Query very good!

	The pub quiz scoreboard © Gavin Scovell

I bet Martin Guptill didn’t see this coming.

He’s standing in the centre of a pub, holding aloft a trophy in front of a crowd of over a hundred, which includes his New Zealand team-mates, coach Andy Moles, the team support staff, Mahela Jayawardene, Ian Bishop, and Danny Morrison.

Given the tour Guptill and New Zealand have had so far, the moment calls for massive cheer all around, and whoops and whistles from his New Zealand team-mates. The setting is the Cheers pub in the basement of the Cinnamon Grand hotel in Colombo, and Guptill’s team, Pole City, has just won a quiz night after staving off last week’s champions, this time around aptly called Beauties & the Beasts, which comprises Jayawardene, his wife Christine, Jehan Mubarak, and the Sri Lankan support staff including assistant coach Paul Farbrace, team trainer Jade Roberts, and physiotherapist Tommy Simsek, and another couple.

Pole City, Beauties & the Beasts, the Daryl Tuffey-lead 6 Guys, 1 Cup – including Daniel Vettori, Shane Bond, Jacob Oram, Ross Taylor, and Gareth Hopkins - and a fourth team all ended the final round of the quiz tied on 68 points and had to go through a general knowledge shootout. In the end, Guptill’s team won and as he walked up to received the trophy the crowd cheered raucously. For once on tour, the New Zealanders were able to laugh out loud.

It was a super evening. Ten teams and a bunch of enthusiastic onlookers were treated to seven rounds of intense quizzing by quizmaster Darren, who along with his wife put up a tremendous show. It was a rare moment where production crew, cameramen, players, commentators, management and the public sat back and just had fun.

I was part of a Ten Sports team that had recently lost to the Sri Lankan team – Jayawardene, Christine, Farbrace and the rest – narrowly. I’d been briefed that our team – aptly titled Give Us Our Trophy Back! – had to beat them this week. Our unit also included the statistician Mohandas Menon. We picked the cricket round as our ‘joker’ round, in which points tallied are doubled. A doozy, right? A cricket-mad television crew, a statistician, and two cricket journalists. You can’t go wrong.

Not really. We ended up short by two points have incorrectly answering two questions in our ‘joker’ round: who hit six sixes in the 2007 World Cup, and which Twenty20 international had the most sixes? The first was so easy that we all just nodded in approval, most of assuming we all knew it was Herschelle Gibbs, but in the milieu of bonhomie the question a few of us heard that they were asking about the World Twenty20 and so the answer penned was Yuvraj Singh. The second answer was a Twenty20 between New Zealand and India earlier this year, while all of us were certain it was the first match of the 2007 ICC World Twenty20.

Shucks. But, still, we were the best Ten Sports team of the five in the fray, so that was some consolation. Even though poor Gavin, the director of production on this tour, won’t be hearing the last of it for having two outsiders in his team.

We started off slowly but gained steam in the sports and film/television round. Gavin was given a hard time by his colleagues because I wasn’t an employee, but all was good-naturedly laughed off ... or so I was assured. At one point, I felt a firm pair of hands on my shoulders and looked up to see Bishop looming above, looking disapprovingly at Gavin. But Bish being the nice man he is, didn’t rib Gavin too hard about it. I’d like to think I made a decent contribution – I got Pamela Anderson’s character’s name in Baywatch and the name of the bartender in The Simpsons, Moe – but the others were really very sharp and we didn’t do too bad at all. There was some intense discussion as to whose derrière one picture was of, but in the end, the racquet manufacturer convinced us it was Maria Sharapova. No, really, it was the racquet handle that did it. There were some other easy ones, such as a behind shot of George Best, at which time Jayawardene yelled out and chided Darren – “What team did he play for?” Props to Gavin for answering ‘Lassie’ to the insanely difficult question about which popular female film and television character was first played by a male in 1943. And the rest of the team all chipped in with some good answers, until of course we came to the easiest one of the lot.

All in all, a really good time was had. It was a scenario I would have never seen back in India. Imagine a visiting cricket team playing a quiz in a pub in Bombay, with Sachin Tendulkar and his wife sitting amid the crowd without security or any intrusion. Great stuff.

As we were leaving, Mike Haysman stopped us, looking rather concerned: “Umm, so boys, which of the cricket questions did you lot not get?” Turns out our team didn’t do as bad as the commentators’ group, out of which Danny Morrison didn’t get a singe question pertaining to New Zealand correctly. Not even the one with the picture of Jade Stadium.

Well at least a few Kiwis did their team-mates proud. Good on ya, Guptill.