University of Malawi challenges Strathmore

One of the delights in watching the Celtel Africa Challenge is seeing an underdog like the University of Malawi beat an overconfident opponent like Kenya’s Strathmore University.
Malawi had the game rule that has the university with fewer points go first in each subsequent round of play.

Come the Ultimate Challenge, a speed round in which 10 questions worth 50 points each are played in under 60 seconds, and Malawi was in on the kill.

Clever choice of category (they went for United Nations over Sixth Letter-Six Letters, Abbreviations and Geometry “C” Words) earned Malawi an additional 450 points onto their 250-point third round tally. That gave them 700 points. Malawi only failed to name “Group of 77” as the collective term for the UN’s least developed countries.

Strathmore could have bettered their 260-point third round score had they racked up as many points as Malawi in the Ultimate Challenge.

Lady luck was not on their side though and they threw the game away after managing only six correct answers in the “Abbreviations” category. After racking up only an additional 300 points in this round, Strathmore made a quarterfinal exit with 560 points. One cannot berate them much for not knowing that the web acronym URL means “Uniform Resource Locator”, BBL is “Barrel”, AU is “Astronomical Unit” and GPS is “Global Positioning System.”

For the most part of the earlier three rounds of play, Strathmore was on top of the game stealing buzzer moments from Malawi but they failed to bring on that aggressive streak other Kenyan teams have employed to create sizeable point leads over competitors. Malawi, which had mostly medical students on its team managed to keep the point difference narrow mostly due to apt categories like “Bones and Teeth”.

No one expected them to fail to name “canines” as the teeth also known as “cuspids” that got their name because they are large in dogs. Our own Nkumba University plays Tanzania’s Sokoine University for the last semi-final place this Sunday on UBC TV at 7.30p.m.