The Bare Bum Gang and the Football Face-Off Read Online Free PDF Page A

don’t you worry,’ I said. I didn’t like the thought of our best ever den going up in flames. I’d rather they just played in it like we did.
    â€˜Oh,
I’m
not worried.
You
should be.’
    â€˜We ought to play in different colours,’ I said.
    â€˜Yeah, I’ll tell you what, we’ll wear blue and you wear white. White for surrender. White for cowards.’
    And then they all went off, laughing and mucking about. Except that Dockery forgot about the cans, and they tangled up in his legs and he fell over. That was the best thing that had happened since this whole story began. It took him about five minutes to get free, and he used some bad words I’d never even heard of.
    â€˜Nice work,’ said The Moan quietly when they were finally out of range. ‘That’s the den gone, for sure. We might as well burn it ourselves. We’ve got the matches.’
    â€˜Don’t be such a defeatist,’ said Noah (he knew lots of good words). ‘We should look on the bright side. The other kids from our estate aren’t all as rubbish at football as we are.’
    â€˜We’re not even that bad,’ said Jamie. ‘Ludo once scored a goal at school.’
    He was right. The ball hit the back of my head by accident while I was daydreaming, and flew into the goal.
    â€˜It doesn’t matter how good we are,’ said The Moan, ‘Dockery and his lot will never let us win.’
    â€˜Well, we can try our best,’ I said. ‘And at least we can say that we didn’t just let them take our den without a fight.’
    And then we all went home, feeling about one per cent hopeful and ninety-nine per cent depressed.

Chapter Eight
RECRUITMENT
    We had four days to find and train a team of red-hot players, fit to take on and beat the bully boys of the Dockery Gang. There’s a film I saw once called
The Dirty Dozen
, where an army captain has to find a bunch of soldiers for a deadly mission, and because it’s so dangerous, he has to get them from the army jail, and they’re all smelly and dirty, and don’t do what they’re told. But then he makes them into really good soldiers, and they complete the mission, except for the ones who get blown to bits or shot with machine guns.I was able to watch it because Mum and Dad went out and we had a babysitter called Tracy, and I told her I was allowed to stay up until eleven o’clock and watch whatever I wanted.
    So, finding our team was a bit like that, except we weren’t really smelly and dirty, and there was less of a chance of getting blown to bits. The trouble was that the kids on the new estate were mostly younger and more wimpy than the old estate kids. That was because the old estate had been there for longer, so the kids had more time to grow.
    We began looking for the three recruits we needed the next day at school. Some kids we asked said yes until they heard who we were going to play against. Then they changed their minds, because they knew that there was no way we could win, and the best thing we could hope for was only getting slightly bashed.
    But in the end we did manage to geta couple of the kids from Year Three, who didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for. They were actually quite good. One was called Luke and the other was called Oliver, but I never got it quite fixed in my head which one was which, because these small kids all look the same. The downside of Luke and Oliver was that they only had tiny little legs and so couldn’t run very fast, and they were so weak they looked like they’d fall down if Dockery even coughed in their direction.
    But, like I said, they were actually quite skilful, which was more than you could say for some of the others we looked at. Most of them didn’t even know which way to run, and just sort of milled around, tripping over their feet or getting distracted by the lines on the pitch. And if the ball came near them,