From the Stirland Observer, January 24, 2515:

One of the great all-around performances of this new Blood Bowl season was turned in this Friday. Griff, the MVP of the game at the Stirland County Fair, isn't the legendary Imperial Blitzer Griff Oberwald. He isn't a fearsome bull centaur or a Skaven gutter runner either. No, this Griff is Griff Goaterwald, and he's a trained goat with a basket around his neck.

Griff scored two touchdowns, two casualties and a completed pass for his team, Farmer Ed's Remarkably Intelligent Football-Playing Goats, in their upset win over the highly touted Hammer i 'Øjet. While the Goats are newcomers to the organized Blood Bowl world, they've been a popular barnstorming attraction at carnivals across the Old World for the last three years. The team was founded by Edholm Varwijk, a retired Blood Bowl player turned goat farmer, who noticed one of his goats carrying a basket round the farm in his teeth. Seized by an idea, he crafted harnesses with built-in baskets and started training the goats to pick up and carry Blood Bowl balls. Two years later, he led his team onto the pitch at a harvest festival near Talabheim.

"Well, you know, they were expecting a tussle, but they weren't expecting a game," Varwijk remembers. The opposing team, a group of young farmhands and local carousers, were stunned to find the goats executing complex blocking plays, dodging into the end zone and even passing the ball with ease. "I knew we had something," he said, "but I didn't know we had THIS much."

Success followed success for the plucky and playful goats, and soon they were a leading attraction at fairs and festivals around the Empire. Untrained Blood Bowl players found it hard to cope with the goats' powerful heads and horns. "Well, there was that one game outside Middenheim," says Varwijk. "The locals had lost the previous year, and when we came back around, they requested a rematch. What we didn't know is that they had made a ball out of goat hide. The way the team reacted, you'd think they knew and were horrified." Most of the players refused to touch the ball, forcing Ed himself to carry it across the goal line for a 1-0 victory. This was made easier by the fact that the goats had killed eight opposing players and maimed all but one of the rest. To this day, an outstanding warrant prevents Farmer Ed or his team from entering Middenland.

Finding it difficult to line up an amateur team willing to be beaten by goats, the team made the leap to organized play after their second tour of the Empire. Farmer Ed himself was forced to retire from the game three months later after a Khemri tomb guardian crushed his leg. He now guides the team from the sidelines and trains the next generation of Blood Bowl-playing goats. He's aided by a pair of strapping farmhands on the pitch, but they mostly serve to give orders to the real stars, goats such as Griff, One-Horned Carl and Longhorn Sue, billed as "the goat the size of a cow." (Keen-eyed Blood Bowl observers have remarked that Sue is, in fact, almost definitely just a cow.) They're the unlikeliest Blood Bowl squad this side of The Hobgoblin Team, and while they aren't quite ready to face off against the Reikland Reavers in the top echelon of Blood Bowl, they're gradually rising in the minor-league ranks. And that, if nothing else, should inspire little surprise: if goats are good at one thing, it's climbing.