Fantasy Football has descended upon Oxford. On the face of it, any football fan should relish the prospect of picking himself or herself in a fantasy football team, and, despite amounting to about twenty seconds of Wayne Rooney’s pay packet, the top prize of £150 is extremely exciting. If nothing else, as with real fantasy football, this could just prove to be a handy way to procrastinate next time you’re trapped in the Gladstone Link on a sad Thursday night. Regardless of what your motivations are for playing Oxford Fantasy Football, here are a few things to keep in mind in order to maximize your bragging rights next time you’re at the pub with your one or two mates who, like yourself, have nothing much better to do.

Have a ridiculous team name in mind. Cherwell Sport recommends classics like ‘All Souls Campbell’, ‘Corpus/Lineker’ and ‘St Peter Crouch FC’ – names that make an embarrassment of the huge potential for football and Oxford-related chat, but that’s exactly what you want.

One difference to the original Fantasy Premier League is that everyone starts on the same price, meaning some players are much better value than others. On one end of the spectrum, as an amateur footballer at best, I would have scored a remarkable -6 points in my only appearance as a stand-in goalkeeper last year; the eight goals I conceded against Worcester 2nds still haunt me to this day, finding it difficult to keep clean sheets on and off the pitch. Absurdly, I would be the same price as last year’s top goal scorer in the collegiate system, Matt Hill of St Hugh’s, who cuts a very different figure to his ‘real world’ footballing namesake, formerly of Wolves and Sheffield United. Hill’s 42 goals and 23 assists last year would have earned well over 200 points for anyone picking him in their XI and should be the first name on your team sheet this season.

Another particularity that novice game-players may miss is that some players will play far more games than others, allowing more opportunities to score points. Men’s and women’s Blues players can also play for their college team, providing multiple chances to pick up points and a good way of following the progress of the University teams. Pembroke’s Alex Tsaptsinos, who has started the 2015/16 season in especially impressive goal-scoring form for the Blues team, will be keen to avenge his college’s Cuppers Final defeat last season. Players who play in both the JCR leagues and Reserves leagues can also be a significant source of points. Regent’s Park’s Jonny Streatfeild and Julius Lehmann also ply their trade for LMH first team and can rack up a lot of points from more defensive positions. Therefore, those who don’t know the ins and outs of college football may find it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Finally, a message to the silly fresher who decides to shoot rather than square it to his mate with an open goal in order to score more points for his own fantasy team. Your captain will bench you and the drinks will be on you in the college bar that evening. You have been warned.  

This week sees the start of one of Oxford’s greatest sporting traditions: college football. Week in, week out, teams of the good, the bad and the just plain awful slog it out in sodden pitches all over the city. For some, an opportunity for sporting immortality, for others just another way to procrastinate, college football will always retain its central role in University life.

Up in the rarefied air of the JCR Premier Division, traditional powerhouses Worcester and Catz vie once again for the title. The league promises to be as competitive as ever, as newcomers Hugh’s and Lincoln attempt to draw on the momentum of a successful qualifying campaign to establish themselves amongst the elite of men’s college football.

Though Wadham’s survival in the league went down to the wire last season, and was due to a fantastic run of form in the final set of games, new captain Ben Williams is “optimistic” about continuing the 20-year tradition of Wadham being part of the Premier Division despite the loss of key personnel. The influx of freshers, with many eager to sign up, has “unearthed a few gems,” whilst a strong performance in a preseason friendly with Pembroke “gives us a strong platform to build on.” The squad, according to Williams, is “fit, ready and fresh” to face Keble 1sts in the opening game of the season.

The struggle to replace old icons and replace new talent is the toughest thing for Michaelmas football. In Division 1, Exeter captain George Bustin rallies against those “naysayers” who would suggest they are a “team in decline,” though he admits that of the eleven that started the 2014 Cuppers final, only two remain. After finishing last season with one win out of nine, Bustin is looking forward to using the new season to inject some energy into a revamped squad and targets this year as a “break-through season”, with the continued talents of Harry Morgan in midfield.

Division newcomers Pembroke also have a good feeling for this year, with captain Laurence Wroe spurred on by last year’s Cuppers final defeat to aim for a rare double. Promising international talent in Australian Jason Ghaly and Spaniard Karl Frey should go some way to filling the void of the departing Blues winger/full-back Richard Lloyd and the aggressive defensive talents of Jesse Schwimmer. Indeed, Wroe admits that an abundance of University talent, including Blues captain Alex Tsaptsinos and Centaurs captain Joe Fowles, can sometimes be a drawback as ‘burnout’ and a busy schedule increase injuries and fatigue.

Division 2 promises to be just as competitive. Merton/Mansfield and Brasenose are still smarting from last year’s relegation, and with hopefully a newly solidified defence (they shipped 42 goals last season) Brasenose could rapidly be back in Division 1.

Freshly promoted Hilda’s and Peter’s, neck-and-neck throughout last season, look to continue their rivalry and solidify their place.

Traditional Division 2 stalwarts Jesus are looking to “challenge for promotion this year,” according to captain Omar Mohsen, with a team composed of promising freshers and seasoned players. They are expecting a “strong fight for the title” by fellow team in the ascendancy Magdalen, who raised a few eyebrows and not a few yellow cards with their physicality last season. Nick Cooke looks to be an early tip for player of the season, moving in to a more traditional central striker role, having been team top scorer last season marauding opposition defences from the wing.

Though the quality of the football may decrease, the enthusiasm for the game certainly does not. Down in the depths of Division 3, many teams’ best-laid plans and careful tactics disintegrate quickly into an exercise in damage limitation. No one understands this better than Hertford captain Sam Broadey. Though admitting he was “nervous” this year after losing four of his top scorers to graduation and the real world, “We were optimistic after thirty freshers signed up, with eight interested in University trials.”

Such enthusiasm translated itself into a particularly enthusiastic first bop the night before a friendly with Peter’s, which in turn resulted in Broadey giving his second half team talk at 3-1 down over the sound of vomiting players. However, inspired by the freshers rising to the occasion and an opportunistic goal apiece to make it 4-2, Hertford enjoyed a remarkable turnaround. With spectators on the edge of the pitch cheering, by the end of regulation time goals by Broadey and ‘Scottish powerhouse’ Matt Edwards had levelled the scores. With one minute remaining, a scintillating run by centre back Joe Day saw him sweep the ball into the box, where Ossian O’Sullivan slotted him from the penalty spot. Hertford’s remarkable turnaround “couldn’t have been done” without the new players, says captain Broadey, as he heaps praise on the freshers Witt, Esosa, Rabinowitz, Ahmad and Joshi.

Inter-collegiate football is the beating heart of University sporting life. It may not be pretty, it may not be skilful, but there is something very real and vital about freshers, grad students and everybody in between playing together. 

Swish, flies the arrow of the 2015/16 College darts season – squarely into the triple 20. Riding the beer-swilling wave of excitement of the Trinity 2015 Cuppers tournament, this year’s league sees the return of 22 veteran teams and the arrival of Christ Church into the four divisions.

Hertford I, the team of the moment, will be looking to follow up a slew of successes in Cuppers with a strong start in the top division. The team packs a weighty Blues punch in the form of barman duo Jamie Tong and Jack Shirley, each trailing achievements across all forms of the game from recent years. With a traditionally cohesive team spirit, they pose a serious threat to 2013/2014 champions Wadham I, who have suffered from a series of high-profile graduations in the last two seasons. Despite retaining Blues Captain Scott England and veteran thrower Jonathan Stanhope, they have been consistently pipped in deciding legs by Hertford in recent history. A sizeable and skilled fresher uptake will be essential to their hopes of returning to the top.

Ever present and eternally menacing, Worcester I, despite a distinct dearth of silverware in the recent past, will remain a threat to the top teams. Boasting recent Blue Matt Boughen and a host of returning college stalwarts, they will look both to spoil Hertford’s and Wadham’s parties, and to curb any rise up the ranks from increasingly sharp-looking sides from Linacre and Catz.

The second and third divisions are home to several other college first and second sides, as well as two women’s teams from Wadham and Worcester. Whilst regularity and turnout for these divisions has in the past been patchy, the recent openness of the top league is surely an invitation for sides in the lower leagues to confound the record books.

A stage witnessing some of the most dramatic arrows of last season was the lone division of fours. A contest that saw OULS snatch victory from Mansfield by 71 points to 73 spawned some real danger-players in Trinity cuppers. Librarians by day, wizards of tungsten by night, Matthew Roper and Gavin Robinson led the University Library Services to their league title before occasioning dramatic upsets in the cup, felling Blues favourites in both the singles and pairs formats. It will be with great confidence that they lead the only non-college-affiliated team into flighty battle this term.

Outside the college world, the Blues team also enter this year braced for further drama and success. After victory at the National Championships in 2014, Oxford came into last summer’s tournament with courage and a steely mettle, yet also with an acute awareness of the desirous eyes of the northern universities that met them as they entered the Nottingham Trent SU. Superb consistency saw them chassé through the group stages. In spite of momentary concerns, the team sunk their quarter- and semi-final opponents to reach a second final in as many years.

In what became a pantomime performance, the outed teams, cheering and heckling from the Trent mezzanine, clearly positioned Oxford as the heroes and a bolshie Lancaster side as their villains.

Yet as the game reached its deciding match, in turn its deciding set, and tortuously a deciding leg, there was no happy ending for OUDC, as anchorman and crowd favourite Jonathan Stanhope succumbed in the final throws of the tournament. Incredible scenes, for sure, but a distinctly quiet night in a Nottingham hostel to follow for the team.

Nevertheless, with seven returning Blues from last year’s side, there is an air of renaissance amidst the now-experienced squad and its seasoned supporters; the standard exhibited by the team throughout the travails of Trinity Cuppers speaks volumes, foreshadowing greater triumphs to come in the 2015/16 season.

Whilst the lack of other-than-wrist exercise and preference for lager over Lucozade sees darts much maligned in the sporting world, it is a growing art in Oxford. With more teams than ever before, the leagues offer a great vehicle for visiting new colleges and their bars.

After a failed bid to introduce darts as an Olympic discipline at the Rio and Tokyo games, our sport must wait until at least 2024 for its turn on the biggest of stages, and for its own Olympic stadium.

But with an incipient Cambridge side beginning to appear on the horizon, there is renewed hope of finally securing Blues status for the underdog Varsity fixture. As the sport continues to throw its flights out across the town and see them settle on new teams and arrowsmiths, the cellars of Oxford’s college bars, the floor beneath its oches and the bristle of its double 20s have never looked so under threat.

If you would like to field a college team or express interest in playing for the University side, it is not too late. Please email [email protected] for more information.  

At the end of my first year, I was offered the captaincy of our college second football team. The team had gone all season without losing a game, won the cup and finished with a +47 goal difference.

I certainly didn’t win the captaincy because of my footballing ability; I suspect I got given it because I was punctual, relatively enthusiastic and I had bought the previous captain a few pints in the bar over the year. I didn’t even make the starting eleven in the cup final, instead putting in a stellar performance as linesman. Still, everything was looking good and I could already hear myself describing myself as “captain of a cup-winning football side.” Perfect.

Except, I had forgotten that all of the team’s best players were about to graduate. No bother, we had a few more decent players – we’d be fine, I thought. Except I had forgotten that all of our mediocre players would then get poached by our 1st team, whose ranks had also been thinned by the sands of time. Still, we’d have new freshers, some of whom would probably be good footballers – we’d be fine, I thought.

Fast forward a few months, and I’m stood by the side of the pitch after my first game as captain, wondering how we had managed to lose 8-0. I wasn’t even sure we’d let in that many goals in the entirety of last season. As I had hoped, a big group of freshers had come along but unfortunately after our pathetic first performance most of them didn’t come back. I imagine they decided they had better things to do on a Friday afternoon than watch some smarmy tosser with an infuriatingly good left foot score his fifth goal past our beleaguered keeper to the sound of me shouting, “Come on lads, we’re still in this”.

Fast forward a few more months, and our team is nearing the end of the season having not won a game and disastrously crashed out of the cup 6-0 in the first round. We had managed to score five goals, but had unfortunately conceded 35. We’d have conceded more but we were lucky enough to have a few games cancelled because if there’s even a slight chance of a bit of light drizzle, our groundsman won’t let us play. Arguably the worst part of being captain was trying to make sure everyone got a game – even the shit ones. I’d end up subbing myself off to let someone else attempt the futile task of keeping the goal tally below three. That, or I’d end up playing in goal because no-one else wanted to. “Keep it up boys, we’re playing good football”. We were bollocks. It’s just what people say, isn’t it?

By some miracle, we managed to scrape a 2-1 victory in the last game of the season. By then, though, it was too late. A whole year of guilt-tripping my friends into playing, of negotiating with stubborn groundsmen, of washing the kit because I felt too bad asking freshers to do it, and for what?

We were relegated, we went out in the first round of the cup, and our goal difference was -31. I somehow only spent an average of 45 minutes on the field per game, despite the fact that I was the one picking the team. I was depleted and couldn’t wait to palm it off to an unsuspecting fresher.

Still, would I do it again?

Obviously. 

ESPN’s annual #NBArank project, which counts down the NBA’s top players for the upcoming season, was released last week. Kobe Bryant, the man who has argu­ably been the face of NBA basketball over the course of the last 16 years, was ranked as the 93rd best player out of a possible 400.

For diehard Bryant and Lakers fans, this was a hard one to swallow. Bryant himself obviously was not happy, claiming that the rankings were “silly” and thus continuing the ongoing animosity between himself and the ESPN reporters whom he called “a bunch of idiots” last year after being ranked 40th. To a degree, he has a point – the rankings are en­tirely based on the opinions of 100 reporters, and have notoriously been controversial ev­ery year. Yet the sad reality is that, as someone who is fast approaching the end of a legend­ary career, Kobe Bryant cannot and should not be viewed as an elite, high-performing basketball player any more.

First of all, in order to be one, you actu­ally have to play on a regular basis. In the last two injury-plagued seasons, Bryant only managed to play in 41 out of a possible 164 games. For someone who’s played almost 20 years of professional basketball, this should perhaps be expected, but it should not be disregarded when estimating what Bryant can actually contribute this year. The same principle ap­plies to stars such as Derrick Rose and Dwayne Wade, who have both also dealt with nagging injuries in recent years, but the dif­ference is that Bryant is now 37, preparing to play what he himself has acknowl­edged to be his swan-song season.

Because of age and injuries, Bryant’s once superhuman abilities have deteriorated. Last season, before going down with a severe shoulder injury, Bryant averaged a respectable 22.3 points per game but shot at a rate of 37.3 per cent, well below the league average. This resulted in him only being in the 30th per­centile in player efficiency. Sure, he’s playing on a really bad team plagued by inexperience, unjustified swagger (Google Nick Young) and hilariously-outdated coaching – anyone who still believes that basketball games can be won without three-point shooting, like head coach Byron Scott, counts as a bad coach and needs to be rescued from the 70s. But this is where Bryant’s own legacy haunts him, as he’s shown that he can dominate games on bad teams before – the man averaged just over 35 points a game on a team that started notori­ous scrubs and consequent folklore heroes Kwame Brown and Smush Parker.

This isn’t to say that he can and should do better, given that he is roughly ten years past his peak, as any 37-year-old basketball player would be. But it is an indication that Bryant just can’t do it anymore, which makes this next season all the more daunting for any fan of the NBA. Regardless of whether you’re an admirer or a hater, Kobe Bryant deserves the respect of being the top-ten player in NBA history that he is, and to watch him score eighteen or so meaningless points per game, whilst being evidently frustrated by the lack of success that has defined his last years in the league, will be disappoint­ing.

Bryant chose to take the 93rd rank­ing as an insult. Per­haps he would be better off seeing it as a wake-up call.