Results time. I don’t mean the lopsided result of that contest which many of you (my readers) are so damn pleased about; I mean the result of the normblog Ashes comp. Five entrants got the 3-1 scoreline right. They are:
DEEAE (M.E.)
EADEE (B.M.)
EEADE (A.T.)
EDAEE (N.W.)
EADEE (R.W.)
The first tie-breaker was to be the sequence of match outcomes, but none of the five has it correct, as you can see:
DEAEE
The second and third tie-breakers – respectively, the batsman with the top batting average for the series, and the bowler who took the most wickets – also doesn’t help since these were Alistair Cook and Jimmy Anderson, and none of the five 3-1ers predicted either. Using my unlimited powers as competition organizer to find a way out of this impasse, I resolve as follows: three of these guys – M.E., A.T., and N.W. – had three of the match results correct, such that if you swap the places of the two results they got wrong it yields the correct sequence. For B.M. and R.W. you’d need to do more messing than this.
I therefore declare Martin Edmondson, Andrew Tattersall and Nicholas Waller joint winners. Congratulations and a £15 book token to each of them.