The teenager came home dead pale.
He had left full of bravura, the club’s scarf around his neck, brand new season ticket in his jacket pocket – bought at a discount for the second act of the competition in which the club would fight against destruction. A bargain, he thought.
For the boy, who breathes football, it was a dream: to sit in the stadium every other week, watch the best players in the country pass by and hope for a resurrection of the club.
The fact that the resurrection did not take place did not bother him. What mattered was that he was there. Present. Not with his parents, with a friend. Independent. Both a green chair. Looking wide-eyed at the Z-side. Sing along, roar along. Those guys turned a simple game into something big.
“Then throw!” That day the friend challenged him. It was not his intention that the bottle would end up on the field, he said afterwards, but he did throw. Without thinking. It was plastic and empty. Flew further than he thought, rolled on, over the line, about 10 inches into the field.
Wrong lot. He was picked, pointed out by the public, taken by a steward. This, the man said, could cost him a stadium ban. No matter how many times he said “sorry,” the man was adamant. The club would investigate and he was going to hear it.
So deadly. He had only just tasted the excitement of the big football world and now they threatened to deny him entry. Because of a stupid bottle.
He never heard of it again. The day the man ran onto the field (‘he came from my profession’) and Willems was beaten, he was not in the Euroborg for other reasons. When the thrown lighter in De Kuip this week made Ajax player Klaassen’s head bleed, he was sitting on the couch watching television and asked his mother if he now understood why the steward had acted so harshly against him.
The teenager nodded. Whatever he understood, the big adult world is essentially not all that different from his uncontrollable adolescent brain. The trick is to find your way through it without too much damage.