History Men stormed back to form against the luckless X-Pats

What nation produces two-thirds of the world's vanilla?

Down at the Club tonight we were delighted to meet up with two members of our new team, The Men They Couldn't Hang (whose name I got wrong on the website previously).  They stayed for about an hour noting the various etiquettes and listening to tales of past Snoopy papers lovingly retold by the two contesting teams.  Worryingly their body language seemed to indicate there were a number of questions where they not only understood Jitka perfectly well, but actually knew the answer when neither teams had the faintest idea!!  I gather they have chosen The Old House at Home on Burton Road as their home venue.

The final round tonight was called "PURE FICTION" - which only goes to prove that the truth, as portrayed in the previous seven rounds, is indeed stranger than fiction.  Does anyone, for example, really believe that Socrates quaffed his final cup of hemlock simply because he could no longer live with his irrational fear that globules of peanut butter might stick to the roof of his mouth?  I think not.  Small wonder then that Fr M sat for most of the evening holding his onions and swearing in Egyptian.  He did however really enjoy the final round though several might carp that it was a bit too specialised for their taste.  Fr M would like to take this opportunity to invite the setter of this lit-fest round to his place at the weekend where we can slip into something more comfortable and spend an intimate soirée comparing our contemporary book-ends.........and I pray to God that it was not set by either Tony or Eric.

Truth indeed can be stranger than fiction.  Could any sane person really have believed that Ireland's rugby team would take second place on the back pages to Ireland's cricket team last weekend?  Or that Ireland's cricket team would be in turn be dumped off the front, middle and back pages by an Agatha Christiesque whodunit saga?  Do they still have butlers in post-Raj Pakistan?  Be that as it may, I look forward to the Pakistanis turning up at Croke Park and becoming the first foreign side to beat Kilkenny in an All-Ireland hurling final.  Only then will I once again feel safe supping a pre-curry pint of Guinness and listening to THE FIELDS OF ATHENRY on the juke-box of The Clarence pub in Rusholme.

Only a true great like Fr Megson can ever hope to understand fully the heart-stopping night-fright that being a manager can induce.  The next few weeks will make or break his reputation.  Can 2 FCEKs hold out and become one of the truly great second best teams in the history of the league?  Or will they wilt under pressure and be remembered as just another bunch of third-raters?  And will they become the first team ever to get bumped out of t'Cup by The Men They Couldn't Hang?  Glory may well be fleeting but obscurity lasts forever.

Fair play to him though.  He's a wily old fox.  More callow managers like Ferguson or Mourinho would have the team holed up in the Stadium of Murk endlessly revising their phobia questions.  It is surely the mark of a psychological genius to whisk his squad off for a weekend of team bonding and pedalo racing in a disused quarry on the outskirts of idyllic Doveholes in Derbyshire.  It was there during a limbering up hagiographic exercise that Fr Megson stumbled upon the intriguing fact that the patron saint of quarrymen is in fact Saint Rock.  Must have been a bit of a shoo-in when he applied for that job.

"Have you ever done any patron-sainting before, Rocky?  Never mind -you'll soon get the hang of it - it's not exactly rock science, you know."

If any of you out there happen to know who has the honour of being the patron saint of sewerage workers, could they drop Fr M a line and he will be in a position to commence setting a perfectly paired quiz for when his team get knocked out of t'Cup by the afore-mentioned THE MEN TCH.

THE MEN THEY COULDN'T HANG is an excellent name by the way.  But I wouldn't go round shouting it too loudly when you're playing against last night's setters.  You don't want to rile Tony by setting him a challenge that he might find impossible to resist.....