“Oh my word! This game was so one-sided it was almost no-sided, if that could be a thing. On paper, the teams looked about even. I have my evil tree and a couple of handy wardancers, but I was also packing 5 journeymen. On the other side, Emphasy had a fairly well-balanced team with some handy blitzers, and a lineman to die for...hmmm, maybe not the best phrase to use about him in hindsight.

Anyway, Europe Force One received and we settled down to a typically fast and furious game (one of the things I like about playing against Emphasy is that he's a fast player...I mean really fast, so our games rarely take much more than 30-40 minutes). Anyway, fast he may have been, but all the fury was coming from my side of the field. My blocking was unreally unreal, and Spiderplant drew first blood with a -AV to a useful lineman.

I couldn't stop the score (which was the way I'd been expecting the game to go) but I was determined to show the humans what a nifty bunch of wood elves was capable of, so I went for my usual two-turn long-bomb TD. On the way, Spiderplant BH the ogre, just to rub salt in the wound.

And it was about now that any lingering vestiges of good dice left Emphasy. Well, that's partly true, but it's even more true to say that all the luck was with me. I didn't fail anything for the rest of the game. Literally. Well, according to the report I failed a GFI, but it clearly wasn't a big deal.

So while Emphasy was busy failing all his rolls, I went and killed his star lineman. Boom! Just like that, and there was no apo left to try and save him. It was savage and honestly heartbreaking (as a committed pixel-hugger myself, I know how horrible these moments are).

So Sensation went into the second half 2-1 up and about to receive. But more importantly, Emphasy was now down to eight men, and it's a hard ask to stop wood elves when you're that outnumbered. There was just no way he could mark all my receivers, seeing as how my dice were allowing me to throw to journeymen as well as everyone else. Honestly, If I'd thrown it to the tree I'm pretty sure he'd have caught it.

Probably the best thing Emphasy could say about the second half was that no one else died. And the dice did that typical thing of suddenly becoming not so bad, so that you can actually make some reasonable plays at last and the final stats don't look anything like as one-sided as they really were. So yes, he was able to score a couple of TDs, but it was never going to be enough to make up for the pure ugliness of that first half.

But as Emphasy pointed out, we all have days like this and you just have to suck it up and move on. What goes around comes around and I'm sure I'll be on the receiving end of something similar soon enough, so I may as well enjoy the sunshine while it's shining on me.

But the death of Netherland was a real shame, not just for Europe Force One (obviously) but for the rest of us as well. It's great to see a lowly lineman stat-up like a maniac and it would have been fun to watch him rack up some impressive stats for a while longer. May he never be forgotten.

As for Sensation, we're now in the luxurious position of being able to afford not one, but two new linemen. I'll take the journeyman who scored, and add a pure rookie as well - possibly not the wisest move, as this will leave me with no cash to replace any of the big boys for a while now, and with my TR soaring it's likely to be a tough old time over the coming matches, but I feel I need to at least make the effort to field elven non-journeymen at some point.

And of course, with my luck being what it was, Briskbreeze managed 5 for 60 and Spiderplant again took the MVP.

It's just rude.”