“Iron was worried. His brother, Steel, was still off the pitch with a nasty concussion. And this was the first time he had faced a dwarven team.

Fortunately, the cows had taken to the game quite well, and now there were enough with skill in blocking to put up a decent fight. Although that coward Ramskull had mainly improved his ability to not get hit - not the way of chaos at all!

The fickle gods gave the toss to the Dwarves, and so Iron set up to recieve the charge. He placed his most disposable beastmen in the front line, with a better warrior behind each, to counterstrike the dwarves just as they congratulated themselves on their assault.

It worked remarkably well. The dwarves, attempting the usual slow but steady bludgeoning of a path up the field, made little headway. Ramskull was assaulted by an ogre, but his cowardly dodging skills proved highly useful - not only letting him survive the ogres assault, but allowing him to leap out of the creatures reach in order to assault the Trollslayer who had just knocked down Blitzkrieg, the Minataur. Using his horns to great effect, Ramskull gored the unfortunate slayer, causing enough injury to force him to sit out the rest of the match.

A vicious ruck broke out on the edge of the pitch, with players from both teams on the verge of being thrust into the crowd. Some remarkably nimble footwork by a chaos warrior and a beastman led to a highly skilled dwarven blitzer being the final victim - and clearly, he fell into a chaos orientated part of the crowd, for he was instantly killed outright.

With seconds to go, the Dwarves were on the verge of scoring. Faced with a risky run through opposing tackle-zones, the Dwarven Runner with the ball chose to hand it off to the team ogre, relying on the creatures strength to carry the ball over the line. But a heroic blitz from ramskull, once again using his excellent dodging skills to escape his markers, put an end to the Dwarven chances of scoring in the first half.

Two beastmen immediately collapsed of heatstroke, as did two members of the dwarven team. But undeterred, the Minotaurs and beastmen flattened the dwarven front line and sent two beastmen charging up each flank. Meanwhile, the surprisingly agile Iron Daemon picked up the ball, and prepared for a pass.

The opportunity soon came, the ball flying over the heads of a row of stunned dwarves and an equally inconvenienced ogre. Undeterred, the dwarves attempted to prevent the touchdown by surrounding Blitzkrieg, hoping to cause a turnover. But the dwarves had suffered from atrocious luck all game, and this continued, with Blitzkrieg able to escpape the cunningly laid "wild animal traps", leaving Bonehead free to score.

By this time, the sun had lost some of its strength, and so neither team suffered any further from heatstroke. Certain that, outnumbered and outpaced, they could not score, the dwarves where equally confident that the chaos team should not score again either. But this was not to be, as the outnumbered dwarves found themselves rapidly surrounded. Whilst they were able to badly hurt two beastmen, the ball was plucked from their confident grasp, and another succesful touchdown made by the chaos team.

2-0 to chaos, equal casualties - but only if you included the crowd-inflicted injuries. In fact, the Bloodthirsty fans of the chaos team were disgusted by the teams concentration on scoring rather than bloodshed, and deserted in droves, despite the game being the teams greatest victory to date.

***
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Under normal circumstances, this should have been a pretty even game, but I was lucky. Taking out the Slayer and the Blitzer so early in the match was all that made it possible for me to stop the dwarves original touchdown attempt, and the loss of another blitzer and a lineman to heatstroke affected the dwarves more than my loss of 2 mere beastmen. By pure fluke, the one beastman with dodge always seemed to be in the right place at the right time - amazing considering there was only one opposing player on the pitch without tackle - and Blitzkrieg managing to escape from wild animal traps twice in a row was nothing short of miraculous.

If my opponent made any mistakes, it was probably passing to the ogre instead of risking a run for a touchdown, which would have only required one dodge roll with no modifiers from an Ag3 runner.

In short - a game that could have been a lot more even, but victory was granted to chaos by the fickle gods of luck and Bloodbowl.
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