The Teams
Edinburgh
Parthav Easwar
Johnny Richards
Alice Leonard (capt)
Rayhana Amjad
Manchester
Ray Power
Kirsty Dickson
Kai Madgwick
Rob Faulkner
No Grand Final is ever settled in the opening exchanges,
but the opening exchanges of this Grand Final were going to tell us a lot about
how the match might unfold. For the first starter neither team knew Mary
Wollstonecraft was writing to Talleyrand in the quotation given. Nerves? No.
Kai Madgwick buzzed in extremely fast to identify the border between China and
Afghanistan as the border with the largest difference in time zones in the
world. The works of my great, great, great, great uncle’s mate, Pushkin
(honestly, Pushkin wrote a poem to him and about him) brought two bonuses. No
panic from Edinburgh. Rayhana Amjad, their own star buzzer from the semi,
recognised the description of Bose for the next starter. They in turn took two
bonuses on foreign football clubs founded by British ex pats. Nobody knew
sachlichkeit – which surely only exists as part of the lyric of the song Let’s
Go Sachlichkeit from Mary Poppins. Johnny Richards knew that the creature in a
film mentioned was a donkey. (The film wasn’t Shrek). Poisonous plants brought
a full house, and the lead. The picture starter showed us the flag of
Turkmenistan and that sort of thing is meat and drink to Kai Madgwick. More
flags in the bad category of the 2001 pamphlet Good Flag Bad Flag proved
considerably harder and brought nowt to any of us. Edinburgh lost five with an
interruption of the next starter. Given a little more Kai Madgwick was able to
identify the Nestorians (whose planet was saved from the Daleks by the Doctor
in the 1968 Doctor Who Serial “It’s them Bleedin’ Daleks Again”) Non-narrative
film makers brought two bonuses and the lead. The score was 50-40 at the ten.
Amol did not get to the end of the next starter when the
Manchester skipper buzzed in with degenerate. Places and characters from Greek
mythology sharing a name element – hippo – brought two bonuses. The Madgwick
surge looked to be irresistible as he buzzed with the name of poet Rainer Maria
Rilke. For those of us counting, this was his fifth starter. That was as many
as he managed in the whole contest last time Manchester played Edinburgh and
more than half of the contest remained to be played. This was ominous. 2
bonuses followed on the Second Crusade. The gap was widening. Edinburgh really
needed to find a starter. For the music starter nobody recognised a little bit
of Wagner – that’s Richard, not Robert. Rayhana Amjad was first in with the
name Thule for the next starter. More pieces of classical music about fire did
not, sadly, include the timeless work of the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. They
didn’t add to the Edinburgh score either. Nobody knew a video game widely
praised for its realistic depiction of psychosis – sounds a whole load of fun,
does that. Kai Madgwick took another starter linking the name Bokassa with CAR
– Central African Republic – or Empire as he would later have it for a while.
Even if he hadn’t been playing so well, I would still have applauded Kai Madgwick
for his comment “This is too mathsy for me!” about the bonuses. You and me both
kid, you and me both. The Continuum Hypothesis – a prog rock group from the
70s, surely, yielded one bonus. Kirsty Dickson was unlucky to give Argyll and
Bute for the next starter thus allowing Rayhana Amjad to tap just Bute into the
open goal. Sociological terms beginning with A brought one bonus. It helped,
but they really needed to be winning more on the buzzer. So Rayhana Amjad took
the next starter with various clues to the word corner. Zimbabwe stubbornly
refused to yield up bonus points. Still, at the 20 minute mark the gap stood at
only 20 points, 100 – 80 in Manchester’s favour. Both teams were still in it.
For the second picture starter Kai Madgwick identified a
photo of Werner ‘Du, du, lichts mir in’ Herzog. Stills from three documentaries
directed by Herzog brought one bonus but stretched the lead to 35. Again, Edinburgh
cut into it as Parthav Easwar recognised words for pomegranate syrup. (another
prog rock band?) German chemist Ida Noddack brought them one bonus and the gap
was back down to 20. Gawd knows about enantiomers. Neither team did for the
next starter. An incorrect Manchester interruption narrowed the gap to 15. The
lightning fast buzzing of Kai Madgwick struck again for the next starter to
identify poems contained in the Exeter Book. Two world heritage sites only
yielded one bonus, but that bonus meant that Edinburgh would need two
unanswered visits to the table. And there was not a lot of time left. It’s
almost needless to say that it was Kai Madgwick who turned the likelihood of a
Manchester win into a certainty by buzzing in with the correct answer of
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk for the next starter. Paintings by Basquiat brought ten
points to stretch the lead to 50. Johnny Richards knew that the German word for
cathedral is Dom, taking Edinburgh into triple figures. But that was it. The
contest was bonged after one incorrect answer on international borders and
Manchester had won by 145 to 105.
And let’s be clear. Although Kai Madgwick was the undoubted
star of the final, and the series, it was won by Manchester, the team and the
whole team. Kai knew this, saying ‘I’m pleased with every single member of this
team’. Right enough.
Analysis – well, should you need such a thing, then
Edinburgh achieved a BCR of 42.1% while Manchester had 48.1%. But the story of
the day was not about bonuses, but about starters. Manchester got more of them
than Edinburgh and yes, Kai Madgwick got all of his team’s starters, 9 to be
precise. I said in my preview that if Kai Madgwick hit top form then my
tentative prediction of an Edinburgh win wouldn’t be worth a damn. Well, he did
and it wasn’t. At the end of the day, like every other team that Manchester
have played in this series (except themselves in the quarter final) Edinburgh
were Madgwicked.
I enjoyed the fact that the Beeb had asked Miriam Margolyes
to present the trophy. This was a cue for her story of using the F word when
playing in a series in the 60s when she got one wrong. I think I did once read
that her episode no longer exists in the archives, so that’s one we just have
to imagine. Miriam M is a popular, yet somewhat high-risk speaker. Miriam is
going to say what Miriam wants to say, not what someone else wants her to say.
In this case, no expletives, but the usual thing is for the luminary presenting
the trophy to pay a tribute to both teams, commiserate with the runners up,
congratulate the champions and not single out any one player. Not our Miriam.
All she wanted to do was concentrate on Kai Madgwick. “You’re extraordinary.
You’re a genius.” Even when pushed by Amol to pay tribute to Edinburgh she
hardly gave them a word. When presenting the trophy she said to the Manchester
team “You were brilliant,” and then looked at the skipper and said “especially
you!” Well, if we’re honest, it’s probably what we were all thinking.
Amol Watch
Another good season, Mr. Rajan, so take a well earned bow,
please. I think we can safely say that you’ve made the show your own now.
Interesting Fact That I Didn’t Already Know Of
The Week
The largest time zone difference over a land border between
two countries is that between China and Afghanistan. With its huge area yet
single time zone, it had to be China, but I didn’t know if it would be a
Western or Eastern border.
Baby Elephant Walk Moment
First advanced by Georg Cantor in 1878, what name is given to
the hypothesis that posits there is no set whose cardinality is an intermediate
value between the cardinality of the integers and that of the real numbers?
Yeah, you had me at cardinality. Dum de dumdum dum dum dum
dum dumdum.
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