First up setting are the Charabancs of Fire for the first round of league matches on Wednesday October 7th.

Unfortunately (as I said in my recent email) the X-Pats have found it impossible to raise a team for the coming season - so after many years in the league they have had to drop out.  Of course we will all welcome them back in the future if the occasion arises.  In the meantime Jim has offered to QM if anyone is short.

The consequence of X-Pats dropping out, and no new team coming forward, is that we will have just 10 teams competing.  Although the season will spread over the same number of weeks, each week (apart from the last week of the first half of the season and the last week of the second half of the season) there will be a team sitting out, as well as one setting.  On those 2 weeks when all 10 teams will be playing we will revert to the honoured tradition of asking 'Dummy' to set - i.e. a guest non-playing setter.

This season's  WIST Champions Cup competition is in the same format as has been the case for the past 2 years with Quarter Finals played the week before Christmas and Semi Finals the week before Easter.  Our top 4 league teams from last season (SPW, the Charabancs of Fire, the Opsimaths and Snoopy's Friends) will be competing against their top 4.  Let's try and get one (or even 2) of our teams to the final this year.  It is our turn to set for these WIST matches this season.  Stockport have suggested that we use a mixture of the Stockport question paper style and the WithQuiz style in each WIST tie from now on (2 of their rounds followed by 4 of ours) - rather than oscillate between their style one year and ours the next.  They rather like the WithQuiz style with its ingredient of individual challenge before team conference takes over!

Fr M is involved in a lot of missionary work this year (amongst the fallen souls of Stockport I believe) so he tells me that he may be unable to provide us with his wise words so often as in the past.