Offside

Struck down by a massive bout of the sniffles at work, I fell asleep as soon as I got home. And while this aided my recovery in an immeasurable way, it did also mean that I wasn't finished cooking my dinner until five minutes before the episode started, so I'm going to have to write this whole thing late at night. Woe is me.

At the weekend, Bruno Fernandes scored the equaliser in the Manchester derby courtesy of the most inexplicable offside decision I've seen in the age of VAR. At least with the silly lines they draw you know that they've tried to stick to the rule, even if the rule is inherently stupid (which it is, and I would propose to change the law so that its only the players' feet that count, but thats a story for another blog).

This decision displayed just how little the officials understand the game, but it got me thinking as to whether a similar thing had ever happened in University Challenge. Has there ever been a question that the setters simply got wrong, and which affected the outcome of the match in a material way? Let me know in the comments if there are any real life examples, but for now I have a bit of a shaggydog story about a time I thought there had been a mistake when there wasn't.

What follows is an extract from an as yet unpublished edition of my Patreon reviews. If you want to read the rest of it, along with other blogs from bygone series of University Challenge you can sign up here for as little as £1/month.

Bristol's star player Rendell gets them a bonus set on countries which have hosted matches in football world cups, and the year in which said country hosted. They are given a list of cities and then have to give the country and year.

They miss the first one by four years, guessing Argentina '82, then get the second - South Korea '02. On the third they are served a remarkably difficult curveball. The answer is Mexico, but Mexico has hosted two world cups, in 1970 and 1986. They know about the 1970 one, and that Monterrey, Queretaro and Puebla are in Mexico - surely that should be enough, but no. Queretaro and Monterrey didn't host matches at the 1970 world cup, but how were they supposed to know that? Obviously some questions are meant to be very hard, but I think this was, accidentally rather than on purpose, a trick.

Before correcting myself there, I had typed out a paragraph in which I thought I'd discovered a cock-up - that the question setters had mixed up '70 and '86 - meaning that the answer Bristol had given was in fact correct. But it was me who was wrong, of course.

Holloway-Strong's axe is on target with the first starter of the night, axis (its an axe-throwing analogy. That thing people do in city centres because bowling is too boring. She threw her axe and it hit the bullseye. It works), but Newnham only manage one of the bonuses.

Cardiff's Wimperis, who has one of the best surnames in the competition, takes the next starter with space (I tried to come up with another axe-throwing-esque bit here, but decided it probably wasn't worth subjecting you to). They took a hat-trick on one of those 'give me the two words which differ by a single letter' bonus sets, which always seem massively easier and more guessable than any of the others.

At the end of a very long, arduously worded sentence (something readers of this blog can relate to, I'm sure), Ellis takes their first starter of the night to tie the game. A blank on the bonuses meant that we stayed level going into the first picture starter, which Holloway-Strong took. One bonus followed, and Newnham were now two for nine on the five pointers. Another for Ellis extended their lead, but again they struggled, with another blank. Two for twelve. They'd won the buzzer race four times to one, but only led by twenty five.

Will Balkwill-Western, one letter away from having the nickname 'Woman Crush Wednesday', takes the next starter. A second for Wimperis, along with some competent bonus-work, gave Cardiff the lead, which they duly squandered. No matter though, because Newnham kept up their form on the bonuses - they were now three for fifteen, going into the music round.

With rapid confidence, Bowen grabs the musical ten points with Scott Joplin. Finally managing to convert on the bonuses, a full set gave Newnham a thirty point cushion. Revell and Freeman closed the gap back to five, but Ellis stopped the comeback with another strong buzz.

No one knew the second picture starter, which was a still from the film Carrie, though Wimperis does buzz in to guess Son of Rambow. Either he was joking, or he thought that Sissy Spacek looks like Jessica Hynes.

Thanks to a near miss from Ellis, Revell is able to steal the next starter, and with it the picture bonuses. Freeman pulls an amazing answer from the ether and Cardiff are back within five. She smashes the next starter as well, and the Welsh quartet find themselves clear with only minutes remaining.

Ellis comes up clutch with two starters in a row to wrestle it back for Newnham, but another brilliant buzz from Freeman, and some impeccable conferring from Cardiff, tied the game. WBW plucking the Russo-Japanese war from absolutely nowhere is one of my highlights of the series.

And then GONG.

Newnham 140 - 140 Cardiff

For a second Paxman makes it seem as though the game is going to be ended as a draw, which would make no sense, but then he asks if they know how this will play out. Of course they do, let's get one with it.

And who else but Ellis should show up at the most pivotal moment of the episode?

Of the seven positions in netball, how many begin with a letter other than W or G?

One.

C.

The C that was missing from WBW's name, perhaps.

Newnham 150 - 140 Cardiff

A crushing loss for the Welsh team, that. But congratulations to Newnham, who managed to squeeze through, despite a very poor record on the bonuses. They'll need to improve in the quarters, but if Ellis can continue to buzz like that in crunch time, they're always going to have a chance.