Gerbil World Cup HQ: Middle Earth vs. The Magic Roundabout
Nobody at HQ expected the pitch to hold. Elendil arrived flanked by elves, dwarves, and a hobbit still visibly carrying something she wouldn’t discuss, and lined up against Dougal, Brian, Ermintrude, Dylan and Zebedee like it was the most natural fixture in the fixture list — which, by this point, it basically was.
Griselda blew the whistle. Gwendoline, pitchside, had already used four exclamation marks before kickoff and had to be gently reminded the match hadn’t started.
Minute 3: Aragorn strode the length of the pitch with the calm inevitability of prophecy, only for Brian to slide-tackle her from a snail’s pace that nobody saw coming, least of all Aragorn. “Consistency,” Brian said afterward, “is a snail’s whole personality.”
Minute 19: Theoden thundered in on goal — genuinely thundered, the pitch shook — and struck a shot so hard it went through Dylan, who had fallen asleep directly behind the goal line and did not wake up, but did, somehow, keep the score at 0-0 by pure unconscious mass.
Minute 34: GOAL. Isildur, distracted by a shiny corner flag she mistook for a ring of power, wandered so far out of position that Dougal — who had been complaining continuously since kickoff about the state of the grass — simply walked the ball in unmarked. 1-0, Magic Roundabout. Dougal complained about that too.
Minute 52: Denethor, from the stands, ate an entire bag of crisps and announced Middle Earth’s tactics were “beneath the dignity of Gondor,” moments before Frodo equalised with a shot so low and so determined nobody even saw her wind up. 1-1. Gwendoline’s bulletin simply read: SHE DID IT AGAIN!!!
Minute 70: Extra time loomed. Elves in goal proved excellent at spotting danger from a great distance and useless at anything closer than six yards, which Ermintrude exploited twice, twice denied only by a despairing full-length dive from an elf who would later describe the save as “beneath my usual range, but sufficient.”
Penalties.
Elendil stepped up first, composed, dignified, Elf-friend to the last, and put it straight down the middle — saved, astonishingly, by Zebedee, who did not so much dive as boing, materialising in the ball’s path with a spring nobody in Tournament Operations had cleared as legal but nobody was now willing to argue with.
Aragorn scored. Theoden scored, still thundering. Isildur, given a second chance, walked up to the ball, looked at it for a long moment as though weighing an old and terrible temptation, and then — to the audible relief of everyone who knew the story — simply passed it into the net instead of trying to keep it. The crowd, such as it was, wept.
But Dougal converted. Brian converted. And Zebedee, last up, didn’t even take a run-up — just boinged forward from a standing start and rolled it in with the weary satisfaction of someone who had, once again, “gone where the game needed her.”
5-4 to the Magic Roundabout.
Middle Earth were out. Denethor declared it “a dark day, but a day, at least, that ends,” and went back to her crisps. Elendil shook every paw on the opposing side individually, formally, and at length, delaying the trophy presentation by nine minutes. Frodo, last off the pitch, was still carrying something — though now, everyone privately agreed, it looked a little lighter than before.
Greta’s line appeared under the glass before the final whistle had finished echoing:
Middle Earth — out. The Magic Roundabout — through. Time for bed, said Zebedee.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/middle-earth-vs-the-magic-roundabout