“Two practically new teams face each other: our new orcs vs billbrasky's 1-game dark elves. However with a niggler from that 1 game fired and their winnings spent replacing him effectively the two teams are brand new. 11 players each, no new skills, no apothecary, just classic blood bowl action!

We kick deep as one of the orcish fans hurls a rock, stunning a dark elf lineman. The dark elves retreat backwards en masse to prevent us from making it a line-on-line punchout. Our tricksy goblin ball-boy has cleverly oiled up the ball though- and the elves fumble it two turns in a row. By now we've charged forwards and an orc lineman (forgetting about the oil) goes for the ball, dropping it. They counter with some nice blitzes, a lineelf badly hurting a black orc, and the ball thrown to the far side of the pitch. We're forced to attempt a 1d blitz but luckily it works, and now with both sides out of rerolls things start to get messy. But solid play from the elves means despite some good (risky) blitzes by us, they eventually get the ball over the line on their last turn.

We set up 10 vs 11 as the elves kick for the 2nd half. We choose an early turnover rather than burn a reroll and the elves reward us with a crowdpush to give them an even bigger number advantage. They are attacking the ball tenaciously, while we are giving away turnovers with an uncommon amount of skull/both-down results, but we've managed to put three elves in the cas box. The ball is still contested in the middle of the pitch though and time is running out. It's down to our last turn and we've run a blitzer into range of the endzone while making things very difficult for them around the ball. They can only bounce it out into a bit of space and we have a chance now... but we use up our reroll blitzing an elf out of the way (more both-downs!) and the lineorc entrusted with the game fumbles the pickup!!

Great game billbrasky- unusual to have such a hardfought one without a single foul!!”