Charabancs, Prodigals and Smoke Fairies go through - Ethel get next week's setting duties

I have to apologise for a mistake I've made on the Fixtures page for the Cup competitions this year.  I have indicated that the Plate Semi Finalists in 2 weeks time will be the four losers of the Round 2 Val Draper Cup matches.  This is wrong and out of line with last year's format.  I should have indicated them as being the 4 highest scoring losers from Rounds 1 and 2 of the Val Draper Cup.  The setters for next week will be as stated to date i.e. the lowest scoring losers from this week's matches.  The setters, however, for the week after next will have to be the second lowest scoring losers from Rounds 1 and 2 (or the lowest scoring losers if that formula results in the same team setting next week and the week after next).  Once again many apologies and I hope you can adjust to this way of doing things at this late stage.  I think you will find that the Fixtures page now appearing corrects this earlier error.

With our esteemed captain on his annual Irish sabbatical, our rotating QM Jane kindly and ably substituted so that we managed to put out a full team.

We felt inspired before proceedings commenced when our absent captain sent Roisin a mysterious text message that was completely blank!  After much anxious discussion as to what this might actually mean, we tentatively concluded that it was either a Zen Buddhist-inspired exhortation that in an infinite universe, all things are possible even our winning a quiz without his participation or that he was just too drunk to type anything and could only manage to hit the Send button.  So we wisely decided to hedge our bets and got Roisin to send him a blank text message in reply!

This week the paper was set by The Bards.  This was not an easy paper with a reported 19 unanswered questions from the Ethel/Charabancs match but it did have plenty of inventive material and gave some great close finishes.  The average aggregate of 65.1 was almost exactly the average aggregate across all matches so far this season.  Only quibble from the Griffin was against what seemed a surfeit of literature questions - oh and some imbalance in a few of the pairs (but I think this evened itself out over the whole match).

Damian comments from the Cricket Club match:

We thought the Bards' questions were a genial melange of this and that with a pronounced emphasis on literature which may have been instrumental in giving us the edge - or at least that was our impression.  Ethel captain Roddy seemed to be overcome with excitement when the QM started to read these literature questions out and kept disappearing for minutes at a time.  On the other hand, we were advised by his team that it may just have been some dodgy meat-balls he had apparently had earlier for his dinner.  Does this sort of thing ever happen to vegetarians I wonder?

As a tribute to TMTCH's vice captain, and a fine example of quirky trivia, I'm going for Round 6 Question 5:

The Cost of Arms of a Greater Manchester Borough punningly features the Mountain Ash or Rowan tree.  By what other name is the Mountain Ash known which gives rise to the pun?