“Middenheim Challenge 9/07 - round 2
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After the costly win against khemri in the first round the Basement Crawlers couldn't even muster an 11 man line-up and with 13 norsemen as opponents I never had any big hopes of winning. Thus I can be extremly proud of the way my players performed on the pitch today.

Despite lacking key players like my only tackler and the rat ogre from the start and early losing a player due to a foul and then my blodger, which cut me down to 8 players for the bulk of the game, the Crawlers managed to pull off daring maneuvers to tie up the opponents and to score when they were behind.

An early TD put the Crawlers into the lead and it was damn close that they managed to deny the norsemen the chance to tie before the half time break. The opponents had to rely on 1d blocking and pickups in T8 to even the score.

In the 2nd half I did my best to encourage Psycho to score early when I noticed that I had low chances of stealing the ball. This succeeded and I managed to run in a quick equalizer on the next kickoff. The skaven yet again risked their lives to hold the opponents and this time it succeeded. The norsemen's last push was halted and the Crawlers managed to bring the match into over time.

Here I got lucky (I was lucky throughout most of the match) and won the kickoff. After seeing my LOS finally buckle under the pressure which put me down to 6 players vs 11 I decided to count on luck and made a desperate dash with my gutter runner. Not surprisingly he was caught up and downed and the norsemen could than quite safely box in my remaining players and move towards my end zone line. The Crawlers never gave up and tried impossible dodges and hard blocks to claw their way through to the ball carrier, but despite coming close they didn't have the manpower to stop them and the match was lost.

Despite the loss they can be proud of their effort in the Middenheim Challenge. Not buckling under the pressure during the bloody premier vs khemri and managing a moral tie with their broken remains earned them some new fans, and amazingly enough no further cripples were caused in this match which made it a very entertaining recovery match.

Congrats to the win, Psycho-Dad. Good luck in the semi-final!”