Much, if not all of the intrigue lay in the contest within the contest.
"This spell to Collingwood is reminding me of an innnings of Atherton's," says Paul Frame, "not Jo'burg but that evening at Trent Bridge when it was clear that here lay the match, whoever won that contest would clinch the game.
The central drama lies in the contest of wills between Sage, the most defiant of the orphans, and the cruel but (we are led to believe) essentially virtuous Conner, who may be brutal but is trying to keep the kingdom from civil war, fomented by Lord Santhias Veldergreth.
Somewhere in the liminal static of my click lies the world of competitive-eating contests, which have in fact appeared on both channels and which now have their own ruminant — in both senses of the word — Runyons, with surnames that sound like pasta (Jason Fagone) and Hungarian pastry (Ryan Nerz).
Although victory has tilted the political balance towards reformists in the short term, Raisi secured a face-saving vote tally high enough to mean that he is not finished politically, and lying ahead is the contest over who will be the new supreme leader.
When it came to Scotland's medieval history, the contest lay between Wallace and Robert the Bruce, in which Wallace emerged as a kind of proto-socialist compared with his aristocratic and treacherous successor – "nothing but a French baron", as my father always said.
13 But the chief trouble in the contest lay with the Lusitanians and the Numantines, and not without reason; for they were the only Spanish tribe that possessed leaders.
"From here it starts getting hysterical". The location of Peg Leg's lost claim is the subject of many of the lies told at the contest.
But the nub of the ideological and fiscal contest lay in the Continent's traditional driving axis between Berlin and Paris, with Mr. Hollande promising to rewrite the austerity-driven pact struck between Mr. Sarkozy and Ms. Merkel.
It's sometimes easy to forget that beneath the costumes, the theatrics and the tactical voting, lies a talent contest.
