Smoke me a clipper, I’ll be back for breakfast
But things begin to slip, and the second round goes very badly. Oli is the only one of us who knows that Jose Mourinho’s dog is called Gullit, which is remarkable considering that Oli is extremely proud of his utter ignorance of football and everything to do with it. The only time his number has ever come up on the snowball, the question was which Dutch footballer is the only person to have won the Champion’s League with three different clubs - despite the hundreds of pounds at stake, and the anguished cries coming from Ivan who knew the answer, Oli looked delighted as he said “I have no idea and I can’t even offer a guess”.
We have a bonus round this week - from extracts from poems we have to name the poet. I can offer no help here, except to suggest that Tennyson and Betjeman may well be among the answers. Patrick’s quizzes are unashamedly highbrow, and he obviously relishes being able to say things like “Quite a few teams put Sappho for that one, but it refers to Lesbia, not Lesbos and the answer is of course Catullus”. Of course. Our score is modest, and we drop down the order. Afterwards, I say to Patrick that poetry has never been our team’s strongest point. “Clearly”, he says.
As the quiz goes on we are slipping further and further from the money. We do know the three players other than Federer and Sampras to have won Wimbledon in the last 15 years (Richard Krajicek, Goran Ivanisevic and Lleyton Hewitt), and after much debate we realise that what connects Natasha Hamilton, Alex Best, Nell McAndrew and Javine Hylton is not that they are or were all married to footballers but that they’ve all won Rear of the Year. Patrick’s quizzes do occasionally contain such lowbrow moments but I am not sure Patrick really enjoys them. But we are enraged by a preposterous question which requires us to know not just that Laurence Olivier was born 100 years ago today, but also what each of his three wives were called. Marcus tells us afterwards that he actually got this question right, and I may have to refer to him from now on as Smug Marcus. Come the final reckoning we are a horrific 18 points off the lead, and yet again we’re in the worst position, just outside the money. We’re setting the quiz next week and we all agree that will be a lot more fun.
May 24th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Erm …. wasn’t Mourinho’s stupid, poncey, illegal little dog called Leya? (Wrongly reported as Gullitt according to that fount of all wisdom TheLondonPaper)
May 24th, 2007 at 11:09 am
Could be true - Patrick did mention that he’d seen another name given, and gave points for that as well. But Gullit got points, and that was what we put, so we didn’t question him.