went, and then, the next year, in the same week as his thirtieth birthday, the right one. The surgeon said he could run, and he could, a little. He could not turn. A midfielder who cannot turn is a man standing in the way.

His cousin Bernat played for Montse. Bernat had lost his sight at nineteen in a motorbike accident on the Carretera de la Conreria and now he was a defender, a good one, very calm. It was Bernat who said the team needed a guide, a sighted person to stand behind the other team's goal and talk the attackers in. The guide speaks only when the ball is in the last third, the twelve metres before the goal. In the middle third, Montse speaks. In the first third, the goalkeeper. Three voices, each with its own piece of the pitch, and each one quiet when the ball is somewhere else.

"You talk too much," said Montse.

"He asked where the goal was."

"He didn't ask. You told him. You told him the goal, and the defender, and the other defender, and left, and left again, and shoot. That's six things. How many things can you hear at once?"

Nil thought about it.

"When you played," Montse said, "did you want the coach shouting at you when you had the ball?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I already knew."

"So," said Montse, and went back to her line.

---

On Thursday Nil came early. The others were in the changing room. Quim was sitting on the bench by the boards with his eyeshade pushed up on his forehead, tying his boot by feel, both laces, double knot, and not looking at it, because there was nothing to look at it with. He had been blind since he was four.

"Montse says I am too loud," said Nil.

"You are not too loud. You are too many."

"I don't know what that means."

Quim held his hand out. "Ball."

Nil put one in it. Quim turned it once, so the steel ran round inside, and gave it back, and with it his own eyeshade.

"Put it on. Take the ball to the far board and back."

"I'll walk into the board."

"Yes," said Quim. "Put it on."

Nil put it on. It was very black. There was a smell of somebody else's sweat and a little of the rubber crumb that gets into everything on these pitches. He put the ball down and touched it with the inside of his foot and it rattled and he followed it, and after three metres he did not know any more whether he was going towards the middle or towards the boards. He stopped. He put his foot on the ball. Then there was nothing at all except a car on the Avinguda del Marquès de Mont-roig and his own breath inside the shade.

"Where am I?" he said.

"I don't know," said Quim. "You stopped the ball."

Somewhere to the left Quim began to walk. Nil heard him clearly: the shoes on the plastic grass, a little shush every step. He knew exactly where Quim was. He did not know where anything else was.

"Voy," said Quim, and came at him from the left.

Nil turned towards the voice. He knew he was turning towards it before he turned. The body does it.

He took the shade off. Quim was a metre away, smiling, with his arms out in front of him, palms down, the way defenders hold them.

"You heard me," said Quim.

"Yes."

"The rule says I must say it. So you don't get hurt. Fine. But also it tells you where I am and what I'm doing. Every time. The man who says voy is giving you a present." He turned his head towards the far goal. "When the ball stops, I don't know where it is. When I say voy, you know where I am. So who has the advantage? The one with the ball or the one without?"

"The one with the ball, if he keeps quiet."

"If he keeps quiet," said Quim, "and if the ball keeps quiet when he wants it to."

He held out his hand for the eyeshade and Nil gave it back.

"So what do I tell you?" said Nil. "From behind the goal."

"What I can't hear," said Quim. "I can hear the defenders. They tell me themselves. I can hear the boards. I can hear Montse and the ball and my own feet. The goal makes no sound. The goal is the only thing on the pitch that never says anything. Tell me where it is. That's all."

"That's one thing."

"Two," said Quim. "How far, and which side."

---

They worked it out over the next two weeks, with Montse listening and saying nothing, which for her was approval. A number for the metres. Then dreta or esquerra, right or left of the middle of the goal, and if it was straight, nothing. Set, dreta. Seven, right. Then quiet. If Quim moved, a new number, only if it was different. If the ball went out of the last third, Nil stopped talking altogether, even in the middle of a word, because then it was Montse's ball.

The first evening he did it this way, he found that most of the time he had nothing to say. He stood behind the goal with his hands on the crossbar and watched four men in black shades play in the dark, and for whole minutes he said nothing because nothing had changed. It was harder than talking. When he played, the hardest thing had also been not to touch the ball when there was no need to.

He began to see what Quim did. Quim did not run much. Quim waited near the boards, where one side of him was safe, and listened. When the ball came he took it with the sole and moved it only a little, and then he stopped it, and when it was stopped he was invisible. The defenders came towards the last place they had heard it. They said voy, both of them, one from the front and one from the side, and so, standing in his silence, Quim knew exactly where two men were and they knew nothing about him at all.

Then he pulled the ball back behind his standing leg and turned with it, and the rattle started again, but behind them now, going the other way.

Nil had seen this turn before. Everybody has. A Dutchman did it in a World Cup against Sweden, a long time before Nil was born, and boys did it in every playground in Catalonia after that. Nil had done it himself, with sight, a hundred times. He had thought it was a trick for the eyes. You show the defender one thing and do another.

But Quim's defenders had no eyes. Quim showed them nothing. He let them hear the ball stop, and then he listened to them believe it.

---

The match was on a Saturday in November, at home, against a team from Castelló who were second. There were perhaps forty people on the little stand by the school wall, families, two physios, a man from the federation with a clipboard. In blind football the crowd must be silent while the ball is in play. They can shout when a goal is scored and then they must stop. Forty people being silent make a sound of their own, a kind of pressure, and Nil, standing behind the Castelló goal with his hands on the bar, could feel it in his back.

Castelló were good. Their two defenders talked to each other the whole time, low, short words, and they had a goalkeeper who shouted at them from his area, and they stayed close to Quim and closed the boards on him. For twenty minutes Quim had the ball five or six times and each time there was a voy before he had finished stopping it, sometimes two. Once he went down, and the referee gave a free kick, because the voy had come after the man and not before. It was nil–nil at half time.

Montse did not say much to them in the break. To Nil she said: "You've talked eleven times."

"Too much?"

"No. I counted because it's interesting. Eleven times in twenty minutes."

In the second half Castelló scored after six minutes, a low shot that came through a crowd of legs and that Dani, in the Badalona goal, saw too late. The two Castelló families on the end of the stand were allowed their noise, and they made it, and then the referee raised his arm and they stopped, and the silence came back, heavier.

Eight minutes from the end Bernat won the ball in his own half, which he did by standing very still in the place where the Castelló attacker was going to need to go. He passed it hard along the board on the left. The board gave a deep wooden knock. Montse said, "Quim, line," and Quim was already on the line, because he had heard the knock.

The ball came into the last third. Montse stopped talking.

"Nou," said Nil. Nine. Then, because Quim was left of the goal: "Esquerra."

Quim took the ball with his sole, facing his own half, with his back to the goal. It rattled once and stopped.

The first Castelló defender said voy. He came from behind Quim, from the goal side, low, arms out. The second said voy from the right, from the middle of the pitch, to close the inside. Two voices. Nil could see what Quim could not see and did not need to: the two men coming to the same point, the point where the rattle had stopped, and between the first of them and the board a space of a metre and a half, which nobody was in.

Nil said nothing. Nothing had changed. The goal was still nine metres and still to the left.

Quim waited. The defenders came. A metre. Half a metre. Then he pulled the ball behind his left leg, and turned on it, and the rattle started again, running towards the goal along the board, through the metre and a half, and both defenders were facing the place where it had been. Two touches, and he came in off the board.

Now something had changed.

"Set," said Nil. Seven. Quim was square to the goal. Nothing about the side.

Quim hit it with the inside of his foot, low, not hard, towards the post the keeper had left, because the keeper had come out to the voices too.

It went in off the inside of the post. The forty people on the stand stood up all together and made a noise like a door being opened onto a street, and Bernat was shouting, and Quim was standing with his arms out, eyeshade on, turning his head, laughing, listening to it.

Nil did not shout. He held on to the crossbar with both hands, and through his palms he could still feel it ringing from the post.

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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