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

they ran away or flapped at it the way you would at a wasp attacking your ice cream.

    There was one Year Six boy called Vincent who said he would play for us if we let him be in charge of our gang. Vincent’s teeth were green and brown and his hair was so greasy he could squeeze it into whatever shape he wanted – say, a horn or a spiral – and it would stay like that, and he smelled of smoky-bacon-flavour crisps, which is good if you’re a crisp, but bad if you’re a person (the same goes for prawn cocktail and cheese and onion). Vincent was good at football, and not just because nobody wanted to get too close to him in case they got a noseful of smoky bacon, or hit with the wet slap of his greasy hair.
    We discussed letting him in.
    â€˜I don’t think we should let him play,’ I said.
    â€˜That’s because you don’t want him to be our leader,’ replied The Moan. ‘You want to stay Leader yourself.’
    â€˜I don’t want Vincent to be our leader,’ said Jamie. ‘I couldn’t stay in the den at the same time as him. We’d all end up smelling of smoky bacon.’
    â€˜I don’t want him as Leader either,’ said Noah. ‘I like having Ludo as Leader. He doesn’t even smell a
bit
of smoky bacon.’
    â€˜Well,’ said The Moan, who was obviously looking for an argument, ‘he sometimes smells of something worse.’
    â€˜No I don’t,’ I said. ‘What could be worse than smoky bacon? For a person, I mean.’
    â€˜Flowers,’ said The Moan, looking smug.
    He could really fight dirty sometimes.
    â€˜That’s because of the soap my mum buys.’
    â€˜It’s girl soap,’ he said.
    There was a pause while we thought about this. If it was agreed that I used girl soap, then that would be me finished as Gang Leader, and Vincent would take over and we’d all smell of smoky bacon, even if we managed to keep the den, which was not very likely.
    It was Jamie who came to my rescue, which I didn’t expect.
    â€˜That’s stupid,’ he said. ‘Soap is just soap. It’s not like lipstick. You don’t wear lipstick, do you, Ludo?’
    â€˜Only at weekends,’ I said.
    â€˜He’s only joking,’ said Noah, which was true.
    We told Vincent that he couldn’t play because he didn’t live on the new estate. We didn’t mention the smoky-bacon thing.

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 penaltyshoot-out. We