Category: Cricket

An apology

I posed a cricket trivia question at the end of a recent post. My multitasking skills weren’t up to it.

The question should have read:

Which five cricketers have done the treble of 3000 runs, 100 wickets and 100 catches at Test level?

Apologies to those of you who’ve been trying to come up with impossible answers.

Incidentally, the one part of the question I remembered easily was the answer, which I had memorised… and then I had to reconstruct the question from that answer.

Talking about reconstructing questions from answers, there used to be a competition in the late 1960s or early 1970s, I think it was on the radio. I was still in Calcutta, so all this came to me secondhand or even further removed.

This is all I can remember. They gave you a list of everyday answers to trivia questions. You had to come up with the most original question befitting any one such answer.

The runner up was:

The answer was Dr Livingstone I Presume. The question was “What is your full name, Dr Presume?”

The winner:

The answer was Crick. The question was “What is the sound made by a Japanese camera?”

Does anyone know where I can find out more about this competition?

Nurdling

I’ve been watching a lot of cricket these past few weeks, while listening to music and reading at the same time. See? I’m learning multitasking. It must be the time I’m spending with my wife and Generation M children.
While watchening the cricket (I have no word to describe the half-listen half-watch that every child of mine has done with television when young) I heard a commentator use one of my favourite words.

“….and Dravid nurdles that past Smith”.

Nurdle. What a fine word, Mr Pockheel, as H*Y*M*A*N  K*A*P*L*A*N was wont to say. [An aside. If you haven’t read the two Leonard Q Ross/Leo Rosten books on the classroom adventures of Mr Kaplan, find the time somehow. They are just incredible, particularly for people who like some humour in their linguistics. I’m reading them for the 9th or 10th time. Rosten is fantastic.]

Nurdle. Now with an entry in Wikipedia, I’ll have you know.

Nurdle. Defined as: to score runs by gently nudging the ball into vacant areas of the field. There’s something bucolic about it, conjuring sounds of willow on leather amidst an aroma of freshmown grass.
While on the subject of nurdling. The commentators almost nurdled some truly useless cricket trivia past me while I was dreaming of nurdles, trivia that I love:

Name the five cricketers who’ve done the treble of 200 wickets, 4000 runs, …. and 100 catches. At Test level of course.