Presenting an in-depth look at the day’s big football games means you’ve heard a lot about tactics and thinking your way out of a tight corner.
But does that put you in a premier league of solving fiendishly tricky puzzles?
BBC Bitesize challenged Match of the Day’s Mark Chapman to take on a head-scratching half-dozen of brainteasers which tested his powers of logic and deduction. As well as finding mirror images of complex shapes, completing sequences of symbols and cracking a password code, Mark also had to face the prospect of getting a lower final score than the BBC News presenters who took on a similar challenge.
You can take the challenge yourself and also watch to see if Mark Chapman emerges as Champ-man.
Mark Chapman: If it doesn't go well, does it just go nowhere?
Choose the shape that would come 16th in the above pattern. Circle, star, star, hexagon, circle, star. So that presumably would be… That has to be… it has to be star. A: star. What? Oh, my God, I didn't count up to 16, did I? Oh my word. Oh my word. Right. Come on. It's like going a goal down early.
Which of these is the mirror image of the shape above? You told me when you booked me for this that it would play to my strengths. Can't be D, can't be B, has to be C. Thank God for that!
Which button should replace the question mark? So one plus one equals two. Then one plus two equals three. So two plus three equals five. And then five and three should equal the eight. So let me find the one with the five dots. So I think that has to be button B. Yes, yes. Right. 2-1 up now.
Can you find the correct password? I've got to do a show after doing this as well and I think my head's going to be mashed. Right, so first of all let's see which of these have got nine letters. You know the password contains the letter 'O' but it's not in the second position. Right, so that's not Toy Story and not The Lion King. So if I'm following that exact question and how it's written, and I have argued back on quiz shows before, then I think that it should be The Hobbit. Yes! Sophie Raworth did this a lot quicker, didn't she? Yeah, that's the difference between News and Sport.
Who's the puzzle expert? You are. You should be should be proud of yourself. But annoyingly, I'm really, really annoyed at myself for the first one, because do you know what I didn't do? I didn't read the question. Ahhh! Is that better than Sophie Raworth?
From off: Yes.
Mark cheers!
This article was published in March 2025
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