Free Sleepover Club Goes For Goal! by Fiona Cummings

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 handsto 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