Discworld vs. Bagpuss’s Mice
Quarter Final IV. Saggy old cloth cat…
The mice arrived in careful single file, each one carrying something small and useful — a needle, a spool of thread, a spare button, just in case — and set their kit down with the tidy precision of a team that had never once lost anything down the back of a sofa.
Bagpuss herself was carried out last, fast asleep, and laid gently on a cushion beside the touchline. Griselda eyed her with mild professional concern. “Will she be joining us,” she asked, “at any point?”
“When she’s ready,” said Charlotte Mouse, with total confidence, and went to warm up.
Discworld arrived the way Discworld always arrived, which is to say gradually and then all at once — Weatherwax first, saying nothing, which somehow took up more space than shouting would have; Nanny Ogg last, humming something that made Gwendoline blush and then correct her own bulletin twice.
The whistle went. The mice played the way they mended things — small, exact, patient touches, nobody rushing, everybody covering for everybody else. Within ten minutes it was clear this was going to be a much closer game than anyone at Gerbil HQ had drafted a headline for.
Minute 12: Nanny Ogg won a corner that nobody quite remembers the ball going out for. The elephant shrew referee checked her notes, found nothing wrong on paper, and allowed it with the specific unease of someone who suspects paper isn’t the whole story.
Minute 17: GOAL, Discworld. The corner came in, and somewhere in the resulting scramble the ball ended up in the net by a route nobody present could fully reconstruct afterwards. Griselda wrote “unclear” in her notes and underlined it twice. 1-0.
Minute 24: The mice, entirely unbothered, mended the gap that had let the goal through — literally, several of them conferring at the back like a sewing circle assessing a tear — and simply stopped conceding through it again for the rest of the match.
Minute 33: Death, playing an unhurried holding role, made a tackle so calm and so perfectly timed that the mouse in possession simply found the ball gone, without quite experiencing the moment it left. Nobody could call it a foul. Nobody could quite call it fair, either.
Minute 40: From the resulting move, GOAL, Discworld, scored by Errol with the sort of finish that involved slightly more fire than regulations technically allowed, though nobody wanted to be the one to raise it with a dragon. 2-0.
Half-time — and Bagpuss woke up.
She did it slowly, the way she does everything, opening one eye and then the other and giving an enormous, unhurried yawn that seemed to take the whole pitch with it — and the moment she was properly, fully awake, the mouse organ struck up on the touchline, playing something so sweet and so wonky and so entirely uninterested in being impressive that half of Discworld’s bench stopped what they were doing just to listen. Nanny Ogg was seen, briefly, wiping her eye.
Minute 51: Whatever Bagpuss’s waking did, the mice came out transformed — not faster, not harder, just surer, every pass finding its mark with the quiet certainty of a job done properly. GOAL, Bagpuss’s Mice, worked the length of the pitch with nine short, careful passes and finished low into the corner. 2-1. The whole team celebrated by tidying up the goal net where the ball had disturbed it.
Minute 66: The mice drew level — a header, unlikely, from a mouse barely half the size of the ball she’d just directed, met with total astonishment from her own side and something close to pride from the touchline. 2-2. Gwendoline’s bulletin simply read: THEY MENDED IT.
Minute 78: Nanny Ogg, sensing the game slipping away from her side entirely, produced something from her pocket that nobody got a clear look at, waved it near the corner flag, and the resulting set piece bent in a way that set pieces do not, strictly, bend. GOAL, Discworld. 3-2. Griselda’s notes on this one simply said “no.”
90+4: The mice threw everything forward one last time, working a final patient move through a Discworld defence that was starting, visibly, to tire of being patient back at — and were denied, right at the very end, by Weatherwax simply standing in the one place the ball needed not to go, arms folded, entirely unmoved, the way she is in most situations.
Final whistle. 3-2, Discworld.
The mice shook every paw, thanked the referee, and began, without being asked, tidying the pitch on their way off — folding the corner flags rather than leaving them, coiling a stray bit of netting that had come loose. Nanny Ogg watched them go with an expression Gwendoline’s bulletin described, for the only time all season, as sheepish.
Greta’s line was waiting under the glass:
They didn’t win. But everything they touched was better mended than they found it.
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