This clash raised many expectations – the last meeting had resulted in a draw and at the beginning of this week’s contest The Phoenix and The Castle were equal top in the B League. A real battle of the Titans.
The difficulties faced by The Castle pub have been outlined before – there is no proper landlord and the pub remains closed except on Tuesday evening when the caretaker-landlord opens the doors just to the quiz teams and provides bottled beer. However the arena had been well prepared with a very warm heater and the Castle team had been kind enough to purchase a selection of meat pies for the game – much appreciated. The question master was the very experienced Allan from the Church House Bollington.
The scene was set for a very pleasant evening – could anything go wrong? Sadly yes – the questions.
The Specialist were OK if a little eccentric (a whole round on the Black Sea???) but the General Knowledge were not at all impressive – a pity really as several of the questions were valid but would have been improved had they been reworded – for instance give the Chinese names in the question rather than expect us to remember or even pronounce them. And some answers were just incorrect – two have been pointed out in the questions published (Churchill’s quote and the Talbot) and others open to question.
It is unfortunate really because the obscure reference to News and Views after the heading represented a good idea that may not have been recognised (certainly not by Nick until he was publishing the questions) – several answers were the names of pubs or players in the League - even the Fenix along with Baths, Albion, Harrington etc and Hargreaves, Bogey and so on – but at the same time created problems – Kafka’s The Trial is also about K battling bureaucracy.
Probably the biggest criticism of the General Knowledge questions is the huge number of sport questions – quite disproportionate!!
Normally the vetting teams would be held responsible for the shortcomings but it seems their comments were ignored.
It will be interesting to see how the questions were marked – certainly in our game they had a deadening effect, so much so that no-one showed any interest in hearing the supplementaries.
Except for Tomo who again played a good game the scores were low, being:
Bob 6/12, Wendy 9/6, Nick 9/3, Tomo 12/15 with conferred points 9/11 and passovers 6/6; The Castle picked up 7/7 passovers. They won the Specialist 59 to 51 and the General Knowledge 66 to 53 winning the game with 125 to 104.
Many thanks to the home team for their hospitality and we very much hope that the future of the Castle is soon resolved.
3 comments:
To add to the list of incorrect answers, please also note Q52. The White Queen was able to believe (not do) six impossible things before breakfast, not Alice herself!
Any more??
Since writing the above, I have seen the questions that were originally drawn up - the hint about News And Views is much more explicit, the questions are better and more evenly matched, and they do not contain many of the wrong answers - why they were messed about with is not known.
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