Quickfire double keeps Cardiff unbeaten run going.

1 Response to Quickfire double keeps Cardiff unbeaten run going.

1. Dai Woosnam says:

   January 26, 2025 at 5:51 pm

   How Paul I appreciated you zeroing-in on Paul Warne’s post-match press conference. I too was mightily impressed.

   I am too rushed right now to google* it, but someone once said he could listen to a Brit speak for just two minutes and be able to accurately guess what town he came from… indeed, I rather fancy he boasted he could guess what ‘block’ of the town…!! (Was it Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady… maybe… but who it was does not matter.)

   I mention it because my old job in the Wine Trade took me all over Great Britain from Truro to Thurso, and my party piece in my long retirement has been trying to guess the county of origin of total strangers I may meet in hotels, etc… I am usually moderately successful in my guesses, with the proviso that the person did not go to public school or have a peripatetic childhood.

   Now I knew nothing of Paul Warne’s background – sure I had seen a few 20 second interviews down the years, but not long enough to apply my guessing game to him – and so, before consulting Wikipedia, I thought I would listen hard to this…

   I invite the MAYA fraternity to do the same – even if you do know his bio details – because like Paul says, he comes across so well.

   If City go down this season, Omer will surely be shown the door, and I fancy even if Derby survive, Mr Warne will be shown the door from a hugely ambitious club who will have concluded by the start of next August that he is a manager who specialises in getting teams up from Division One… and not up from the Championship.

   Having listened, I suggest that we can do a lot worse than hire his services if the circumstances are as outlined. And it will be so pleasing to us supporters to have a chap with such patent decency in charge… not, in fairness, that I have any misgivings re Omer on that count.

   Anyway, enough of me rabitting on. Please folks enjoy your linguistic test…

   https://tinyurl.com/yuwrvtsx

   Now SPOILER ALERT: do not read on, if you have not yet viewed that 9 minute lesson in logic…

   Initially, I was struggling. Oh for sure it was not RP he was coming out with, and what trace of his origins still there in his delivery manifestly was not Scottish, Welsh, West Midlands, West Country, cockney nor north of a line from The Humber to the Mersey.

   But halfway through I was no closer than that. Could it be rural Oxfordshire, Northants, Leicestershire? Maybe… but I would not bet on it. South Lincolnshire? No. What about Cambridgeshire? Ah, I felt I was getting warmer.

   I remembered the Soham accent of Nick Pope, who as a boy was in the same class in junior school, as the two little angels in Man Utd shirts who were murdered by a monster.

   I thought I had cracked it, and Cambridgeshire was my final guess. But I was wrong. It turned out that Mr Warne came from the adjoining county of Norfolk… grew up in Norwich and supported The Canaries as a boy.

   Sure, he does not have the spectacularly unadulterated accent of a Chris Sutton… but playing it back a second time I could hear ‘Norfolk’ ringing through almost his every sentence.

   (And even if I had not, the clue came in his surprising interest in the result at Carrow Road, which he masked as a comment on the South Wales rivalry, but is now clear to me that he wanted to know how many goals his boyhood team had netted that lunchtime.)

   *deliberate lower case as in ‘hoovering the carpets’…

   TTFN,
   Dai.