My tournament game fell through and I'm having a bit of a hard time hooking up with my opponent. So this last weekend I went ahead and wanted to get some more practice games in.

Not being able to find any opponents in Academy, I decided to throw a team into the Ranked division to see how I would fair.

And while the water wasn't exactly warm, read as not as easy, it wasn't overpowering either. I lost my first 2 games with scores of 2-1. In both games, the dice just hated me in the first halves. And by the time they started to come around it was too late to come back.
So with an 0-2 record, I was feeling a bit down as I had lost a fan factor, wasn't earning very much money (despite scoring, getting injuries and a FF of 9 or 8). But luckily I had not lost any players yet.

My 3rd game I played yesterday. Verse a really cool dwarf player. The arch rivals Skaven and stunties went at it hard and heavy. He originally had the ball and built a cage but I kept slipping in to bust the cage but the ball kept popping into incredibly great places for him.
Eventually he switched flanks, but against skaven this is a mistake as he was only able to get half his team over there while I could take everyone. Popped the ball out and made a long pass downfield to a waiting Gutter runner. He dropped it and it took a couple turns but I finally picked it up for a turn 8 score.
In the 2nd half I had the ball and was going to do a strong side sweep, since I was low on players. He gets perfect defense and overloads there as well. Ugghh.
With no players on the left, I take the ball right anyway.
He blasts in hard and knocks the ball loose but is unable to claim it.
I get a Gutter runner down in the end zone and am ready for a quick long pass that even if I don't catch it, he shouldn't be able to stop me from scoring. I pick up the ball with my thrower and with a 2 block blitz on the one guy in my way, I roll double skulls, knock my QB Rony Tomo out of the game and drop the ball. This will be the 3rd of 4 double skulls I roll this half. I was able to re-roll the first 2. This was a killer. He got the ball and after a couple turns fighting through my guys, scored.

I made a valiant effort to score on the last turn but to no avail and we ended in a 1-1 game.
I did earn enough to pick up my 4th gutter runner and a spare lineman. But like an idiot I forgot to try and dodge my gutter runner out of the sidelines. Sure it would have been a tough dodge as he had 3 guys lined up, but if I fall down he has to actually foul me to hurt me. Instead he gets an easy push out into the crowd, and he got seriously injured and will miss the next game. Ugghhh!!

So now I'm 0/1/2 in Ranked play, still looking for that first victory.