“Well, that was an epic.

So much happened, I can't even remember all of it, but I do remember it was a lot of fun and required a lot of concentration.

Two wood elf teams, but both surprisingly different from each other. Mine still had a handful of journeymen in it, only one wardancer (unskilled) but a good thrower, two good catchers and a legend of a tree. jur, on the other hand, had a basic tree, no thrower, but a whole collection of linemen with well-chosen skills, mostly dodge and guard...a lot of guard. He also had the only tackle on the field, on one of his wardancers.

The first half was as expected, with both coaches scoring quickly, and then both coaches scoring quickly again. When I was on offence, I ran as many players as possible downfield, kept the thrower back and picked whichever target I could free up on the second turn - even if it was a loner. jur preferred to get the ball to one of his wardancers and run them both forward along the edge of the pitch. They both had side step, and they had a shield of dodge/guard linemen to prevent me from getting anywhere near them.

It was 2-2 at the start off the second half with me receiving, but a sneaky blitz from jur and a failed dodge from me turned the game around, and instead of leading the scoring, I suddenly found myself playing catch-up. It wasn't so bad though - my treeman was having a stellar game, multiple blocking whenever possible and doing a good job of thinning out the opposition.

Then disaster struck. For the second game in a row my thrower threw an interception and failed his safe throw and reroll, handing over the ball to a slightly surprised and very happy AG5 wardancer. I fought back as best as I could, but that pretty much put the game out of my reach and I was left with one final chance to score a final consolation TD to make the result look a little closer. Sadly, my thrower messed up yet again, by failing the gfi that would have put him in range of the open lineman waiting to score.

For jur it was a well-deserved win. He had a better team than me, and he used them really well, knowing that I had no weapons to counter his guard cage except some sheer desperation and lucky dice. On defence, he used his one tackler to deal with the biggest threat each time (sometimes the wardancer, sometimes one of the catchers) and this forced me to throw to journeymen - which is always risky.

A quick note about the dice, which were generally excellent for both of us It was only at the very end, when we were out of rerolls and making more risky plays that we started to have more turnovers and this allowed for some exciting and daring plays throughout the game.

But what would the post-match report be without at least one little grumble...

From a passing point of view, the game was a real disappointment for me. The first two kicks I received were both short, landing just behind the line, so I wasn't able to get in any impressive long bombs. Then the weather changed and it became really sunny, which made long bombs just a bit too risky (and it stayed like that for the rest of the game). The third kick was nice and deep, but that was the blitz and as jur wasn't able to reach the ball, he took the opportunity to blitz the thrower, so I lost another opportunity to pass. Then I threw the interception. Then the thrower failed his gfi. I suppose after all that, 4 for 29 is not too bad, but against a team of fast-scoring wood elves, I was hoping for more like 8 for 60.

I did pick up a skilled journeyman though, thanks to the two TDs he scored, so what with the two injuries from yesterday's match returning, I'm now down to only one journeyman. Time for that second wardancer, I think.”