It was an epic match in the making. Arguably two of Australia's best AA teams facing off in the Grandfinal of season 5 of the GA competition. Being the only ladder to offer a prize (thus far in aussie AA), the stakes were high, the pressure mounting and the nerves frayed. The setting was SF Sandstorm, a personal favourite of some but not for others. Our line up consited of our fearless leader and team founder InTe!_MiTcH, the ever reliable and straight shooting InTe!_Leathal, the deadly accurate and deadly powerful InTe!_uNit, the steady old hand of InTe!_MightyBear and our brilliant and captivating team captain InTe!_lokate.

 

Our opponent for this mammoth match was the ever-present and formiddable -rawr- team consisting of their team co-founders -rawr-Trepid!ty and -rawr-LadyWoogy, 'the unknown' in -rawr-Aussie^, the slightly sexy/painfull -rawr-Angelfire^ and the serious yet fun -rawr-psychokiLLa. Over the past few months there have been some close matches between these two great teams with -rawr- leading the head-to-head match up at 5 wins to InTe!'s 3.

 

The match begun at a little after 8:40pm AEST and -rawr- got off to a flyer. With InTe! starting on Assault West we began by taking the first round slow to try and gauge our oponents strategy. It was clear early on that they were keen to secure central objective and take the upper hand early so we decided on taking and holding north and south obectives. However late on in the round we lost north objective and was forced into a late push into central where we were comprehensivley decimated by a co-ordinated counter by -rawr-. The second and third rounds followed suit in quick succesion with round 4 a tie due to the holding of one objective each. We were facing anihilation unless we came up with a solution. We decided on a 5 man flank to the rear of central which proved very effective and allowed us to score our first round victory. In the 6th round we continued with our central flank strat and came away with another round win however in round 7 we tried it one too many times with -rawr-, now more prepared, to take the match into half-time at 4-2-1.

 

Round 8 started off fairly quietly with InTe! holding back from central objective and -rawr- slowly pushing forward. Panic then arose when they secured central aswell as south objectives thus leading to a rash and ultimatly futile central counter attack. -rawr- now had what seemed the match win in their sight at 5-2-1. InTe! however had other ideas. With some choice words and hearty encouragement we held our game together and pushed deeper into central obective for the remaining rounds pulling off some brilliant shots and cutting down the -rawr- advance to hold both central and north. We managed to peg the score back to 5-5-1 after a devistating central rush by -rawr- but InTe! to their credit held their ground and took it down to the wire for a 2v2 with leathal taking on Ladywoogy and Trepid!ty in and around central with MiTcH guarding north objective. Leathal managed to take down Woogy with some nice shooting overhead while MiTcH won the round with an awesome flank on Trepid!ty. The match was now in the balance. After some more 'words of encouragement' we set about taking the lead in the match for the first time, however this was not to be. -rawr- were initially on the ropes as the numerical superiority was with InTe! after the first engagements of the round. Unfortunatly for InTe! some misscommunication lead to us losing north objective with only seconds remaining in the round and and combined with -rawr- holding south resulted in a 6-5-1 lead to -rawr-. After this we lost our momentum. -rawr went on to claim the final 2 rounds to come out victors 8-5-1.

 

A truley amazing match that had everything. Congratulations to -rawr- for a resounding victory and comiserations to InTe! but I must say....bloody good effort boys. Hopefully our next encounters with -rawr- will be for the titles of TWL League OC and CyberGamers season 1!

 

For the record:

 

[Statistics]
OverallWinner=-rawr-
Team0Name=InTe!_
Team1Name=-rawr-
Team0Wins=5
Team1Wins=8
Ties=1
TotalTeam0Score=1346
TotalTeam1Score=1010

 

[Team0PlayerList]
Player="InTe!_uNit.",90,-110,0,0,-20,2,230
Player="InTe!_MightyBear",150,-90,0,0,0,2,385
Player="InTe!_Leathal",90,-50,0,0,-159,2,171
Player="InTe!_lokate",60,-110,10,0,0,2,290
Player="InTe!_MiTcH",50,-90,0,0,0,2,270

 

[Team1PlayerList]
Player="-rawr-Trepid!ty",100,-90,0,0,-222,2,18
Player="-rawr-LadyWoogy",140,-70,0,0,0,2,350
Player="-rawr-Aussie^",60,-100,0,0,0,2,210
Player="-rawr-Angelfire^",100,-70,0,0,-8,2,232
Player="-rawr-psychokiLLa",40,-120,0,0,0,2,200