“Well that was horrible. For both of us. From start to finish.

I knew it was going to be a tough one. MeetYourMakerz were fairly well developed, with nearly all players having block and most having dodge as well, whereas I was still fielding four journeymen and no tackle.

When it started raining, and MeetYourMaker chose to kick, I knew things were going to be tough.

And sure enough, I muffed my first catch, leaving the ball not exactly exposed, but certainly within easy reach of the dark elves. A couple of turns of failed dice followed, before I was finally able to make amends for my earlier mess up by picking up in, and passing from, two TZs for the first score.

MeetYourMaker then handed me a second score by being unable to roll anything but 1s and skulls for three turns, allowing me to run the catcher and wardancer down to cover the ball after the first failed pick-up.

And then any possible chance for a one-turn sore, or even just some therapeutic bashing, was ruined when I rolled a perfect D on the final turn.

And then I began the second half with a blitz - not exactly an effective one as I BH my own catcher on a failed gfi, but I did at least manage to slow the dark elf offence down a turn.

It was then another three turns before the dark elves could score again, after I'd managed to mess up my offensive drive by not getting the ball far enough downfield.

So in the end it all came down to the final two turns. If I could keep the dark elves away from the ball, I could scrape the draw, and with only seven players left, that was about all I could hope for.

The tree failed his take root, and the dark elf front line refused to do anything except get pushed around, so it took an entire turn of blocking to clear enough of a space to run my last surviving catcher downfield, but I did at least manage to pick up the ball with a loner and get far enough back that the dark elves couldn't reach me in their turn 7.

And then MeetYourMaker rolled yet another double skull, leaving me with a slim chance of a score...

I had to free the wardancer from his TZ, then throw a 4+ to him with a loner, then run him down and hand-off to the catcher who could run it in. And sure enough, it all worked.

MeetYourMaker didn't try for a final-turn one-turner, so in the end I managed to salvage a most unexpected win from what really was a most ugly game.

After that one lucky pass, my thrower was BH and that was that - no more epic passing plays. Despite all the loners hanging around, it was a regular lineman who took the only permanent injury of the game, so my journey of recover was, yet again, a case of two steps forward, one step back - especially as my winning roll was a 1, rerolled to another 1, so I can't even afford the second wardancer yet. And my tree had nothing at all to show for his 11 blocks.

As for MeetYourMaker, he had a terrible dice game and can justifiably claim he was robbed of a sure win. A third of his blocking dice were skulls - quite a lot of them coming as doubles - and he also failed some really crucial ball-control skills, like the failed pick-up that led to my second score.

All in all, it's probably a game we'd both happily forget.”