Saving Grace (cartoon strip by Steve English)

A four-panel comic strip in the junior section, drawn and written by contributor Steve English. Grace, the young goalkeeper the strip is named for, is again the victim of the format’s running joke about the gap between how a player feels and what the game then asks of her: an offer of help arrives with immediate effect, a team-mate reaches for the nearest solution, and by the last panel Grace is left in her goal with the outcome resting entirely on her. It is drawn in the same bright, loose style as the rest of the Little Kicks pages and lettered by hand. It shares the page with We Kick!, in which Liverpool Feds Under-11s answer questions from vice-chair Sue Carmichael and coach Annie Wilkin: the Macarena as a goal celebration, goalkeeper Victory’s dancing, and Jessi’s auntie, the former England international Fern Whelan.