"Ron, were you secretly putting in extra practice over the holidays?" Oliver Wood stared at Ron in disbelief.
It was not just Oliver. Every member of the Quidditch team was looking at Ron as though he were a monster.
On Friday evening in the second week of term, the Gryffindor Quidditch Team held its first group training session of the new academic year. Before training began, they first held an internal Gryffindor practice match.
Gryffindor now had twelve players, counting both the starting players and the reserves. Without including Seekers, that was enough to form two teams for a practice match.
Of course, they could not simply put the starting players on one team and the reserves on the other. Instead, each team got half of each.
Oliver Wood, Angelina Johnson, Katie Bell, Fred Weasley, Seamus Finnigan, and Sally-Anne Perks made up one team.
Harry, Alicia Spinnet, Ron Weasley, George Weasley, Parvati Patil, and Isabel McDougal made up the other.
Rather than playing Chaser as he usually did in practice matches, Harry played Beater.
That was because the Weasley brothers both said Harry was handy with a club. Well, that was the impression they had formed while throwing gnomes at the Burrow the previous summer.
As it turned out, Harry did perform quite well as a Beater.
But the most outrageous performance in this match came from Ron.
The practice match lasted fifteen minutes-the median length of Hogwarts inter-house matches over the past five years.
That figure had originally been a little higher, but in the past two years, Hogwarts had gained two outstanding Seekers in Harry and Cedric. Their performances had greatly shortened the matches.
And over those fifteen minutes, the score was one hundred and ninety to twenty.
Harry and Ron's team won by a crushing margin of