The Sixteenth Shirt

"A team. A ground. A dream bigger than the city."

Deo is eleven, the smallest boy in the compound of Dambo, and everyone knows his job is to carry the water. When the welder next door empties a tin of saved coins onto a shopkeeper's counter to enter a team in the town league, he only finds fifteen boys — and the form needs sixteen names for a squad. Deo gets the last line, the sixteenth shirt, and a coach's flat instruction: you will not play.

Taught everything he knows by his sister Thandi at a wall with no windows behind it, Deo has spent his whole life being told to wait his turn. This is the story of the season that tested whether waiting was ever going to be enough.

Book One of a football story about grit, community, and what it takes to be picked when there's one shirt short.

For readers aged 9–13.