A short story. Made up, like the others.

It’s nil–nil in the under-elevens cup final with four minutes left, and it’s been raining sideways since the warm-up.

The Harriers’ number nine hits it from the edge of the box. I’m thirty metres back and wide on the left, because the last thing that happened was a throw-in on that side. The ball goes over the keeper’s hands, smacks the underside of the bar and comes straight down. Then a Rovers defender swings his leg at it and it goes out over the touchline, halfway to the car park.

Where it came down, I don’t know. I saw the bar shake. Between me and the goal line were the Harriers’ number four, who is eleven and already taller than me, and the far post.

The noise arrives about a second later.

The parents are all along the far touchline behind the rope, Rovers nearer this goal, Harriers nearer the other, the tea hut in the middle. Every Harriers parent has seen it go in. Every Rovers parent has seen it bounce out. Nobody is saying I think. The loudest of both lots are by the tea hut, side-on to the goal and forty-odd metres from it, which is the worst view in the ground apart from mine.

The only spectator level with the goal line is a man by the corner flag with a dog. He’s looking at the dog.

Gav, the Harriers’ manager, comes one step onto the pitch, which he isn’t allowed to do, and then another. “Ref! That’s a yard over! A yard!”

If it had been a yard over I’d have seen it over the number four’s shoulder. It’s the first useful thing anyone’s said, and he didn’t mean it to be.

The players are looking at me. The number nine, Kai, already has both arms up, but he’d have had them up whatever happened. The Rovers keeper is on her knees looking at the line, as if it might tell her.

Here is the rule. A goal is when the whole of the ball is over the whole of the line. Not most of it. Not probably. And the referee has to have seen it, because there’s no one else to ask. Nobody’s filming, except a dad on a phone behind the other goal, at the wrong end. I can’t ask the players, and I’m not going to ask the man with the dog.

Giving it would be quieter. There are more Harriers parents than Rovers ones.

I point up the pitch, the way the Harriers are attacking. “No goal. Harriers’ throw.”

The noise changes key. Someone by the tea hut tells me where I can go. Gav takes a third step and his assistant pulls him back by the coat. Somebody on the Rovers end starts clapping me, which is worse.

Four minutes of nothing happen. I blow for full time, it goes to penalties, and the Harriers win them four–three, because their keeper guesses right twice. Their parents come onto the pitch, which they also aren’t allowed to do, and I let them. Nobody shouts at me any more. The thing I didn’t give has been replaced by a cup, and a cup is better.

I’m getting my bag from under the tea hut counter when Kai comes over. He’s got his medal on and mud up to the eyebrows.

“It was in, though,” he says.

“It might have been.”

“So I scored in a final.”

“Not one I can give you.”

He thinks about that. Behind him his team are trying to fit the cup on the goalkeeper’s head.

“That’s not fair,” he says.

“No.”