Coach Hurlock swept his eyes over his team.
What a bunch of disgusting pigs he
thought.
Quite literally disgusting pigs; they
were the Space Hogs F squad and their sense of personal hygiene had
long since abandoned them after deciding it couldn’t put up with
the smell. Coach Hurlock was not of the hog persuasion, he came from
Jetpack City. It was a quite a radical new thing in the game of
Slamjet, inter-region coaches. No longer did the team coach need to
be from the same city, planet or species as the team.
Officially this had been done to
encourage a new spawn of tactical thinking and to encourage
strategies more in depth than
I’ll-try-and-knock-that-guys-teeth-out-and-maybe-score-a-goal.
Unofficially, however, this had been
done to build a better network of people involved in the sport and
make it easier for things like bribery and match fixing.
In practice what was happening was that
coaches were being kidnapped, tortured for information about the
opposition and ransomed back.
So far Hurlock had managed to avoid all
forms of brutal torture (if you didn’t count the smell). However,
his team had lost their last 23 games. Another two losses and they’d
set a new record. Hogs Squad F had been the talk of pundits and
bookies everywhere for the past couple of weeks. Celebrity
commentators were mentioning the psychology of a losing streak and
how it can become a self fulfilling prophecy in that the players are
worrying so much about losing that this causes them to lose. Coaches
always come under fire in these situations and Hurlock was no
exception; What was Hurlock trying to achieve? What’s he got
against playing the
I’ll-try-and-knock-that-guys-teeth-out-and-maybe-score-a-goal
scenario? Or was Hurlock demanding too much from players? What were
his credentials? Did he actually have any success with Jetpack City?
Coach Hurlock had another theory for
the huge losing streak. It was because all of the players sucked. It
wasn’t his fault. He’d tried his best to teach them the tactics
he’d learned from his time with Jetpack City but it just wasn’t
taking. And let’s face it, these guys were the F squad and the E
squad wasn’t particularly good.
He’d had great plans before he came
over. He was a great tactician, he knew it. And this was supposed to
be his chance to prove that. But no matter what he did or how he
tried to get through to the team it didn’t matter. He’d tried
diagrams, and roleplay. He’d bought the Slamjet Stadium computer
game to help them think about the game. The management had given him
the budget to get a holographic projector installed to create 3d
representations of the stadiums to better explain his plays. He even
tried sock puppets one time. They didn’t know what socks were and
spent the whole session trying to figure them out. Then during the
game Braggers Rushog tried to wear the ball over his feet. He fell
backwards off it and Newton’s Third Law of motion propelled the
ball through his own goal.
He contacted an old coaching friend of
his that had great success with a local kid’s team, the Fighty
Bucks, and managed to lead them to victory in three separate years.
Hurlock asked him what the secret was and he just said that at end of
the second act a star player would suddenly join the team and a lot
of the players would suddenly overcome the crisis of confidence they
were having.
But no star players had suddenly
appeared. There was no miraculous dawn of understanding from the
players. They were just continually confused and bewildered trying to
follow the coach's advice and messing up the game.
Tonight was going to be different. They
were not going to lose this game.
He told them so.
They looked worried. To be fair the way
he told them did make it sound kind of like a threat. Coach Hurlock
stood before them. Behind him was something draped with a blanket to
obscure it. Well as much as you could obscure the shape of a board on
a tripod. It covered up what was on the board at least. And besides
which, the Hogs didn’t have much in the way of cognitive capacity
of spatial reasoning, as far as they were concerned that blanket
could be hiding a chocolate bar or a spaceship.
Coach Hurlock had figured it out. He
was a great tactician but he was still thinking like a Jetpack City
team. He had to think like a Hogs team. Coach Hurlock pulled at the
blanket. It fell away to reveal The Plan.
There was a sudden collective indrawn
breath from the team. Which, due to their biology, was more of a
snort. Their eyes lit up. They understood this. This would work. It
made sense. Coach Hurlock could see from their faces as they nodded
to one another that he had cracked it. This would lead them to
victory tonight. And not just tonight but for many games to come.
This tactic was going to define teamwork for the entire game.
On the board he had written
“You-hold-this-guy-down-while-I-knock-his-teeth-out-and-maybe-score-a-goal."
