Friday evening, in the Gryffindor Common Room.
The Quidditch players looked rather listless.
The tryouts for new players had not gone very well. There were no particularly promising second- or third-years, and the fourth- and fifth-years who had failed to make the team over the past two years were still not quite up to scratch this year. One sixth-year boy, however, had shown some promise.
But after trying him out, they found that the position he was best suited to was actually Keeper.
That made things a little awkward. As a Keeper, the boy named McLaggen was actually passable for inter-house matches. As the twins put it, he was probably about as good as Wood had been in his fourth year-Oliver had been a fourth-year when the twins joined the team in their second year.
That put him at roughly the middle of the pack among Hogwarts Keepers, and any other house would probably have been delighted to take him. For Gryffindor, however, Keeper was the position they needed least.
The reason was simple: Ron.
Ron was good enough to have even the top professional clubs fighting over him. Although he had already announced that he had accepted an invitation from the Chudley Cannons to attend a trial after completing his ordinary wizarding levels, the other powerhouse clubs had not lost the slightest interest in him.
In fact, both last Christmas and on his birthday this year, Ron had received gifts from no fewer than ten league clubs from around the world, all hoping to leave a good impression on Ron and the Weasley family.
Under those circumstances, unless they had already secured overall victory and could afford to disregard the outcome of an individual match, as they had in Harry's third year, being Ron's reserve basically meant never getting