Thanks for all your entries for our latest quiz. So how did you get on? Here are the answers.
1. Which significant date do Marcus Trescothick and Alastair Cook have in common?
They were both born on Christmas Day – Tres in 1975, and Cook in 1984.
2. Which of these counties did Chris Lewis not play for? Leicestershire, Surrey, Nottinghamshire, or Hampshire?
Hampshire.
3. Which twentieth century UK prime minister had news-wire equipment installed in 10 Downing Street, but used it only to check the cricket scores? He dubbed the apparatus his “cricket machine”.
Clement Attlee (1945-51).
4. Which former England captain, now an executive for the ECB, described, via Twitter, a recent TFT article as “inaccurate and poorly researched”?
Clare Connor, head of women’s cricket at the ECB. The offending article was this: https://www.thefulltoss.com/england-cricket-blog/the-conundrum-for-womens-cricket/
5. Who was the last (ie, most recent) Oxford University graduate to captain England?
MJK Smith, who skippered the side in twenty five tests from 1963/64 to 1966.
6. Who was the last England player, of more than twenty five caps, to retire with a test batting average over 50?
Ken Barrington, who finished his test career in 1968 with an average of 58.67. He is seventh on the all-time, all-nations list of test averages, and the second highest placed Englishman, after Eddie Paynter (59.27).
7. According to the Duckworth Lewis Method (the band, not the scoring system), it was ”jiggery pokery, trickery, jokery. How did he open me up? Robbery, muggery, Aussie skullduggery. I might as well have been holding a contra bassoon”. Who were the two protagonists involved in the famous event thus described?
Mike Gatting and Shane Warne – at Old Trafford in 1993.
8. What links Cleator (2013), Reed (2012), and Woodhouses (2011)?
They are the most recent three winners of the National Village Cup.
9. A question on the middle names of England stalwarts from the 1980s: what does the ‘I’ in DI Gower stand for? The ‘T’ in IT Botham? And the ‘J’ in AJ Lamb?
Ivon; Terence; Joseph.
10. “As a player he had trouble getting to sleep. As a commentator he struggles to stay awake. His voice remains on one note – the drone of your neighbour’s mower”. So wrote Tim de Lisle in The Independent in 1995. Who was he describing?
Bob Willis.
