The Smashmouth Game

You arrive at the soccer pitch bleary-eyed and tired. How many hours of sleep did you get? Two? Maybe three?

“Look lively, dude,” Val says, giving your back a good thump as you straggle onto the field. “You planning on winning us this game?”

You blink at her a couple times and shrug.

“Just going to keep the ball out of that goal,” you say. “That’s my job as a defender.”

But watching the hulking guys and girls of the Smashmouth team jog around their pitch for the warm-up, the eleven of them chanting some kind of USMC Running Cadence in sync with their heavy footfalls, you start to feel kind of intimidated.

“We should get on that,” Mars says, sliding up to the two of you.

She and Val both look great in their grey jerseys, and you probably spend a second too long staring at them, because Val points two fingers at her tits and then points them up at her eyes.

“Eyes here,” she says.

Mars laughs, and then her head snaps to the side at the sound of a high whistle: “Oh shit! Daphne’s calling. We’d better go before she boots us from the squad.”

The game goes hard from the kickoff. The Smashmouth players charge down the field, and you wonder for a moment if this isn’t (American) football with the way that they’re muscling past your teammates. They play with quick passes, their massive numbers on your side of the pitch ensuring that there’s always somebody open to receive the next ball. At least one of them seems to have the full time job of making crazy runs that border on offside, and you find yourself tied down by all the moving players, unable to properly mark one of them, because there goes another bigger threat to chase...

Your legs grow tired ten minutes into the match, your head throbbing with what feels like a hangover, but it must just be simple exhaustion. You blink and miss a pass aimed for you. It goes off the sidelines. Smashmouth throw in.

You find one of the Smashmouth women to mark, somebody built like a tank, with thirty pounds and four inches on you. You see the guy on the sideline searching back and forth, trying to find a target. The sun shines bright in your head, giving you another splitting headache, and you clutch your head, wincing.

But just as you’re busy rubbing your forehead, the ball flicks by you, followed by a storm of Smashmouth players. One of them gets there and kicks the ball hard. It arcs high through the sky, and Charlie leaps into the air to get it, but he gets edged out by a woman taller than him, who crisply heads the ball straight for your goal. Keegan dives for it, his fingertips grazing the ball, but it’s no good. The ball sweeps by and hits the back of the net. Smashmouth is up a goal.

The rest of the half goes no better. It seems like there are always five of the Smashmouth guys on you, the hooligans unrelenting in their attack. With so many of them constantly swarming you, you can’t possibly keep all of them down. No matter how many times you clear the ball, somebody sprints back to pick it up and lobs it back into their mass of players. Shot after shot is aimed at the goal, and it’s a miracle that Keegan blocks as many as he does, but it’s for nothing. Even when the ball bounces off his good hands, there’s somebody there to volley the ball back towards the goal. It’s all you can do to watch as two more goals are made.

Halftime is a depressing team talk with Daphne. She looks frustrated at everyone, but in particular, you.

“You’ve got to see the play before it happens, Alex,” she says. “Get in the right place. Pass the ball up. We’ve got a chance if you can break through their ten strikers!”

You nod, seeing the eyes of the team on you. You’re going to try to follow her advice.

It works, at first. You tackle a burly dude, outplaying him with some fancy footwork, and then you boot the ball hard, passing it down to Katie. She dribbles the ball down the pitch, steadily keeping pace ahead of the Smashmouth players rushing back to try to defend. She’s a quick one, and she gets the one-on-one with the keeper. With a beautiful curved ball into the top corner of the net, your team erupts in cheers. Maybe you’ve got a chance after all.

But your burst of newfound energy doesn’t last long. Even when you see the play, you’re not able to get there in time. The Smashmouth players are just too physical, too easily able to push you aside, and you practically beg the ref to call a foul a couple times, all to no avail. They make up the conceded goal not ten minutes later.

Things go downhill from there. They play the pitch like a factory line, just jamming the ball down your side of the pitch, going for shots on goal whenever they draw anywhere close to the box—and they get there an awful lot—and before you know it, the final whistle is blown, and you’ve been blown out 6-1.

“Fuck this,” Javier sighs as the lot of you slouch into the changing rooms. “Worst game of my life.”

“Tell me about it,” Charlie says, rubbing his pecs, which caught quite a few elbows over the course of the game.

Daphne -5
Katie -5
Khloe -5
Jack -5
Keegan -5
Charlie -5
Jason -5
Javier -5
Mars -5
Valentine -5