“Well, yes,” admitted Lyndz, “but I don’t suppose there’ll be anyone watching us anyway. It’s not a big competition like last Saturday, is it?”
“But we don’t need supporters to play well, do we?” I fired back. “You’re just being defeatist. Come on guys, do it for me?”
The others all looked at each other.
“OK, but we’re only doing it this once,” Frankie spoke for all of them.
“And if anyone laughs at me…” piped up Fliss.
“… you’re out of there,” the rest of us said together. “Yes, we know!”
The problem was that to practise properly we really needed some opposition. We tried practising by ourselves over the weekend, but it got pretty hopeless. I mean, when you’re trying to be the striker and the goalkeeper you can get a bit of an identity crisis!
“This is never going to work!” wailed Fliss. “We’re going to be a laughing stock. We’ll have to call the whole thing off!”
“No way!” I told her. “We’ll just have to sort something out!”
And that’s where the boys came in. (I always knew that they must be useful for something!) It nearly made me choke to ask them a favour on Monday morning, but it had to be done.
“But boys aren’t supposed to play against girls,” sneered Ryan Scott when I finally asked him to play against us. “You might get too upset when you never get the ball.”
“Yeah, right!” I snorted. “I reckon you’re scared that we’re going to beat the pants off you. Not up to the challenge then, Scotty Boy?”
“OK, you’re on!” he said indignantly, “but you’d better not start snivelling when we keep beating you!”
As if!
I knew that Fliss would have a fit when I told her what I’d arranged, so I didn’t tell her until the last minute. Bad move! She nearly wet herself when she saw Ryan Scott all puffed up waiting for the contest.
“I… I can’t play against them!” she wailed.
“’Course you can,” I told her firmly. “You’ve done it before. Just forget who they are. Pretend they’re girls or something.”
Easier said than done. Fliss just froze every time she saw Ryan Scott with the ball. 1–0, the ball flew into the goal over her head. 2–0, the ball whizzed in past her left hand. 3–0, the ball whooshed in to her right. 4–0, the ball whipped in through her legs.
“Come on Fliss, get a grip!” I yelled. I turned to Frankie. “This is hopeless!”
“Hang on a minute, I’ve got an idea,” she said.
She quietly went over to have a word with Ryan Scott, and when she’d whispered something else to Fliss she came back.
“Right, I reckon the rest of us should have a bit of shooting practice, what do you say?” she said, and grabbing another football, she went towards the other goal.
“What’s going on?” I asked her when Danny McCloud and the others were shooting at goal.
“Oh, I just told Scotty what a great striker he is.”
I stared at her in disbelief.
“And said that because he’s such a superstar,” she continued, “he’s the only person we can rely on to give Fliss the practice she needs.”
“What?” I shrieked. “You traitor! What about Girl Power? I’m better than Ryan Scott any day of the week. And you know it!”
“I know,” agreed Frankie. “But would Fliss have listened to you like that?” She gestured to where Fliss was engrossed in what Ryan Scott was telling her.
“I guess not,” I agreed. “But he’ll be so big-headed now, he’ll be unbearable. I hope it’s worth it!”
Well, I was definitely right about him getting big-headed. He never stopped rubbing it in that we needed his help to sort out our playing. I was well annoyed about that.
“I’m going to kill you for this!” I warned Frankie. “He’s more unbearable than ever.”
“I know!” she agreed. “I made a BIG mistake with that. You’d better shoot me now!”
Of course Fliss was absolutely delirious about Ryan Scott’s attention, which just made us madder still.
“I bet she hasn’t learnt anything from him,” Rosie said before our match against the boys the next lunchtime. “She’s probably just been batting her eyelashes at him and telling him how wonderful he is!”
Well, that’s where we were all wrong. Fliss played an absolute blinder in goal. Nothing got past her. And we actually won the game 1–0!
“Hey Fliss, you were brilliant!” we all congratulated her afterwards.
“She had a good coach, didn’t she?” smirked Ryan Scott from behind us. “Good job you’ve got a man like me to sort you out, isn’t it?”
“Man?!” we snorted. “In your dreams, mate!”
“Don’t get too cocky,” he sneered. “We only let you win because Pownall said we had to boost your confidence.”
“Yeah right!” I laughed.
“You don’t think he was serious, do you?” asked Rosie anxiously afterwards.
“No way! We won that fair and square,” I reassured her. I was sure that they would never let us win a game like that. Although it did play on my mind just a teensy bit on Wednesday as we got ready for the competition…
Boy, was it tough getting through that day. We were all so nervous we could barely talk to each other, never mind do things like work and eat. Fliss lost it completely – surprise, surprise!
“I can’t do this!” she kept whimpering. “I’m sorry, I just can’t.”
“Yes you can!” I told her firmly. “We all promised that we’d do it this once. Besides, we’ve already beaten the boys’ team. How frightening can a girls’ team be?”
“But the boys let us win, didn’t they?” she twittered.
I was going to make mincemeat of stupid Ryan Scott when I got hold of him.
“At least there’ll be nobody there to watch us make fools of ourselves,” muttered Lyndz.
She certainly seemed right there. Mrs Poole did mention the match in assembly and wished us luck, but nobody else seemed very interested. The M&Ms of course sneered at us, but what’s new? They’re our deadly rivals in everything, so you wouldn’t exactly expect them to be cheering us on. But I thought that Danny McCloud and Ryan Scott might have mentioned it. After all, we had supported them in their competition. But that’s boys for you, I guess.
Anyway, when the bell went at home time, we all made our way into the changing rooms. By that time I was feeling more than a little sick. Part of me was desperate to get on with the match, and part of me wished that we’d never got involved in the five-a-side thing to start with.
“Just think, in less than twenty minutes it will all be over!” said Frankie grimly, pulling her T-shirt over her head. She’d embroidered S.G.U. on hers in big loopy silver letters. I’d used a black felt tip on mine.
“Couldn’t you do better than that?” asked Fliss, looking at it. The sequins on hers were still sparkling. But to be honest with you, our T-shirts were really the last of our worries.
There was a knock at the door. Mr Pownall popped his head round it.
“Are you ready, girls? The other team’s waiting for you.”
We must all have looked petrified, because he laughed.
“There’s nothing to worry about – treat it as just another game. Keep your concentration, use all the pitch and keep your defence tight at the back. I’ll be there to shout instructions, so just enjoy yourselves!”
That made us feel a bit better.
“OK sir, we’ll be out in a minute,” I told him.
When he’d gone, we got into a group huddle.
“We’re all in this together so let’s go out and win this baby!”
We broke free and put our right hands into the centre.
“Sleepover Superstars!” we yelled, raising our hands into the air.
With that, we were really pumped up and ready for anything. We burst through the changing room doors into the gym and…
“I don’t believe it!” gasped Frankie.
The gym was absolutely packed with people. There were children from every other year in the school, loads of teachers – even Mrs Poole was there. But there were just as many people who we didn’t recognise. They must have come with the other team.
“Blimey!” shrieked Rosie. “Look at them!”
On the pitch were some of the meanest-looking girls we’d ever seen. And huge! They looked like Teletubbies in football shorts!
“We are going to get slaughtered!” wailed Fliss. Lyndz just started to hiccup, which is Lyndz’s response to any crisis. Frankie tried to deal with her whilst I tried hard to think how we should approach the game. And that’s when the cheerleading started. At first all we could hear was Mr Pownall’s voice warbling:
“Sleepover Superstars are the best,
They’re going to score more than the rest!”
Then you could just hear a few more voices joining in.
“Give me an S…”
It was Ryan Scott and the others, can you believe that? They looked dead embarrassed too. I nearly cracked up. Mr Pownall must have made them do it – it was wicked!
I turned to the others.
“Right, we’re going to win this, OK?” I told them firmly. “I know that they look a lot bigger than us, but that probably means that they’re a lot slower. Don’t let them intimidate you. And Fliss, you’ve got to remember whatever it was that Scotty taught you, OK?”
She nodded, the others nodded, Lyndz hiccuped.
“Right, deep breaths and – we’re on!”
We ran on to the pitch looking as though we were scared of nothing and nobody. It was a major act, but it boosted our confidence. The supporters went wild. It was totally awesome. I couldn’t believe that they were cheering for us, but I couldn’t let myself think about that too much. We had a football match to win!
It didn’t start too well. In fact it was a disaster. We were 2–0 down in less than a minute. I was pushed out of the way by the huge girl I was marking and Fliss’s brain had gone walkabout, so they scored from the kick-off. Then the exact same thing happened from the re-start. After their second goal, I heard one of their players say to her mate:
“This is a piece of cake!”
And I saw red. No way, NO WAY was I going to let them think that we were a walkover.
“Come on Sleepovers!” I clapped my hands to gee the others up. “We can get back into this!”
The referee, who was a friend of Mr Pownall’s, blew his whistle to re-start, and I passed back to Lyndz. She dummied past one of their players, Frankie shook off her marker, got the ball, passed to me and—Wham! 2–1.
I think they realised then that they had a game on their hands, and really tightened things up. Have you ever tried getting away from a bad-tempered hippopotamus in a hurry? I thought not. Well that’s how it felt trying to shake off my marker. Every time I got the ball and tried to run down the pitch with it, I was bundled over. A couple of times the referee awarded us a foul against her, but their goalkeeper was like an octopus and seemed to be able to save anything that came at her. Fortunately for us, Fliss was holding her own in our goal.
When half-time came round, the score was still 2–1.
“It’s hopeless!” mumbled Rosie. “We just can’t get the ball.”
“I, hic, know!” agreed Lyndz. “They’re such, hic, bruisers, they just keep bundling us out of the, hic, way!”
“Just stick with it!” I urged them. “We’ll get the chance to score, you’ll see!”
“But we’ve only got another six minutes,” Frankie muttered. “We’re going to need longer than that.”
“Don’t give up!” I told them firmly. “We need you to be strong, Fliss. If you can keep them out, then we’ve got a chance to win this match!”
The whistle blew for the start of the second half, and the opposition came out with all guns blazing. We hardly got a look in. Ryan Scott was shouting instructions, but it was kind of hard to hear him over the din of all the supporters. When Lyndz finally got the ball he yelled:
“Pass it to Kenny!”
I heard him and managed to dodge past my marker. I got the ball and shot it as hard as I could. Thud! It shot into the back of the net just under the goalkeeper’s diving body.
The crowd went wild. We were on level terms again! Two-all, two-all!
“We can win this!” I urged the others. “Come on, we can win this!”
But before we could compose ourselves, the other team had kicked off and the ball was heading towards our goal. Lyndz backtracked, their forward powered on… and only had Fliss to beat.
“It’s yours, Fliss!” I screamed. “Grab it!”
We could only watch in horror as Fliss and their forward collided with a sickening thud.
My heart was in my mouth. I know it sounds awful, but I couldn’t really think about Fliss. All I knew was that she’d just given away a penalty – we were done for. But then I saw the awful truth. The ball was already in the back of our net! It must have squirmed under her body when she collided with their player. The other team was going wild.
Screee! The referee blew his whistle and shook his head. “No goal, it was taken inside the area!” he told us, pointing for a free kick.
I looked to Fliss to take it, but she was still on the ground.
“Get up, Fliss, come on!” I urged. Trust her to be so dramatic.
“I can’t,” she squealed. “I think I’ve sprained my ankle.”
I bent down to examine it while the others crowded round. Mr Pownall rushed on to the pitch and felt Fliss’s ankle too.
“Well you haven’t broken it, but it seems like a nasty sprain to me,” he said. That had been my diagnosis too.
“It looks like that’s it then,” he said, shaking his head. “With no substitutes, we’d better call a halt to the match.”
“NO!” we gasped.
“How many minutes are there left?” asked Frankie.
The referee looked at his watch. “Just over two,” he replied.
“Can one of us go in goal?” asked Rosie.
“Well, yes,” Mr Pownall replied, “but that will mean you’re short in the outfield. Why don’t we just ask for a rematch when Fliss has recovered? I’m sure Hollymount won’t mind.”
“I can hold out for two minutes,” Fliss said bravely, struggling to her feet. “I think we can win this match, and I’m not giving up now!”
We all hugged her, despite her wincing and squealing, “Mind my foot!”
I took charge of the tactics.
“Tighten up the defence at the back!” I told Rosie and Lyndz. “We’ll have to protect Fliss as much as possible.”
From the re-start it was clear that Hollymount Girls were going for the kill. It was like being charged down by a herd of hungry rhinoceros. Poor Fliss, she had this look of total panic in her eyes. After one close shave, when Lyndz had only just managed to prevent their player from shooting on target, Fliss whispered:
“Please score Kenny, because there’s no way I can get through extra time!”
Talk about pressure! Time was fast running out and we needed a goal. I must have let my concentration slip for a second as I was planning how to score one, because one minute I had the ball, the next I’d given it away. I could see the others at sixes and sevens all over the pitch, and Hollymount’s striker was in an acre of space. She was bound to score. THWACK! The ball thundered towards Fliss. There was no way she could save it!
“Dive, Fliss!” I heard Ryan yelling. “To your left!”
Fliss leapt the full width of the goal. She looked to have got down too late but the ball hit her leg and flew back out of the goalmouth. Coo-ell!!
“Way to go, Fliss!” I yelled. But I could see that she was clutching her ankle in agony.
When the ball had bounced out, Rosie had got it and was streaking down the pitch with it. I was caught between wanting to help Fliss and scoring a goal. Frankie was out on the wing, and Rosie found her with a perfect pass. But I
could see two Hollymount girls rushing to tackle her.
“Over here, Frankie!” I yelled, and sprinted up the pitch, with Fliss screaming “Go Kenny!” behind me.
Frankie tried to cross the ball but it ricocheted off one of Hollymount’s players – right into the path of Rosie. She had a perfect sight of goal and nobody marking her.
“Shoot!” yelled Ryan Scott and Danny McCloud.
“Shoot!” yelled Frankie, Lyndz and Fliss.
I could hardly bear to look. Rosie had never been good at shooting practice and she looked to be panicking too much. It was all happening too fast, but at the same time it all seemed to be in slow motion. I saw her take her foot back, I saw the ball bobbling about and…
“GOOOAAALLL!”
She’d scored! I rushed over to her and flung my arms round her.
“I don’t believe I did that!” she was gasping. She almost looked as though she was going to cry.
“We’ve got to keep it together until the whistle goes!” I told the others when we’d calmed down a bit.
And let me tell you, that was the longest minute of my life. I felt as though I could have walked into Leicester and back before the referee finally blew for time.
As you can imagine, as soon as we heard it we just went crazy. You’d have thought we’d won the World Cup or something! The crowd rushed on to the pitch and all these people engulfed us. It was totally awesome. Even Fliss forgot about her ankle so that she could join in with the celebrations too.
We didn’t forget to commiserate with the other team though. We finally caught up with them in the changing room afterwards and shook their hands and told them how well they’d played. They all looked pretty down, so we tried not to get too hyper about winning the match.
“Shouldn’t we exchange shirts or something?” I asked their captain.
She looked at my shirt. “Erm, I don’t think so,” she said, screwing up her nose.
I looked down, and my shirt was one massive swirl of black and grey where the felt tip S.G.U. had all run together. I was kind of hot and a bit sticky.
“If you think that’s bad, you should see your face!” Frankie laughed.
I ran to the mirror. I looked like a chimney sweep! I must have got the ink from my shirt all over my hands and then smeared it all over my face.
Sleepover Club Goes For Goal! Page 6
