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Dear Father Christmas,

Our football team is doing quite well at the moment but because we are all quite small boys we get pushed about on the pitch by the bigger boys. We can’t tackle them or win headers very easily.

We think we could do much better if our coach asked some of the other teams if we could have some of their bigger players on our side, sometimes. When we played a team in blue the other week, they were all much bigger than us, much stronger and much older. It wasn’t very fair.

We have asked our coach to bring in some bigger players but he keeps telling us that we would be killed if he did that. We don’t want to get killed. We just want some bigger players and in January one of our few big players, Alex, is going on holiday for 3 or 4 weeks. We also think than another big player, Philip, is leaving the country to go to school abroad. So we are very worried.

If you can arrange for some bigger players to join us, we would be really grateful. We have been told that Uncle Danny, Uncle Peter, Uncle Stan and Uncle Ivan have said that they will provide the money to buy the larger shirts for the bigger boys if they joined us, but our coach keeps saying that “small is beautiful”.

Thank you very much

Theo, Sammy, Andy, Carl, Eddie, Jack and the rest of the small boys in the team

PS: we really need a big goalkeeper who can catch, a centre back who can head the ball, a tough midfielder to tackle and a big strong striker who can score goals. Apart from that, we are fine. Except we are also always getting injured and the nurse is running out of plasters and bandages, so we need some of those too.