De droom van een voetballertje

Summary

Short feature film about a boy who dreams of being a football hero.

This is one of the many short films made by Dick Laan for the Boy Scout association ‘De zwarte pijl’. On a Saturday afternoon, a boy hears four older members of the football club HFC Haarlem talking about the first team’s chances of winning the championship. That night in bed, he dreams that he has to stand in for one of the players on the first team: Arie, the centre forward. The dreaming boy plays football so enthusiastically – he lies in bed tossing and turning and kicking – that he wakes up his brother. When the boy hears someone calling from bleachers that there is only one minute left to play, he notices that he is alone against eleven opponents. I’ll do it by myself, he thinks. A superb solo brings him in front of the goal. The audient cries out, ‘Shoot, Ben!’ When he takes his shot, the goalkeeper grabs him by the leg. The ball rolls towards the goal, and stops just before the goal line; Ben then blows it into the goal. Dancing in his bed, he cries out, ‘Hooray, we won!’ His brother is fed up, and grabs the water jug. Since his own bed is now soaking wet, Ben has to share his brother’s bed. ‘Too bad it was just a dream,’ he says, ‘otherwise we would have been the champions.’

In his book ‘Over film’, Dick Laan gives a detailed description of De droom van een voetballertje (The Dream of a Young Football Player).