Cricket offers a multitude of options for those truly hopeless at it
“Last week, which batsman became the first in Test history to score centuries in all 10 Test playing countries?”
They say the word quiz was invented on a bet. It was in 1791, so the story goes, when Dick Daly, manager of Dublin’s Theatre Royal, made a wager that in 48 hours he would not only be able to introduce a new word into the language, but put it “in the mouths of the Dublin public of all classes and sexes, young and old”. That night, Daly recruited all his “call-boys, scene-shifters and other inferior employees” and sent them out about the city with instructions to chalk quiz on every doorway in the city. When everyone woke it was all anyone could talk about. So Daly won his 20 guineas, and, soon enough, quiz came to mean “a hoax, a trick, a humbug, or a joke”.
“In the early 1930s, three friends, who had known each other at Eton and Oxford, shared a flat in London. One was William Douglas Home, playwright and younger brother of Sir Alec. Another was Jo Grimond, future leader of the Liberal Party. Which future cricket commentator was the third?”
Which is a good story, only not so straight as it is tall. There are plenty of examples of people using quiz long before Dick Daly’s time, though no one quite seems to have agreed what it was supposed to mean. “One who thinks, speaks, or acts differently to the rest of the world”, reckoned the London Magazine. Anyone who isn’t “dissipated and extravagant” said the Sporting Magazine. “A kind of toy, something like a yo-yo”, adds the OED, less helpfully. A,B,C, or D – all three. Anyway, the Daly story comes from an author called Frank Thorpe Porter via Marcus Berkmann’s book, Brain Men. And it would be churlish to quibble, since Marcus was the man who wrote these questions.
“In February 2013, who became the first cricketer to lead his country in 100 Test matches? He also has most victories as captain, with 51.”
One of the many beauties of cricket is that it offers a multitude of options for those of us who are truly hopeless at it. Us geeks are able to serve as scorers and statisticians, spectators, writers, reporters and editors, broadcasters, producers, technicians, photographers and cameramen, stewards, groundsmen, umpires, even coaches. The trouble being that these jobs leave little outlet for our competitive instincts. This, of course, is where quizzing come in. It’s validation for all those wasted hours spent studying scorecards. An alpha opportunity for beta men and women. Like last Thursday night, when the latest edition of the ferociously competitive Nightwatchman charity quiz was held at the Oval.
“Who, in 2009, was the first woman ever to be selected by Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack as a Cricketer of the Year?”
This one seemed a touch unfair, since I was on Wisden Almanack’s own team, a late call-up, my selection earned on the strength of the two years I spent working there when I was starting out. The three regular members, Lawrence, Matthew and Hugh, were all a little too quick to insist that I wasn’t just a late substitute. But two drinks later, they couldn’t help but talk about how the man who would typically sit in my chair, Steven Lynch, “would have known” this, that, and the other one we’d got wrong. And they were likely right, since Steven has his own weekly trivia column on Cricinfo.
“There were two centenary Test matches between England and Australia, one in Melbourne in 1977 and the other at Lord’s in 1990. Who was the only Englishman who played in both?”
The thing with pub quizzes is that knowing the right answer is less than half the task. The tricky bit is getting it down on paper. Now, Matthew may well have mentioned the man who played in both these two games. But by this point in the evening he had already persuaded the rest of us that 1916 was too soon for the Charleston to have taken off as a dance craze, and that after the indignity of its defeat in 1558, the Spanish navy surely wouldn’t still go by the name “armada”. So his confidence wasn’t quite what it might have been. Which was how it came to pass that our team of four cricket writers contrived to write down the name of a man who not only didn’t play in both the centenary Tests, but didn’t play in either of them.
“Which captain of the England cricket team, who was born in 1900 and died in 1958, had as his family motto ‘Cave, adsum’, meaning ‘Beware, I am here’?”
Hugh and Lawrence had spent 10 hours proof-reading the county reports for this year’s Almanack, and could fairly claim to be fatigued. At least Matthew was mollified by the idea that he had, as he put it, “reclaimed the moral high ground” over us, his three team-mates. Which, as any regular pub quizzer will well know, is the next best thing to beating everyone else. By the time Marcus had confirmed that the creature known as Dutch chicken in Malaysia, French bird in Greece, and Peruvian bird in India, was indeed the turkey and not, as the other three of us insisted, the guinea fowl, Matthew was positively beaming.
“Imran Khan had two cousins who played Test cricket. Majid Khan was one. Who was the other?”
In Brain Men, Marcus’s own advice on how to handle any cricket questions in pub quizzes is this: “A beautiful sport in sad decline, so no one ever knows any of the answers. If you are similarly befuddled, try ‘Ian Botham’ or ‘WG Grace’, unless they want an Australian (‘Donald Bradman’), West Indian (‘Viv Richards’) or Indian (‘Sachin Tendulkar’). If a woman has set the quiz, the answer tends to be ‘Imran Khan’.” Personally, I seem to remember that whenever cricket comes up in Trivial Pursuit the answer is invariably Geoffrey Boycott. Either way, I can emphatically say that none of Botham, Grace, Bradman, Richards, Tendulkar or Boycs are, or ever were, a cousin of Imran Khan.
“Which Australian cricketer once went out briefly with Princess Margaret?”
If you scored more than six, you beat us. And, more important, if you spotted the mistake in one of Marcus’s questions, you can claim a share of the moral high ground too.
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