OK, I'm back from my two weeks of holiday; first week went pretty well, the second not so well, one was probably enough in the end. Anyway, I'm back now, so back to business as usual, as my series marking the 10th anniversary of this blog continues...
Match 9: St Andrews vs Bangor (24th September 2012)
Our first of three matches this
week pitted St Andrews, represented by Ben Adams, Jim Parsons (not that one),
James Gray and Andrew Newton, against Bangor, who were Adam ‘Welshguy’ Pearce,
Mark Stevens, Nina Grant (futurely of Only Connect) and Simon Tomlinson. After
a strong start, Bangor fell to two successive penalties, including a ‘just an’
interruption from Adam (who also produced a “What?!” from Paxo that I recall
him saying on here he was happy to have gotten!), which allowed St Andrews to
pull back into the game and then take the lead.
After this, the two teams were
pretty much even, decent on the starters but not so much the bonuses, hence the
rather low scores. After retaking the lead though, Bangor did maintain it for
the rest of the show, with St Andrews coming close a couple of times, but not
quite catching them. One question late on, in a bonus round on ‘rings’, asked
simply for the colours of the five Olympic rings; wouldn’t get a question that
easy nowadays. Bangor won the game 125-105, showing occasional flashes of the
better form they’d show from the next round onwards, but clearly not at their
best yet; that was to come...
Match 10: Pembroke Cambridge vs Lancaster (1st October 2012)
Next up, we saw then-reigning
runners-up Pembroke College Cambridge, who were Robert Scanes, Emily Maw, Tom
Foxall and Jemima Hodkinson, play Lancaster, represented by Alan Webster, Anne
Kretzschmar, George Pinkerton and Ian Dickson. The two teams were pretty
closely matched at first, with Pembroke’s better bonus showing keeping them in
front. Lancaster provided the undoubted highlight of the game though, with the
music round on birds in classical music, producing a facepalm from Paxo on one
bonus!
Pembroke got the upper hand on the
buzzer after that though, and ran away with the match; Lancaster did manage a late
rally to secure a score that, ultimately, would get them through to the
repechage. Pembroke won the game 200-140, at the start of a run that took them
to the quarter-finals.
Match 11: Bath vs Liverpool (8th October 2012)
Finally this week, we have a somewhat
infamous match, between Bath, represented by Joe Kendall, Adam Salvesen,
Matthew Wise and Toby Smith, and Liverpool, who were Sasha Torregrosa-Jones,
Jonathan Tinsley, Andy Jones and Agneau Belanyek. I say somewhat infamous
because both teams rather struggled throughout, especially on the bonuses, and
both made numerous unfortunate mistakes. In the very first bonus, for example,
Liverpool, asked for a historian born 1834, offered ‘Julius Caesar’! While, in
their first set, Bath, unable to think of an Irish playwright, offered ‘Paul O’Grady’!
To be fair, the teams weren’t
doing that bad on the buzzers; it was just the bonuses both were struggling
with. One starter saw Paxo, wrongly I’m informed, accept Mr Salvesen’s answer of
‘T killer cells’ when he was after ‘T cells’, an error he would make again a
few series later. Bath were probably the better team on both fronts and
deserving winners overall, though Liverpool did come close to catching up near
the end, and might just have done had Mr Jones not unfortunately lost five after
interrupting with a wrong answer then correcting himself too late. Bath won the
low scoring game 125-110; it remains their only student series victory of the
BBC era to date.
So, that's all for this week; another three episodes next week, and, if I've worked things out right, each of the next nine weeks, except one week when it'll be just two. Which means we'll almost certainly still be doing this when the next new series starts next month. Anyway, see yous next week...
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