Griselda arrived at the pitch forty minutes before kickoff, which everyone agreed was restrained by her standards, and immediately confiscated three items of bunting for being “aspirational rather than accurate.” The scoreline had not happened yet. The bunting already claimed it had.
“It’s for morale,” said Gwendoline, chasing after the offending bunting with both paws.
“It’s for later,” said Griselda, filing it under a clipboard tab marked LATER (CONDITIONAL).
The Hanseatic League do not, strictly, exist as a nation, a guild, or indeed a single agreed-upon century, but none of that has ever stopped them turning up sixty gerbils deep in wool cloaks with a marching band composed entirely of enthusiasm and two working instruments. Their supporters had queued since dawn, chanting something in what Gertrude swore was Low German and Greta swore was just “the alphabet, backwards, with feeling.”
Play School arrived calmly, in single file, each gerbil holding the paw of the gerbil in front, led by a Humpty so dignified in her felt waistcoat that the elephant shrew referee saluted her by accident and had to pretend she’d meant to do that.
“Which window shall we go through today?” the Humpty asked Griselda politely, at the coin toss.
“There is no window,” said Griselda. “There is a pitch.”
“There’s always a window,” said Humpty, not unkindly, and toddled off to her position with the serene confidence of a gerbil who has never once been wrong about this.
The whistle went. The Hanseatic League surged forward in a formation best described as a trading convoy that has smelled profit, and within four minutes had scored through a striker whose name translated, according to Greta, to “she who arrives before the invoice.” The devoted supporters did not cheer so much as detonate.
Play School responded with the sort of composed, gentle passing game that made the whole pitch feel like storytime — sweet, unhurried, and somehow still one goal down by half-time, because Big Ted, playing sweeper, kept pausing to make sure everyone was comfortable before committing to a tackle.
“She’s SO gracious,” wailed Gwendoline into her fourth bulletin draft. “How do you write an exciting headline about someone being lovely at every stage of the collapse!!” She crossed out two exclamation marks, then reinstated one out of guilt.
Gertrude, watching from the touchline, pressed a single sunflower seed into Griselda’s paw without comment. Griselda looked at it for a long moment.
“She thinks it’s over,” Griselda translated, mostly to herself.
It was not over, not quite — Play School pulled level in the sixty-third minute when Jemima, in one smooth motion, produced a goal so unexpected that even the elephant shrew referee had to check her own notes to confirm it had been legal (it had; Jemima has never once needed a window when a doorway would do). The Hanseatic League supporters went briefly, catastrophically silent, the way a crowd does right before it remembers itself.
Then it remembered itself. Eighty-first minute, a corner taken with what Griselda’s clipboard would later describe, admiringly, as “excessive commitment to the bit,” and the ball was in the net before Big Ted had finished asking if everyone was quite ready.
2–1. Final whistle. The Hanseatic League supporters did not so much celebrate as become, briefly, a weather event.
Play School lined up afterwards exactly as they’d arrived — single file, paw in paw — and Humpty paused by Griselda on the way out.
“Through the round window next time, I think,” he said, with the placid certainty of someone who has lost precisely nothing today, only postponed a win.
Griselda didn’t correct her. Some gerbils don’t need a scoreline to know what they’re made of.
Hanseatic League go through to the semi-finals, where they will meet Magic Roundabout.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/hanseatic-league-vs-play-school