Gerbil World Cup HQ: Atlantis vs. The Flowerpot Men & Little Weed
Weeeeeeeeed…
Nobody at HQ had actually seen Atlantis train. They arrived the morning of the match, fully formed, moving with the unhurried confidence of a side that had apparently been doing this for several thousand years and saw no reason to rush the last hour before kickoff.
Bill and Ben arrived talking to each other, at length, in flobbadob, and did not stop talking to each other, at length, in flobbadob, for the entire warm-up. Little Weed stood between them, arms folded, the only member of the squad who seemed to have any idea what the actual plan was.
Griselda blew the whistle. Gwendoline, pitchside, wrote “the mystery XI” in her notes before a ball had been kicked and immediately regretted how much she liked it.
Minute 4: Atlantis strolled it about, unbothered, passing sideways and backwards with the air of a team who had never once, in their long submerged history, felt the need to hurry.
Minute 17: GOAL, Flowerpot Men. Bill said something to Ben mid-move that nobody translated in time, Ben cut inside, and her shot went in off a post before Atlantis had finished their fourth consecutive sideways pass. 1-0. Little Weed allowed herself the smallest possible nod.
Minute 33: GOAL again. A short corner, worked entirely between Bill and Ben without a single word of English spoken, ended with Ben heading in from two yards while Atlantis’s back line was still, by all appearances, deciding whether to react. 2-0. Gwendoline’s bulletin read, with visible alarm: ATLANTIS IN TROUBLE!!
Griselda, watching from the touchline, was heard to mutter that “a civilisation doesn’t just misplace two goals,” which Gertrude took as a compliment to the Flowerpot Men and did not correct.
Half-time. Atlantis said nothing in the dressing room, which unsettled everyone who heard about it afterward far more than shouting would have.
Minute 51: Atlantis came out and, for the first time all match, stopped passing sideways. A one-touch move split the Flowerpot Men apart like it had been rehearsed for a thousand years, because, it was quietly suggested afterward, it probably had. 2-1.
Minute 68: Little Weed, sensing the tide turning, tried to slow the game down — standing directly between Bill and Ben and the ball, insisting on an official team talk mid-play, which Griselda allowed on the grounds that nobody had a rule against it. It worked for exactly four minutes.
Minute 74: GOAL, Atlantis. Same one-touch move, same unhurried inevitability, levelling it at 2-2. The Atlantean captain did not celebrate. She simply looked, briefly, at the crowd, the way something ancient looks at weather.
Minute 85: Bill and Ben, sensing danger, began talking faster, which nobody had realised was possible, and it appeared to work — a driving run split the Atlantis defence wide open, only for the final ball to be intercepted at the very last stride.
Minute 90: GOAL. Atlantis, patient to the absolute last, worked the ball through one final unhurried sequence and slotted it in with something that might, on a species capable of showing it, have been the ghost of a smile. 3-2, Atlantis.
Little Weed did not complain. She simply looked at Bill, and Ben, and then at the scoreboard, and said something in flobbadob that Gertrude, watching from the tunnel, later translated — unprompted, unasked, and only once — as: “Next time, we go first.”
Greta’s line appeared under the glass before the final whistle had finished echoing:
Atlantis — through, eventually. Flowerpot Men — out, but talked the whole way there. Some empires just take longer to wake up.
https://myrtlelion.substack.com/p/atlantis-vs-the-flowerpot-men-and