“As a result of a recent run of complete maulings, the team was more or less retired anyway - from having no injuries 4 games ago to having 5 niggles and a mng pretty much earmarked them for retirement, so I figured I'd put em up against a team one last time, with the intention to retire the team if a serious injury ocurred.

When I used the Apo late on to save a Badly hurt player (turn 6 half 2) my opponent was surprised. As it turns out, he moved a player to foul rather than setting up to score, which to me, in the late stages of a game with numerical advantage and the ball in hand seemed pretty dumb, but you can never figure out some players sometimes. "trying to remove an obstacle" is one explanation. When there are so many glaring holes in the opposition anyway, I prefer the term "fouling like a prick when the score would be easier".

You can never figure out some players sometimes.

I had some luck - double dodge to score, a fair few pows. I had some bad luck - nothing worse than a KO for my opponent meant it was always going to be hard for me and my skull collection took up a fair few of that block tally on the right. My opponent had similar luck, making plenty of dodges, failing on a few, knocking my players down most of the time and the occasional skull. In other words a normal game.

Unusual for this team of mine, I suffered nothing worse than badly hurt so at least the team survives and buys another player on the long road to recovery, though they are always just the one game away from retirement...

At the end of the day this was an 11 vs 8 game, near equal strength, I expected to lose, hoped not to suffer anything nasty (I don't normally use apo on a badly hurt, but not using it on niggles in the past has backfired when it's the only injury in a game. I gambled, it came off.)

A draw in my book is a good result.”