This paper draws upon data from a research project, undertaken in 2 Year 6 classrooms during the 2006 World Cup, to analyse how children used complex sentence structures in their writing on a football web-log. We explore how the confluence of a temporary, popular, global event and an online forum for communication created a moment of linguistic empowerment where pupils began to use high-level forms of language, and we consider the implications of transience and interactivity for the teaching and learning of sentence grammar.