A funny thing happened to me in matchmaking #1

I might do some of these.

So anyway, I was in Nagg looking for a game with my 1400 TV norse team. They are quite bashy. I think the roster is

Ulf - mighty blow
Ulf - guard
Zerker - mighty blow, piling on
Zerker - mighty blow, tackle
Yhetee -
Runner - +1MV, dodge
Lineman - dirty player
Lineman - fend
Lineman - guard
+some other linemen

I was matched against a min-maxed killer chaos team with 1700 TV. It was a really brutal side - lots of mighty blow, claw and piling on amongst the chaos warriors, one beastman with AG4, sure hands and extra arms, one brutal 250SPP killer beastman, and the rest of the beastmen were dross. He was also running only 10 players to cheat the matchmaker (which matches your TV before journeymen are added).

A sort of red mist descended on me. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it was me snapping after so many games being bullied by killer teams as elves. Perhaps it was the irritation that this guy had built a team specifically to kill my players via matchmaking. In any event, I decided to play the game completely differently than any game I think I've ever played before - I ignored the ball.

I don't mean I literally ignored it - at least towards the start of the game I made a token effort to pick it up - but I never tried to score, and later in the game I just concentrated on peeling his players away from the scrum to isolate and kill.

The second half in particular was lovely. He was caging up properly on the left hand side, while I kept frenzy pushing the nearest chaos warrior away from the safety of his team mates towards a knot of my guys in the middle of the pitch whereupon I stuck the boot in. He tried the tactic of staying down, but took some nasty fouls in the process.

He had just 2 players on the pitch by turn 16, and I'd given stat injuries to two of his chaos warriors (-1AV and -1AG, and those two warriors were previously uninjured and had over 200 SPP between them), and a niggling injury to the AG4 ball carrier. All of this came at the cost of 1 dead lineman and 1 lineman with a broken neck (both linemen were rookies).

I lost 2-0, but felt for the first time the cathartic nihilism that pure bash coaches must feel all the time. The urge to simply destroy. A seductive drug.

I think when the Guard drag themselves bleeding from the field and into retirement I might try AV7 bash for a while - with either norse or underworld probably.