Terror on the Training Ground

Keith Brumpton

Author, illustrator, and creator of CBBC series M.I. High, Keith Brumpton knows what will appeal to children, and the Dinosaur FC series is guaranteed to do just that. As well as creating the acclaimed spy series 'M.I. High', now in its fifth season, he has written for many other top kids television shows including '64 Zoo Lane', 'Balamory', 'Pablo the Little Red Fox' and also a kids musical – Dinosaur Rock. Keith is married to an Australian and lives in Scotland. He is a big football fan and supports Torquay United: checking the football scores, he says, is the only thing that can distract him from writing!

Visit www.keithbrumpton.co.uk to find out more.

Press & Blog Reviews

Good for young readers with a passion for dinosaurs.
The Literacy Trust football book reviews

Aspiring young football fans will love this wild and witty new illustrated series, which matches the buzz and action of the premiership with cool dinosaur characters. Terry Triceratops is the manager of Dino FC but he’s a dead-dino walking. With the team bottom of the Premiership, chairman danny Deinonychus drafts in hard-hitting fitness trainer Hans Hadrosaur to whip the dinos back into shape. If they don’t avoid the drop, Terry faces the sack but a win against Jurassic Park Rangers just might save them from extinction.
Lovereading4kids.co.uk

Dino FC is the brainchild of ever inventive author and illustrator Keith Brumpton. Full of wacky adventures and some great one-liners, this new series of books is funny, frantic and overflowing with football. With brilliant cartoon-sytle drawings and stories that put fun first, the Dino FC sereies is shaping up to be a winning formuala for youngsters who just can't get enough of Dinosaurs and football.
Lancashire Evening Post

"fun prehistoric footie series for younger readers"
tBk Magazine Summer 2010 - World Cup Winning Reads

Young footballers will love the the wild and witty new illustrated series, which matches the buzz and action of the premiership with cool dinosaur characters.
Family Interest Magazine

With a clever combination of two favourites topics, football and dinosaurs, this is one to engage reluctant boy readers. Short chunks of texts broken up by cartoon strips give this a light, easy read that may succeed in drawing in youngsters who find reading too much like hard work.
Evening Echo

For youngsters lamenting the end of the World Cup, Terror On The Training Ground is the first book in a series of exciting football novels with the added twist that the players are dinosaurs – Dino FC...Priced at £4.99 each, football fans aged seven and over will lover these books published by Usborne.
Aldershot News & Mail

OK, so not every small boy loves football, dinosaurs and cartoons. But for those that do (as well as similarly inclined girls, of course), Keith Brumpton’s series of stories following the ups and downs of a Jurassic-era team of well-meaning underachievers is bound to press all the right buttons. Avoiding complexity of plot in favour of stock characters, slapstick humour and plenty of match action and punditry, this is Roy of the Rovers repackaged for the Premiership generation- and very nicely done, too. Brumpton combines pacey prose with graphic novel style panels of dialogue, keeping readers turning the pages at a satisfying rate (and not even realising they’re regularly tackling words and phrases like ‘Heterodontosaurus’, ‘Deinonychus’ and ‘personal development programmes’).
Teach Primary

Terry Tricerotops has a big job on his hands managing Dino FC and everything seems to be going downhill. A tough new trainer, Hans, is brought in and uses military type drilling to build a winning team. This includes running up and down volcanoes and swimming swamps. The problem is, Hans gets a bit carried away. The book's mixture of a prehistoric setting and football is really entertaining. It's got a couple of nice twists and has all the ingredients to get boys reading. It's got humour: “The match went well for the first ten seconds or so” and “no tackling from behind and no eating your opponents”. It also has amusing cartoon strip illustrations breaking up much of the text, which will support the reluctant reader. Because of this, the fact that there's not a word wasted and it's a winning combination of dinosaurs and football, I can't see the reader putting this one down until the last page.
Write Away

Reader Reviews

Do you agree or disagree with the reviews below? Why not write your own?

Dino FC - Terror on the training ground
I love this book because it gives a football match in the dinosaurs age.
Paul Montague, 19th July 2010

Extras

• Read Terry Triceratops' diary on the Bookbabblers book group website
• Read the Dino FC blog on the Federation of Children's Bookgroups website!
• Usborne Young Writers' Award 2010
  Read Keith Brumpton's story starter for the Usborne Young Writers' Award 2010.