UTD Unscripted: The quiz master’s tale

I travelled all over the world with the team. I was in the hotels with them and it would tend to be the case that we’d always have a quiz to pass the time. Wherever we were, they’d have a good day’s training, come back to the hotel for their dinner and then we’d have a quiz for up to an hour. They’d have up to a minute to answer a question, which I’d time, and then if the team being asked got it wrong, the other team would have 30 seconds to answer.

It’s just a quiz, isn’t it? Just a bit of fun, right? No chance. It made me so nervous at the time, it really wasn’t enjoyable. You’ve got Alex on one side, Roy on the other and you couldn’t have two more competitive people in everything. Once you got into it, it was fine and the banter afterwards was great. Denis Irwin, for example, still mentions them to me when I see him these days. It was a serious business though, at the time. It got to the stage when I was in Waterstones every week buying new quiz books. Honestly, I’ve still got stacks of them in my garage. I would spend hour after hour poring through these books, trying to find the right types of questions because I knew that some would be impossible for everybody.

That was one of the biggest controversies, finding the right questions. It’s a tricky balance, finding ones that everybody has a chance of knowing, rather than just settling on harder ones. That would have suited the manager’s team because, much to the players’ annoyance, they had the then-club doctor, Mike Stone, who is very clever. The gaffer’s obviously no fool either, he’s a clever guy.

There were some sharp ones on the players’ side too. Roy, of course. Gary Neville is bright too. Phil Neville was really into them as well and so was Nicky Butt. The Class of ’92 loved the quizzes, apart from Scholesy, who was mainly there to heckle and give you stick with his dry sense of humour.