Withington Pub Quiz League - Quizbiz 03/11/21

Ethel's 100% record goes as they tumble at home to Albert;

Top 4 have each lost one game

Ethel Rodin lost to Albert

KFD lost to Prodigals

Opsimaths beat Bards

Electric Pigs beat History Men

Ethel Rodin lost to Albert

Albert upset the apple-cart in Ladybarn

Skipper Mike 'Steel fist in a steel glove' O'Brien returns to the fray...

Ah the joy of playing again. How I missed the jealousy, treachery, backbiting and slandering which constitute the esprit de corps of the Albert team. As for the match...the team managed to win without me making any measurable contribution. I was told by my team mates I wasn't good enough to carry the team kitbag.

An old GOAT

(R4/Q4)

Opsimaths beat Bards

The Opsis get into their stride down at the Club

Hotfoot from the Etihad Mike joined the post-match chit chat...

It seems there was nothing to separate the teams until Round 8 when the Opsimaths swept the board and the Bards collapsed. Clearly 2 teams well-matched with Charas captain, Damian, guesting as a genial QM.

Spirited Rutherford

(R7/Q5)

Electric Pigs beat History Men

The Pigs notch their first victory of the season

Ivor cries into his pint...

Our hopes of progression upwards in the League table were dashed from the outset. Going first we were a point behind after the very first question and felt we did well to be only 8 points in arrears at the end. We normally do well in Charabanc quizzes and it was a shock to find that we were the worst of all the eight teams tonight - and by some distance.

Britain's most haunted

(R1/Q8)

What was to blame for this (or, in wokery terms, why were we successful in achieving second place)? Multiple reasons of course: the usual excuse of not knowing enough, Anne being away in Ibiza, players sitting in the wrong seat for the questions as they fell, the captain overruling correct answers (Mike H will have something to say about that) but most of all the brilliance of Dave Pig who got 7 twos (of his team’s 11) to our total of 6 twos. The unanswereds broke 6 to us and 3 to the Pigs so possibly we copped it for the harder questions. There we have it. Blame it on the Charabancs but never on our own failings! (Lol - we love the Charas really).

Gaslit Bergman

(R3/Q7)

...and Mike H adds his 2d...

A good, but rather complex, quiz this evening, though as ever the evening was most enjoyable. For me our match was a rather a one-sided affair with most of the answers I knew going to the other side, either as ones or twos. My greatest disappointment was getting the 'Andorra' answer but then having it overruled by captain Ivor.

Favourite answer of the night? House of Fun Lovin' Criminals in Round 6.

Oo! ah! Where's he gone?

(R6/Q5)

Authors with terminal bad timing

(R8/Q3)

KFD lost to Prodigals

KFD lose ground to the 2019 Champs

Kieran is inconsolable at the Griffin...

It's crap being Spurs

Poch's miserable defenestration featured in these ramblings a couple of years ago. There was an uncanny coincidence between the comedy gold laid on by Daniel Levy in N17 and the vertiginous fall down the table experienced by KFD (or whatever we were called back then). It went so far as both teams reaching 'Champions League' finals within six weeks of each other and then totally failing to show up. But Spurs are now on their third manager since the glory(?) days, the first of whom got one line in a Mescaline inspired WithQuiz match report and the next was there and gone scarcely wiping his feet. The current (at the time of going to press) incumbent is a glowering disciplinarian with a malevolent bearing which is terrifying. Meanwhile KFD have carried on with more or less the same genial cast and have achieved pretty much an identical outcome.

An old pilot's grounded

(R1/Q3)

An excellent and perhaps surprising start to the season has decayed in just two weeks into nothingness; a depressing slide from tragedy to farce looking more and more likely. Tonight summed it up. We led from the first question to halfway through Round 7 and then offered no resistance as ~~that Portuguese git~~ The Prodigals put us to the sword in the remaining twelve questions.

We've now lost six in a row to the 2019 champions, four times on Charas papers - nah nothing going on with that.

Barry is away this week and young Liam® and even younger Thomas were both unavailable so we welcomed Phil, a friend of David's daughter Ruth, to the team. He acquitted himself well enough, registering an early two, but it was beyond him to rescue the rest of us from the entropy that is inevitable in our thirtieth season.

The quiz was done with shortly after 10.00, and as David and I were revelling in City's victory and PSG stuffing it up (yet again) in Germany, United fan Michael was also celebrating Gabriel Jesus's last kick goal as it won him a bet. Michael please tell me that you feel just a little bit dirty? The best nugget to emerge from the post-match chat was that Hollywood 'A' lister Robert Duvall seems to have carved out a niche market around twenty years ago playing football (as in FOOTball) coaches in films everyone quickly forgot.

Hallelujah! He can stand!

(R8/Q5)

After four successive games in the Griffin we're now on our travels for the next month and won't be seeing Bob the Hat again until just before Christmas. He's in the Irish Republic next week and has assured me that his visit has nothing to do with favourable tax rates there being on their last legs. Next week it's the Pigs who've just scored their first victory of the season. Oh good!

Congratulations to the Prodigals, it's going to be very hard trying to keep up with them this season. And it's really, really crap being Spurs, even the beautiful countenance of Alan Gilzean doesn't make up for the misery on a night like this.

An irritating Aussie

(R5/Q4)

Quiz paper set by...

...Charabancs of Fire

Average Aggregate score 81.5

Sighs of satisfaction from the players for the evening's paper ooze out of most of the match reports. And again an average aggregate that keeps the season's average hovering around the 80 points mark. Plenty of points on offer then.

Some comments (as usual) about the balance of the question pairing but all in all well done and many thanks to the Charas.

"Haven't I seen you on that wall in Copson Street, Withington?"

(R2/Q1)

so what did Kieran think...

There wasn't too much wrong with tonight's quiz - other than the haunting horror at the end of Round 1 which accounted for two of the five unanswereds. The only gripe would be that the remaining three 'nul points' all fell to David who was going first for us. In tight matches like this that does make a difference. It felt like the Charas had handed the harder questions to the team going first in each half. That's fair enough if it's balanced out but it leaves one team feeling exultant right at the death and the other in the deepest despair. I guess that's nearly always the case in any game anyway.

and Mike O'B...

The quiz was up to the usual Charas high standards. Plenty of points on offer and a good balance of difficulty. The lead changed hands regularly and for most of the match the gap was never more than a couple of points - indeed the result ultimately depended on the last pair of questions.

My Mutual Friend

(R5/Q6)

and Ashton...

Lots of interesting questions last night, and we enjoyed the set, but the balance did seem rather all over the shop. Some very tricky ones right next to some absolute gimmes. I guess the closeness of our result suggests things pretty much evened out over the whole paper. I hope no matches were riding on the clue-ridden dolly of a last question though. If you can't recall it, it was the one that went something like 'Which tennis tournament, whose name rhymes with Schwindian Bells...'

and finally Ivor...

Despite our poor performance we cannot complain about the paper which once again tested all elements of human knowledge (quite literally in the 'scandium anagram' round). If there is ever an academic subject of quiz question studies (universities have many more bizarre chairs than that) a Charabanc paper would always make a good case study. Some examples from this week's paper:

...the question where the answer is either Alcock or Brown putting the quizee under pressure to go for a two and be a hero, or blurt the wrong answer and be worse than a zero, since the opposition will surely get the bonus steal,

...the film comedy starting 'Tra' where Andrew blurted "Trains, Planes and Automobiles" instead of "Trading Places",

...the country with the highest capital in Europe; surely it would be Spain to fit the anagram and yet it was Andorra instead,

...the questions which dragged out long forgotten names from goodness knows where in the cerebral cortex; the trans tennis player for example, and the tennis player whose name is so wacky it should never have been forgotten in the first place (Mardy Fish).

Craziest question of the night (unanswered and possibly unanswerable) was the connected venues question that included a remote cottage in County Fermanagh, the scene of strange goings-on (as if there aren’t enough strange goings-on in Co. Fermanagh already).

Question of the Week

This week Mike H has opted for Round 6 (the Run Ons round) Question 7...

No 1 song for Madness which includes the lines “I’m sorry son but we don’t stock party gimmicks”

&

New York band best known for their hit Scooby Snacks.

For the answer to this and all the week's other questions click here.

...and also

Just a quick plea from me...

My usual routine for the weekly website update is to get the results and table sorted out last thing Wednesday leaving the match reports and question paper until Thursday morning. So it would greatly help me if teams texted the results of their matches as soon as they're over on Wednesday even if they haven't got round to penning a report. That way I can complete my Wednesday routine and get to bed knowing they'll be heaps of glorious prose waiting for me when I get up on Thursday morning.

Many thanks for all you do to keep the website a lively and interesting adjunct to the weekly matches.