“Chapter 5


“Man, I got a real bad feelin’ ‘bout this game”, said Walk Don’t Run. “I’m tellin’ ya man. Bad juju.”
“Walk, you always have a bad feeling about every game”, said Surf City.
“Yeah, man. But every game is bad, dude.”

Sadly, Walk Don’t Run was correct. Every game was bad for the elves of Hang Eleven at the moment. They were struggling to get any kind of a passing game going, with far too many fumbles and mis-throws and physically they were being destroyed by every team they faced. Even Charlie, their usually reliable treeman, had been out with an injury and every game these days they were forced to find any old wandering wood elf they could get their hands on just to make up the numbers.

Today’s match was against the chaos team, World Destroyer Revolution – their first against chaos.
“I think I hate chaos teams more than anything”, said Coach Robsson as they were preparing to walk out onto the pitch. “Nothing but mindless mud and muscle for the most part. Pity really. They have the potential to be great teams. They were once, back in the days of the Chaos All-Stars, but these days they seem to breed out all the mutations that could actually make the game interesting and just keep the ones that are bred as killing machines.”
He looked across the field to where the opposition were just emerging from their pitch-side hovels.
“Hmm. Not a lot of mutations on that lot. Maybe you’ll be lucky and get a good challenging game out of them.”


* * * * *


Coach Robsson was half right. It was a challenging game, but not really any different from the previous few, ending in yet another 2-1 loss. At least this time Hang Eleven played their hearts out and finally began to show some signs that they were not a complete bunch of losers. Pipeline finally threw more completions than incompletes and Surf City again showed he was not afraid to mix it up with any opponent, man, beast or whatever else.

And sadly, Walk Don’t Run was also proved right in his feelings of dread about the match. He was killed outright midway through the first half.

Bad juju indeed.
”