Is An Own Goal Bad?

by Helena Pielichaty

  For the mighty Lincoln Griffins U11 Lionesses and Eagles – thank you for making my Saturday mornings so tense and exciting!

  The Team

  Megan “Meggo” Fawcett GOAL

  Petra “Wardy” Ward DEFENCE

  Lucy “Goose” Skidmore DEFENCE

  Dylan “Dyl” or “Psycho 1” McNeil LEFT WING

  Holly “Hols” or “Wonder” Woolcock DEFENCE

  Veronika “Nika” Kozak MIDFIELD

  Jenny-Jane “JJ” or “Hoggy” Bayliss MIDFIELD

  Gemma “Hursty” or “Mod” Hurst MIDFIELD

  Eve “Akka” Akboh STRIKER

  Tabinda “Tabby” or “Tabs” Shah STRIKER/MIDFIELD

  Daisy “Dayz” or “Psycho 2” McNeil RIGHT WING

  Amy “Minto” or “Lil Posh” Minter VARIOUS

  Official name: Parrs Under 11s, also known as the Parsnips

  Ground: Lornton FC, Low Road, Lornton

  Capacity: 500

  Affiliated to: the Nettie Honeyball Women’s League junior division

  Sponsors: Sweet Peas Garden Centre, Mowborough

  Club colours: red and white; red shirts with white sleeves, white shorts, red socks with white trim

  Coach: Hannah Preston

  Assistant coach: Katie Regan

  Star Player

  Dylan “Dyl” McNeil

  Age: 7 — I was 0 once, too. How funny is that?

  Birthday: 9 May (I am three and a half minutes older than Daisy.)

  School: Mowborough Stinky Primary

  Position in team: yes

  Likes: Luna (mum), Jim (dad), Daisy (twin sis), Darwin and Declan (twin bros), Sedge (dog), Fred (guinea pig), Ted (guinea pig), Ned (rabbit), Dead Red (dead rabbit), Pickle (cat), Beetroot (cat), and Ellie Bream and Callum Kirton in my class

  Dislikes: Miss Parkinson, who stinks of butter that’s gone off

  Supports: my mum when she has a headache

  Favourite player(s) on team: me first, then Daisy second and JJ third, because I like the way she runs

  Best football moment: when we score and I can do my aeroplane

  Match preparation: I always arrive too late to prepare.

  Have you got a lucky mascot or a ritual you have to do before or after a match? No but I’d like one. Where do you get them from?

  What do you do in your spare time? Play in the fields round our windmill. Feed the pets. Grow vegetables in my patch. Watch my brothers practising ballet. Sit in my thinking chair.

  Favourite book(s): all the Malory Towers books

  Favourite band(s): Peruvian pipe music

  Favourite film(s): Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

  Favourite TV programme(s): we don’t have a TV

  Star Player

  Daisy “Dayz” McNeil

  Age: 7

  Birthday: 9 May

  School: Mowborough Prison

  Position in team: right wing

  Likes: football, eating biscuits, listening to my granny talk about Scottish things

  Dislikes: shouty teachers like Miss Parkinson and sitting still and assemblies and when we have to kill one of the chickens for dinner

  Supports: Dundee United FC because my granny does

  Favourite player(s) on team: all of them, but especially Tabinda as she’s the one who asked us to join the team in the first place, and Megan, who is always helpful.

  Best football moment: when the whistle blows and we begin

  Match preparation: what did Dylan put for this? We never do any.

  Have you got a lucky mascot or a ritual you have to do before or after a match? No.

  What do you do in your spare time? I dig up worms on my allotment and play with all my animals. I help round the house. I read. I play with Dylan and my brothers, Declan and Darwin.

  Favourite book(s): The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

  Favourite band(s): any as long as I can dance to them

  Favourite film(s): Pirates of the Caribbean

  Favourite TV programme(s): we don’t have a TV — it rots the mind

  Pre-match Interview

  Hello, person reading this!! We are Daisy and Dylan McNeil. We are identical twins. We play football for the Parrs Under 11s. We’re the smallest and youngest on the team. (We begin a lot of sentences with “we”!)

  Our glorious captain, Megan, has let us write about the Nettie Honeyball Cup run. Have you ever seen a cup run? We haven’t, but we have seen one fall. He! He! (If you are a top banana you would smile at that. If you are not a top banana, like our teacher Miss Parkinson, you will have pulled a sour face and thought something like “Girls! Just for once, is it too much to ask that you concentrate on the task you have been set?” We know you are a top banana, person reading this, otherwise you wouldn’t have chosen a book about girls’ football, would you? You’d choose one on verrucas or something.)

  By the way, if you saw what Lucy Skidmore put at the end of her story, about us writing ours upside-down or in Elvish, don’t worry. Although we did try writing upside-down — because we thought it might be fun — it just gave us a headache. And we don’t even like Elvish. We think he was a rubbish singer. No, we have written our story in a traditional way, like the highly good but dead author Mrs Enid Blyton would have. We’ve used chapter headings and had it spell-checked and everything.

  Yours divinely,

  Daisy and Dylan McNeil

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Final Whistle

  1

  In which Miss Dylan McNeil writes about the first match in the Nettie Honeyball Cup, using her best vocabulary (not always found in ordinary dictionaries)

  Our story begins once upon a time on the last Saturday of the October half-term holiday. I was trying to have a deep slumber, because I knew on Monday I would have to get up early and face the cruel and cold weather as well as the cruel and cold Miss Parkinson. The trouble was I could not slumber in a deep manner because I could hear the phone ringing. I waited, thinking someone would get it, but nobody did. “Don’t worry, I’ll go,” I said to my twin sister, who didn’t move a smidgen. Daisy could sleep through a hurricane, lucky thing.

  So I slipped into my slipperoos and went to answer the phone. This takes a while when you live in a windmill and your bedroom is on the top floor and the phone is in the kitchen on the bottom floor. Usually, by the time you have travelled all the way down all the spiral staircases, past your parents’ bedroom on one floor and your twin brothers’ bedroom on the next floor and your living room with all your mum’s paintings on the floor beneath that and then landed in the kitchen, the phone has stopped ringing and all you can do is sigh and pat Sedge, your beloved border collie, then go back upstairs. Today, though, the phone didn’t stop ringing. So I answered it, hoping Sedge wouldn’t mind waiting for his pat.

  “Hello, may I help you?” I asked in a highly polite way, in case it was someone wanting to buy one of Mummy’s paintings.

  “Who’s that?” a sharp voice at the other end replied.

  “Felicity Wishes,” I answered, because everyone knows it’s silly to tell strangers your real name on the phone.

  The stranger sighed. “Dylan or Daisy?” she asked.

  “It might be,” I said.

  “Daisy, it’s your Granny Susan!”

  Then I knew it really was because I recognized her voice, even though it was coming all the way from Scotland. “Oh, Granny. Och aye the noo!”

  She tutted. “Och! How many times do I have to tell you, nobody says ‘Och aye the noo.’ Not in Dundee, anyhow.”

  “Not even the Loch Ness Monster?”


  “Daisy, do you know what time it is?”

  “Actually, I’m Dylan. You can tell us apart because I don’t nibble my nailies.”

  “Dylan, do you know what time it is?”

  “I do chew my hair locks, though. It’s a filthy habit.”

  “Dylan, listen to me. Do you know what time it is?”

  “Nope.”

  “It’s half-past nine.”

  “OK. Well, thanks for letting me know. That’s very kind of you. Now, about the Loch Ness Monster … did it ever have babies?”

  “Dylan, you’ve remembered you’ve got a football match at half-past ten this morning, haven’t you?”

  I frowned. I hadn’t. I squinnied across at the back door. The back door has a big nail and a little nail thumped into it. On the big nail we keep the calendar and on the little nail we keep our fixture list. Both were missing. “Oops,” I said.

  “Tch! I knew it! It’s a good job I’ve got a copy of your list or you’d all be up the Swanee without a paddle. Away now and get ready.”

  “Er … Granny…?”

  “Greenbow Community Centre.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s the cup match against Greenbow United Girls.”

  “Oh! A cup match! Guess what? Megan wants me and Daisy to write up all about the cup matches.”

  “Well you’d better get a move on, or there’ll be nothing to write about!” she said and hung up.

  Of course it was all go, go, go after that! We must not miss the first match of the cup run. We must not! I ran back up the stairs and shouted into my mum and dad’s room, “Wake up, Snoozeheads! It’s football!” and then I ran to my brothers Declan and Darwin’s room and shouted, “Wake up, Snorybrains! It’s football!” but when I ran to my bedroom I didn’t shout. I shook Daisy awake and said, “Twinny! It’s footy and I’m not even fibbing!” and Daisy scowled and said, “When?” and I said, “In, like, an hour” and she said, “Oh no!”

  Do you know what, though, person reading this? We were all ready and climbing into Chutney, our faithful camper van, by ten past ten. That is a McNeil McRecord, that is.

  At first Daisy and me were really excited and we talked about the match. “Do you think they’ll wear green bows?” I asked her, and she said, “They might – but the Grove Belles didn’t wear bells, remember?” I nodded, because it was sad but true. Then we chatted some more about playing and I got that twingly-wooshy feeling in my tummy because I wanted to get out on that field and run like a champion. “Are we there yet?” I asked Jim, our beloved bearded father.

  “No, Greenbow’s out towards Leicester; we’ll be another half-hour at least,” he replied.

  Daisy stopped talking in an instant when she heard that mood-damping news, and she just stared out of the window when I tried more chit-chat, so in the end I helped Darwin with his knitting instead. Have I mentioned that Darwin is an excellent knitter? He can knit you anything as long as it’s something long and thin. I have put in a request for mittens for kittens when he is more experienced. Declan, on the other hand, is not a knitter. He prefers projects involving sawing and hammering and a hint of danger. Building things and falling out of our treehouse are his specialities.

  Eventually, after ages and ages, and miles and miles, we found the Greenbow estate, but we couldn’t find the community centre because every street we went down seemed to be a dead end full of cars on bricks. “It’s badly signposted,” Dad said, as he reversed Chutney into a pub car park sprinkled with pretty sparkly glass.

  We finally arrived just as it began to frizz with rain. “It’s a good thing we’ve brought our cagoules,” I said to Daisy. “Do you think Hannah will let us wear them to play in?” Daisy didn’t reply. Her eyelashes were pressed against the window. “Daisy, I said it’s a good thing we’ve brought our cagoules,” I repeated.

  “I’d leave Daisy alone,” Darwin told me. “She’s upset.”

  When I looked closely at her, I could tell he was right. Her face was blubby. “Let’s do the jolly football clapping song!” I said in a highly encouraging voice. I held my hands out, ready. “Come on! ‘Two-four-six-eight, who do we appreciate…’ Your turn, Daisy!”

  I paused and waited. The next lines were “Not the King, not the Queen, but the Parsnips football team” – but Daisy was not interested.

  “There’s no point,” she replied.

  “Of course there is!” Luna, our beloved spiky-pink-haired mother, encouraged. “If you hurry you might get five minutes.”

  “We won’t,” Daisy said. “They’ve finished. Look!”

  My heart sank then. What Daisy had said was true. Coming towards us, in small grouplets of two and three, were our teamies.

  At the front was Megan, our brave and honest ball-stopper captain, and her best friends Petra and the scrunch-faced Jenny-Jane. They had their arms round each other and looked victorious. Near by, Tabinda was waving her shinglepads at her father and chatting, and on the other side of them Lucy Skidmore and Holly Woolcock were laughing. I couldn’t tell who else was approaching the car park as they were still too far away.

  “Let’s go,” Daisy said, her voice full of urgency. “Let’s go before they see us.”

  “Are you sure?” Dad asked. “Don’t you want to explain what happened? Or see how it went?”

  “No,” Daisy replied in a mope-laden voice.

  Dad twisted round and glanced at me. I shook my head. My twin was right. The match was over, so we should simply return home without further ado.

  As Dad started Chutney’s engine, Mum leaned over and patted Daisy on her knee. “Sorry, my love. It was worth a try, though, eh?”

  “Not really,” Daisy muttered, ducking down and unscrabbling her laces.

  I chewed my lip and hoped my twin wasn’t going to be in a skulk for the rest of the weekend. It does grate on my gums when she skulks.

  Anyway, we returned to our beloved windmill on Windmill Lane, had breakfast and fed the precious and beloved dog, hens, rabbits, guinea pigs and cats – but not the fox, because he is wild and gets his own nibbles.

  2

  In which Daisy McNeil explains to Megan Fawcett why the twins missed the first match of the Nettie Honeyball Cup

  On Monday morning I went to school feeling that my chest was being squashed by a giant’s foot. I was so nervous. What was I going to tell Megan? She would not be very pleased with us, especially as we had promised her we’d make a good job of writing up the reports. “Are you sure you can deliver?” she had asked.

  “Oh yes!” we’d said together. “We’ll be highly excellent. We’ve got really remarkable reading ages and vocabularies for our year. Ask anyone.”

  “Though our spelling’s a challenge,” I warned.

  “Go on, then,” Megan had agreed.

  And now we’d messed up already and she was going to be so disappointed.

  Luckily, when we got to school, Megan and Petra happened to be the greeters on door duty. Greeters miss lessons for a whole day and get to ask people to sign in, and then they escort them to Mr Glasshouse or the staffroom and such things. This is to show how kind and polite pupils at Mowborough Primary School are, and to make visitors feel welcome. Dylan and me cannot wait to be greeters. We’ll be so sublime at it.

  Anyway, Megan and Petra being the greeters meant I didn’t even have to wait until break to get the giant’s foot off my chest. I could go straight away, though I would have to do it without telling Miss Parkinson. Miss Parkinson is not good at understanding things like giants’ feet on your chest, so there was no point telling her.

  As soon as Miss Parkinson had her back to me, I slid out of my place. Dylan was on the other side of the classroom plaiting her friend Ellie’s hair and did not see me sliding, thank goodness. It was better if I did this on my own.

  My knees were a little on the shaky side when I approached the greeters’ table. “Hello, Meganini.” I smiled, pretending to be all breezy. “Hello, Petrasaurus.”

  “Hello, Da
yz,” they chirped. They didn’t sound angry at all! Hurrah!

  “Erm … how is the greeting going?”

  “So-so.” Megan shrugged. “A bit boring, really.”

  I glanced at the visitors’ signing-in book. The page was bare.

  “Is there anything we can do for you, Daisy?” Petra asked.

  I took in the deepest of breaths in case they secretly were cross but were hiding it well. “It’s about the cup match.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We missed it.”

  “We know. Don’t worry about it,” Megan said before I could explain.

  I blinked. Don’t worry about it? How kind! Often when we miss things people get cross or say something like “Typical” or “I might have known you would.” Unless it’s the dentist – then we just pay a fine.

  “It’s a pity you missed the game. It was a cracker! We won three–one!” Petra added. Her grin was as wide as a watermelon.

  “So what should we do about writing up the match? Should we just make something up?” I asked.

  Megan shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. Hannah’s already posted her match report on the website, so we have a record; that’s the main thing.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know Hannah did that.”

  “Yes. She always writes the match reports. She does ours and the Parrs’.”

  “Oh.”

  “Just print that out.”

  “OK.”

  “Print out the table, too. It shows where we are in the group.”

  “Is that important?” I asked. Tables sounded too mathsy to me. Maths is not one of my best subjects. Ask Miss Parkinson.

  Megan nodded. “Not half! Only the top team in each of the two groups goes through to the final.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. Basically, we’ve got to win every match we play in the cup run. Our position is everything.”

  “Lucky for us the Grove Belles and the Tembridge Vixens are in Group B,” Petra added.