History Men lost to Albert
Albert's win helps them stay in touch with the leading pair
Mike
O'B sends a view from the winning benches...
I chose to attend as a spectator last night. I saw myself as a kindly, jolly elderly Dickensian gentleman; Scrooge at the end of Christmas Carol who, if I saw Tiny Tim hanging upside down in a butcher's window, would buy him for the Cratchit's to gobble up.
It was a strange quiz - 40% of Albert's points came from the first two rounds and the team really struggled for points thereafter. It would appear that the History Men, like ourselves, suffered from having to confer for most of the match. The final aggregate was reasonable enough but it took some doing. As usual the run-ons went down well and, to be fair, most of the other questions seemed OK.
...and Ivor from the losing benches...
As the self-appointed leader of the Historymen (and only because I am the only surviving 1989 Historyman still in Manchester), I am no Putin, seeing my role as more directorial than dictatorial. In view of our mediocre performances in recent seasons I am quite willing to innovate and run with good ideas from the troops. Anne has long held the theory that seat 4 (my seat) gets easier questions than seat 3 (her seat). Hitherto we have been like the Academie Francaise in allocating numbered seats. So tonight there was an experiment of seat reversal to see if there was a reversal of fortune. This barely significant trial resulted in Anne getting 3 twos to my none. Even worse I conceded 4 steals (two of which were blurts) to Anne's 1. Albert (playing first) had a similar finding with Evelyn's seat 4 (3 twos) to Jeremy’s seat 3 (1 two).
We got off to a bad start with a blurt on our first question (Faulkes) and fared little better in the next two rounds to be 12 points behind going into Round 4. We have found that not even being into double figures after three rounds does not augur well for the match. We had hoped that the round on film (Mike H’s specialist subject) might have stopped the rot and he did get the only two but otherwise there were a fair sprinkling of actors yet to have the impact of the Golden Greats. Even the music run-ons doomed some of us to oblivion and I would not have expected the Charas to be so cruel as to inflect popular music SOME OF WHICH WAS FROM THE 2010s! Luckily we had young Vanessa to come to the rescue there.
The second half of the quiz we actually 'won' though it did not feel like it at the time and we did have a number of blurts (the Bronte’s Agnes Gray as an example of 19th Century multi-adulterous goings on?). Still there were some satisfying answers out of nowhere (Cromer Ridge). Like poor golfers it is the occasional brilliant stroke that keeps us quizzers going on (until we finally have a stroke probably).
Alison was more than happy to be asking the questions tonight. The picture questions were in beautiful detail to the extent that the answers were readable if one knew the Cyrillic alphabet. The final round was a witty end to the evening but when drink has been consumed the nuances of the hints in the later questions can be lost compared with those in the first half.
whilst
Mike H adds...
As ever, it was a pleasure to participate and to see Anne again after several weeks.
I was happy to hear there was a round on films until those questions appeared! At least I couldn't fail on my question in that round: to identify Sylvie's favourite, Brad Pitt. A very interesting idea for a round but... slightly earlier films would have been more appreciated!
The History Men struggled somewhat, amassing just 9 points in the first three rounds. We did rather better in the second half and it could have been a much closer result if I had been more positive in going for one answer, and more circumspect in conferring on a couple of others.
Part of the Partridge ridge
(R5/Q8)
Electric Pigs lost to Bards
A comfortable victory for the visitors from the Parrswood
Prodigals beat Ethel Rodin
The home team edge in front of last season's champs
Jimmy
tells the winner's story...
A close fought quiz as you'd expect from the last two teams to hold the League shield.
Ethel started strongly, racing into a formidable 9-2 lead by the end of the first round.
The movie round in Round 3 was to prove pivotal; all the Prods are big cinema buffs and this set of questions definitely played to our strengths so that we entered Round 4 leading 17-13.
After that it was extremely close but we just had enough to keep the reigning champs at bay.
The last round was a bit of a Curate’s egg with plenty of opportunities to go the wrong way. Luckily we gathered the points we needed to secure an important win.
and
on the losing side James was none too enamoured...
Not impressed by that quiz at all. Entire rounds based on one polarising topic (i.e. films that our team were never likely to have watched, or music we haven’t even heard of, let alone listened to), well that just kills the game. OK, so the Prodigals mopped up the points - but Geoff and Roddy were essentially excluded from the whole quiz tonight, and that’s not a good thing.
We were then left to try and catch up with a series of 'Jack and Jill' questions. Who didn’t guess Graham Taylor for the England manager question? Who didn’t guess Michael Johnson for the basketball one? If it wasn’t them, then it certainly made the next guess easier. And that round was just that: a series of ‘best guess wins’ questions.
Feeling as if I need to be kept engaged by some recent sets of questions and I don’t think our league can afford the luxury of disengagement.
Mike
would've cocked a snook at that pesky KFD lot...
Kieran
basks...
