The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Face-Off by Anthony McGowan

Author:Anthony McGowan [Anthony McGowan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RHCP
Published: 2013-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

The next evening, although we were still one player short, we practised really hard. I organized the training. We began by running round the field by the playground. We were helped in this by Trixie. Trixie was an extremely vicious Jack Russell terrier. She belonged to an old woman called Mrs Cake, who lived in a bungalow next to the pitch. Footballs were always getting blasted into her garden, so she hated all children. As soon as she heard the sound of laughter, she’d drag Trixie out of her bungalow and throw her over the fence, shouting out, ‘Get them, girl.’

Trixie was quite an old dog, but she could still run at exactly the same speed as an average child, so she would chase us round and round the field, never getting any closer, never falling any further behind. After twenty minutes Trixie would have had enough, and she’d slink off through a gap in the fence. I often thought that it was a good job Trixie was the size of a large rat, because if she’d been any bigger, she would have eaten maybe three or four children every week.

Normally, of course, being chased by Trixie was a bad thing, but when you’re trying to reach peak fitness for a big match, it’s exactly what you need. After the twenty minutes was up, we had a lie down, and then practised other football skills, like kicking (the football, I mean), shouting ‘Pass! Pass!’ and then more kicking.

We ended up by practising taking penalties, in case there was a penalty shoot-out. We decided that Jamie should go in goal, because he had some gloves. They weren’t proper goalkeeping gloves just some woolly ones his granny had knitted for him. One of the gloves had six fingers and the other one had four, because his granny had something called dementia, which is a disease that makes you count up fingers all wrong. I suppose there might have been some logic to it because altogether there were the right number of fingers, just divided up wrong.

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