The day of the game. Milltown High versus St Martin’s. This year it was at our school, not that home advantage had ever been an advantage in the long history of our annual matches. Basically, the game is rigged.

See, Milltown is an ordinary public school. It’s great, don’t get me wrong. Its students have a huge range of academic abilities and an equally huge range of ethnic backgrounds. This makes it great. All of human life is here. St Martin’s, on the other hand, is a private school. It charges massive fees and in return promises excellence, though its Year Twelve results aren’t quite as good as ours. The excellence comes in facilities. An amazing library, partly paid for by someone in government who used to go to the place. An Olympic-sized swimming pool that was opened by Thorpey himself. A state-of-the-art lecture and performing arts theatre that can hold a thousand people.

Our school relies on demountables, and some of those are riddled with asbestos.

No one really knows how the St Martin’s versus Milltown soccer game started in the first place, or why it’s become an annual tradition. Maybe it was as simple as the people with money wanting assurance they were superior to those without. If true, they’d got plenty. Milltown had never beaten St Martin’s. Never. In the last five years the scores had been 15–0, 17–0, 21–0, 24–0 and 14–0. At least we improved last year. And why this dreadful drubbing? Because St Martin’s has a purpose-built soccer ground and training gym, a specialist manager who’d once been an assistant coach for the national under-seventeens and a sports psychologist. Milltown has losers like me and a small shack on the oval that passes for a changing room and smells of pee.

I thought about injustice as we watched the St Martin’s team step down from their customised bus. The Socceroos would have been jealous of the transport. You see, I also know St Martin’s receives more government funding per student than our school does, and we have plenty of kids with special needs. Depending on who you talk to, that includes me. And St Martin’s charges an additional twenty-five thousand dollars a year in fees. We ask for fifty bucks from parents to buy books for the library, though few cough up.

No wonder they kick our sorry butts.

The whole system is rigged.