Leaper Lane (Jane Curry Publishing, $14.95 pb, 206 pp, 1920727264), by Stephen Measday and Paul ‘Sirro’ Sironen, is a typical example. Life isn’t easy, the blurb informs us, when eleven-year-old Jack Lane moves from Melbourne to Sydney with his newly separated mother: he has to leave behind Dad and his beloved Aussie Rules. But it is not long before he is hooked on rugby league, has acquired the regulatory nickname, and is well on his way to becoming a legend. On the domestic front, Mum acquires a new man, thus fuelling some interstate rivalry, and Jack finds himself mid-field juggling the sensibilities of both parents. By story’s end, all is tidily resolved: Dad relocates to Sydney with marital reconciliation on the cards; and Leaper kicks the winning goal to secure the big match for the state team, and a medal for himself. The plot is thin, the characters never seem real, and the writing depends a great deal on italics and exclamation marks to generate excitement. So close and yet so far!... Wham! The game was ours! Narrative suspense might have been stronger had the story concluded with Leaper’s success rather than starting with it.

Exclamation marks festoon the text of Hung Le’s Barry Noodles and DaKillerBs (Random House, $14.95 pb, 165 pp, 1741661102), not to mention screaming, oversized fonts and cartoons; readers past their teens might well develop a headache trying to read it. But the story of Barry ‘Noodles’ Tran’s attempt to be the first great Vietnamese footy player by bringing to the game the skills of kung fu is genuinely funny, and told with all the manic energy you would expect from a successful stand-up comedian. Dong Ho, Barry’s tram driver father, who wants him to concentrate on the violin, and Uncle Five Tran, whose restaurant is called Ho Inn, ‘the best karaoke joint in Melbourne’, provide more fun, and Bruce Lee is called upon for some motivational tips. Le’s book won’t win any literary prizes, but of all the sports novels I surveyed, it was the only one to feature an Asian-Australian protagonist.

Another Specky Magee clone is Jasper Zammit (Soccer Legend), by Deborah Abela and Johnny Warren. The Finals (Random House, $14.95 pb, 217 pp, 1741661005) is the fourth in the series. No doubt there will be more, despite the fact that former Socceroo captain Johnny Warren died in 2004; he must have left enough tips to keep the series alive. Each chapter is preceded by his ‘Johnny Says’ advice, but one wishes he had the same facility with the English language that he had with the soccer ball. ‘A good coach who stressed the skills and fundamentals of the game would have been worth their weight in gold,’ he writes; ‘Leave the game better than when you entered it.’ The story has some development beyond mere description of training and matches, but Abela is unfortunately addicted to the ubiquitous ‘like’, as in ‘his voice boomed over the field like it had its own private PA system’; ‘he said it like he’d just given Jasper a warning, like they were in some kind of LA gang movie’. The story revolves around Jasper’s team, the Rovers, being landed with a new and tyrannical coach just as they head towards the grand final. It ends, of course, in triumph: ‘Like Johnny Warren used to say, ‘Life is like soccer …’

Authors might do better by turning to literary stars rather than to sporting heroes to help them out. Paul Corbet-Singleton acknowledges the ‘invaluable assistance’ of Garry Disher in Fire in my Soul (Lothian, $17.95 pb, 239 pp, 0734408641), and it is a terrific story. Fifteen-year-old James Salisbury is a long distance runner, training for the state finals. As the first page has it, ‘It’s not easy being good at something you fear.’ Despite being a champion in his small bush community, James is a ‘choker’, prone to faltering in the last moments of an important race. He likens it to ‘walking out on a bridge with no railings, and knowing you will fall’. His problem is tied up with his family’s status as newcomers and outsiders – his father has failed to volunteer as a district firefighter – and his undeclared and unrequited passion for Alison Burroughs, his equal as a runner but far ahead of him in almost everything else. Then a new rival enters the picture: the ultra-competitive Gavin Jellis, whose obnoxious father is seemingly determined to make his son a champion, by fair means or foul. James pushes himself harder, and is elated when Alison’s father, a former champ, offers to coach him. Suddenly, a relationship with Alison doesn’t seem impossible. But his bush runs are made riskier by the fact that a firebug is on the loose, with the Salisbury house being threatened just as James begins to suspect who the culprit is. It is a gripping plot supported by strong characterisation, and Corbet-Singleton cares about language. You can practically smell the burning gum leaves, and he takes you inside the mind of an athlete, vividly conveying the pain, tension and excitement of a race, and all without recourse to dumbed-down language or exclamation marks. Fire in My Soul is aimed at slightly older readers than the previous titles, but why shouldn’t pre-pubescent readers interested in sport also be exposed to good, rather than merely accessible, writing and strong plotting?

Guide them towards Marlane Ainsworth’s Offbeat (FACP, $14.95 pb, 128 pp, 9781920731656), a riotous tale that pits music-loving Tommo against footy-mad Smelly. In a nice reversal of traditional gender roles, he likes Mozart and Purcell and plays a mean trumpet; she’s loud, noisy and a great goalkicker. When both the Wallaby Flats school band and footy team travel to the city to compete in respective state championships, there is a disastrous mix-up with the buses; the terrified musicians find themselves on the oval, while the bewildered footy players are hustled on-stage in front of judges and an expectant audience. It is all highly unlikely but extremely funny, and each character is deliciously caricatured. You could read a hundred sports novels and never come across a passage like this, as the nervous Tommo tries for goal: ‘I managed a kick that sent the ball spinning into the air, up and up and up against the blue-grey of the sky between the posts. It was a beautiful moment. A Wagnerian ‘Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla’ moment. Played loud.’ The cover and illustrations by Andrew Allingham are a bonus.

Life isn’t easy when you’re large, lumbering and short of sporting skill – and, I imagine, when you have a name like Claude. Archimede Fusillo’s On the Mat (Lothian, $14.95 pb, 159 pp, 0734408439) is at least a change from all the ball game stories. Clumsy Claude is ridiculed by his peers and nicknamed Big Fella by Mario, a feisty little newcomer to his school who sees him as a potential wrestler, yet the cover photo shows a trim, toned young spunk. Maybe that’s after his three months of training. Mario and his uncle are fans of professional wrestling, that sweaty, totally scripted stuff you now see mainly on cable television. But back in the 1960s and 1970s it was a crowd-puller, and there-in lie the threads of a plot revolving around dead and distant fathers, living legends, past glories and old promises. It is all a bit complicated, and towards the end the story loses pace as characters are forced to explain family histories to other characters. There’s also a rather complex twist to the big final wrestling bout in which the school bully Da Silva may or may not get his comeuppance, and the novel ends so abruptly I wondered whether pages were missing.

An unlikely newcomer also steps in to help solve the problem of bullying in Don’t Call Me Ishmael!(Omnibus/Scholastic, $16.95 pb, 277 pp, 18629816667), by Michael Gerard Bauer. Just as original but very different from his award-winning first young adult novel, The Running Man (2003), this is a humorous story pitched at a younger age group, but will also be appreciated by older readers.

Life surely isn’t easy when you’re saddled with a name like Ishmael Leseur and the bane of your life is a school bully called Barry Bagsley. Yes, this is an ‘issues’ novel, but the problem is dealt with in an original and entertaining way, and without any intervention from adults. Miss Tarango, the new year nine home-room teacher, has a go at dampening Barry’s loutish classroom behaviour, but it takes the arrival of a nerd with a facial tic to turn things around. James Scobie, for all his physical drawbacks, is overflowing with courage and self-confidence. He also possesses a silver tongue and a sharp wit, and he successfully employs both weapons against Barry Bagsley and his gang. He also manages to get a debating club up and going – some might consider this a task with an equal degree of difficulty – and one of the funniest scenes involves a reluctant and unprepared Ishmael forced to participate in a vital debate on the subject ‘That the private lives of public people should remain private’. He doesn’t realise that his hastily donned clothing has retained one of his sister’s decorated clothes-peg people, and at a crucial moment, in full view of the audience, Ringo works his way up his thigh and drops from his pants. A pertinent and ironic comment on the subject under discussion, surely, and I was disappointed that nobody present had the wit to stand up and applaud.

Don’t Call Me Ishmael!, with its humour, sustained witty dialogue, interesting, well-developed characters and fresh approach to what has become a rather overworked theme – school bullying – comes as sheer joy after the clichés of plot and unchallenging prose of many sports novels. And yet it is accessible and engaging: the short punchy chapters have suspenseful endings encouraging you to read on, and the cover art by Joe Bauer hints at the fun inside. The five sections of the novel are prefaced with appropriate and surprisingly relevant quotes from Moby Dick, which might just foster an interest in that classic novel. Librarians and English teachers will be recommending this title to their students, although the realists among them will acknowledge that it is not easy to subdue the Barry Bagsleys of this world with mere words.