One of the M1's longer and more travel-sickness-inducing away trips of the year began with a road trip quiz set by Captain Sam. The quiz ranged from the bizarre: with Sam setting the hardest questions from his latest GCSE physics mock papers (and shockingly allowing answers from Will T’s team in non-SI units, tut-tut Sam) with kinetic energy and thermodynamics calculations (but fair play to Schu for showing his worth as an engineer and getting these right); to the random: “how tall is Harry Lewis in KitKat®s, “by their longest length”, to the nearest whole KitKat®?”… which in my car sparked a rather heated debate on how long a KitKat®is (I thought 10cm, and my passengers Blower, Trimble, and Oscar thought 8cm). Some googling after the answer was wrongly awarded to Will T’s team (more on that in a sec), with an answer of 20 KitKat®s, revealed that a classic 4-finger KitKat® is 9.3cm long, and 6.3cm wide, so therefore according to Pythagoras’ theorem, the longest length of a 4-fingered KitKat® is 11.2cm, and therefore Harry Lewis, to the nearest whole KitKat® would be 16 KitKat®s tall…

[Ed - Most. Cambridge. Lede. Paragraph. Ever!]

My favourite question of the quiz was “who is Harry Lewis’ favourite sportsperson of all time?” (with no limit on attempts allowed)… we know of course from Harry’s recent match report (see 14th October) that he’s a keen rugby fan, so our car (mostly Blower and I tbf, with Oscar not having a scooby doo what we were on about) went about suggesting the entire 2003 rugby world cup winning England team, but alas the correct answer was not even the likes of Jason Leonard or Neil Back, but I think Harry L was tempted to change his answer given the quality of answer we were providing! This question gained a total of 24 incorrect guesses, mostly from Keen-Bean-Blower, with highlights being Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor, Martina Navratilova, or Laura Robson. The correct answer was the rather aloof F1 driver, Kimi Räikkönen, of course!

The results of the quiz (after moderation for incorrect awarding of answers by Sam):

• Team Las Fieras (Jack, Oscar, Blower & Trimble) 1st place with 6 points (what’s our prize, Sam?)
• Team Shoebox (Will & Schu) 2nd with 2 points
• Joint 3rd with 1 point: Nik, Scott, Nat (who wasn’t even travelling with the boys, but just couldn’t resist nibbling in on the action)
• Wooden Spoon: Sam with -3 points for incorrect awarding of points to Will (KitKat®-longest-length-gate), not enforcing SI units in the physics calculations, & he miss-spelt “flour” in one of the questions.
• Keen-Bean award goes to Blower for entering 30 answers, compared to the next nearest of ~15 answers by Will.

Anyway, after this rather fun neural warm-up, we move on to the hockey match.

The game started well, with South dominating the opposition, finding it surprisingly easy to carve through Spalding, who before the match sat 3 points ahead of us in the table and thrashed Cambridge 1s 5-0 the previous week. But then we conceded a short corner, which was slotted very neatly by Spalding’s main (&only?) weapon. Undeterred the boys kept to their tasks and pushed for the goal their chances and field position really deserved. Chances went begging, with missed open goals by Schu (unfair probably because I think the defender made a fine last-ditch tackle, but the umpire give it as a 16-hit-out so officially you missed Schu, sorry bud!), and me, who missed under “extreme pressure” from the defender but still should’ve slotted it. At this stage it looked like it may go the same way as the week before when we were unlucky, hitting the post ~5 times and having 3 goals disallowed from over-eager umpiring. But soon after Will T slithered through their defences and got tackled on purpose to cleverly leave the ball top D for a very hungry Humby to force a hit in through defenders sticks and the keepers legs to level the scores.

HT 1-1.

The 2nd half started fast and loose, our favourite style, and we were running them ragged, defending deep and breaking with pace, power and panache and making the most of the opposition's lack of fitness. This led to a brilliant counterattack where we once again somehow managed to not put the ball in a mostly open goal, but because of their multiple defenders on the floor impeding the South attempts the umpire gave a p-flick. Scott stepped up to take the flick and powered it home, leaving the keeper no chance. 2-1 South. The game continued to get messier and more frantic with Spalding clearly not happy to be losing to Sam’s (their former teammate) men. There was a flurry of cards for both teams for either bad tackles or backchat. Oscar perhaps unluckily awarded a yellow card for what seemed like a clean tackle. The lads did very well to keep playing when down a player, managing to defend their D and frustrate the opposition into mistakes. Harry Lewis popped up with a goal from a beautifully crafted deflection. Some slandered him by saying this was a miss-trap, but it was definitely a deliberate miss-trap, at the very least (I’ve got your back, Harry). South’s final goal came from the still-surprisingly-consistent-goal-source of Connor Trimble, who from another south counterattack and slick interplay decided to not play in two others who appeared to have better chances of scoring and just lifted it over the keeper whilst running along the baseline, nice!

Late on Spalding went route 1, again, and managed to work it to a forward who was 1 on 1 with keeper Stan. Stan managed a fine double save, however, the ball fell towards the baseline and a plucky shot managed to loop into the net from a tight angle.

4-2 well-deserved road win from the boys.

Teas rating: 6.8/10.3 - Solid Jacket Potato with cheese and beans, showers warm and great changing room games options with bowling and velcro-ball darts.

MOM went to Sam for playing well under pressure in midfield, lots of “pointless passes” (some even went forward) and leading the troops well.

LOM went to Keen-Bean-Blower for being just that in the quiz, and also for taking that attitude a bit too hard into the game and levelling two of their players (accidentally) during the 2nd half.

I’ll pass on the match report baton to Connor Trimble for next week's game.