Soccer Scoop Book

I'm trying to expand my horizons more as a reader in hopes of being able to recommend more to a wider audience, so this was my first foray into sports fiction. I can see why sporty kids would get into this, as descriptions of the game nicely tie in sports strategy and have a decent amount of interest and suspense. It's very short (113 pages) and moves quickly. This particular story also has an added mystery of who is publishing mean cartoons about the protagonist, a talkative goalie, in the school paper--not a super weighty take on the issue, since the cartoons are mostly just snide and he mostly wants to figure this out for his ego, but it adds a bit of interest. (The way the principal approaches the issue is interesting, though--saying that he can't do anything to censor the paper and that Mac should just ignore the cartoons--and makes me wonder how this topic might be treated differently today.) There's also some typical school stuff--like going to a school dance--to flesh out the characters a bit more than what we see on the field.

Based on the Goodreads information about Matt Christopher and the information in the beginning of the book, it looks like this was published shortly after Christopher died--which makes me wonder if this was his last/one of his last books, or if his sons took over and wrote this one. Either way, I was struck by how dated the characters' speech was: it felt like I was reading a book about kids in the 60s or 70s rather than late 90s, especially when it came to expressions like, "Hey, what do you know? It's X." While it was still a decent story, it made me wonder if the language would turn kids off, or if they would roll with it.