Extra Time

Extra Time by Morris Gleitzman is a football story for 9 year olds, told by the smallest and fiercest person on the pitch.

What happens

Bridie's brother Matt is fourteen and very, very good with a ball. Bridie is the younger one, and she has quietly appointed herself his manager.

They play on a patch of brown grass next to the cattle yard, which Bridie reckons is the best kick-around spot in Australia. It does get crowded.

Today six enormous boys in orange shirts turn up to prove they are better than Matt.

Matt is extremely good-natured about it. Bridie is not. She is busy correcting their grammar and working out a game plan.

Fast passing, she whispers to everybody. She cannot play herself because running sets off her asthma, so managing is the job. Somebody has to do it.

What she does not say out loud, because Matt would hate it, is that his legs are held together with three pins.

Then comes the bit that tells you what sort of book this is. When Matt's side scores, Matt swaps to the other team. That is the rule. It makes the game better.

The orange captain cannot cope with this at all. You cannot change sides once a match has started. And Bridie tells him this is not a match, it is a game, which is a completely different thing.

Bridie is brilliant company. She sees everything. She notices that Matt keeps passing to Jayden because Jayden's mum is in hospital and having the ball helps. She clocks Uncle Cliff crinkling his beer can on the verandah. She has firm views on why the orange boys turned out like that (too many big dogs in this town, apparently).

Now the part you should know before you hand it over.

Two and a half years before the book starts, the Sutherland boys set off to a football match in the next town and there was a crash. Matt's older brothers, twins called Pete and Danny, both died. Matt came out of it with the pins in his legs. All of that has already happened and the family are living in the after of it, so it is not waiting to ambush your reader later on.

It is handled gently and it is properly sad. Mum panics over a bruise. Uncle Cliff says at the funeral that when the final whistle goes seventy years early for two of your sons, it is hard to trust the ref again.

If your reader has lost someone, or gets anxious about their own family, read this one near them. If they are just here for the football, they will get plenty, and the sad parts are short and kind.

What to read next

For another boy who plays football in the middle of something much bigger, Boy Overboard is in the library. Jamal does his dribbling round a wrecked troop carrier in Afghanistan, with his sister beside him, and that story gets far more frightening than this one.