Champions League Round of Sixteen Second Leg

 

LIVE TV STUDIO COVERAGE

Presenter: Good evening and welcome to what is certain to be a night of pure drama here in Hawkstone. Quite simply, Hawkstone United must win this match against Real Madrid to prevent the club from going bust… I’ve literally just been handed the team news, and taking a huge gamble tonight is the Hawks boss, Harry Armstrong, who has selected JAMIE JOHNSON to start this tie… Johnson, who, it has been revealed, has been training secretly with Hawkstone since last Friday, has apparently showed such scintillating form in practice that Armstrong believes he has no choice other than to play the little genius… And yet, at the same time, questions remain about whether it can ever be sensible for the nineteen-year-old, who has only just returned from a major head injury, to ever take part in top-level football again….

As Jamie breathed in the familiar smell of a football changing room, he smiled to himself. He was back home.

Barcelona had been fantastic. Although they still held his registration as a player – they had never cancelled the contract just in case Jamie did ever come back – they had agreed to loan him to Hawkstone United, who had made a special request to Barcelona in light of their financial difficulties.

Jamie sat down and looked at the Hawkstone United kit next to him. He, like everyone else in the city, knew that Hawkstone United was now on a life-support machine. That support was the Champions League. If they went out tonight, the machine would be switched off and the club would die. A one hundred and twenty-seven year existence would end. But if they could progress into the quarter-finals of the competition, the money it would generate would be enough to keep the club afloat until at least the end of the season.

It was a simple equation: win and survive or lose and die.

The only thing standing in their way was a certain football club called Real Madrid.