John: a New Year’s Revolution?

Feb 4 2010 by John Avison, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

As I may have mentioned before, I’m in the Marsh United Bowling Club’s team in the Colne Valley Quiz League.

Look carefully at those words. I would ask you to pay particular attention to ‘Bowling’, ‘Club’, ‘Quiz’ and ‘League’.

When it comes to trivia, you have to fight me off.

The truth is, Marsh United Bowling Club has being doing really badly this season and may well be looking at relegation to the second division in 2010/11.

The team from the Sair Inn in Linthwaite, on the other hand, have done brilliantly, and are almost certainly looking at some kind of quiz equivalent of the FA Cup.

The last time we played them they ended up 50 points in front. That’s the equivalent of a 7-0 defeat.

So our match against them a couple of weeks ago was very much on the lines of Emley FC taking on Manchester United.

I would have given odds of 100-1 against our success, and though its not gentlemanly to talk about these things, they would have done the same.

We are just about in the same division, but we’re not in the same league, if you see what I mean.

Did we lose? No. Did we hold them to a draw? No. We won.

This is not crowing. It’s just an expression of genuine astonishment.

If this had been a football match, they way to describe it would be that we scored a fluke goal first, shocking them so much that we were able to hang on to our lead until first time, when the Sair equalised.

We defended in earnest until the last moments of the second half, and were level into injury time.

Then someone (I am too modest to name him) was standing bemused in the Man U goalmouth when a ball hit him on the back of the head and bounced into the net.

The Sair team took the defeat with dignity. I’m told it was only their second in two seasons.

We, in our turn, were modest. The questions definitely ran our way, we told them.

There’s a big difference between sport and sporting. But I have to say that when the losers had left the building, one or two players did the equivalent of that shirt over the head thing and went “YES!”

We’re only human.