Saturday, April 26, 2025
Blog Page 1624

Review: Cantina

Finola Austin
-
0
Review: Cantina

An impossibly bendy acrobat balances one-handed on a bar stool over broken glass; a blindfolded man spirals, suspended only by the neck, over the hushed audience; a woman in five inch stilettos walks a tight rope and later climbs over a man’s naked torso. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Cantina.

In a circus tent just a few yards from London’s busy Southbank, the atmosphere is strangely quiet: the audience are unsure whether to clap, everyone is holding their breath. This isn’t circus for the family – it’s masochistic and fetishistic, at times humorous, but always dark. Light relief comes in the form a brief skit involving male full-frontal nudity. 

At just over an hour long, there is never any danger of the show becoming boring or repetitive – although the slight impression of a narrative suggests a pre-emptive strategy for avoiding this. Instead, I could feel myself becoming slightly blasé at the superhuman feats of the performers, always expecting something bigger, stranger, crueller as the performance continued. Perhaps this was part of the point.

Some acts were more successful than others and because of my view, I preferred the aerial sequences. Occasionally the soundtrack jarred but my reservations were minor and I can see why audiences will keep flocking in. Not only is Cantina engaging and polished, it is also incredibly fashionable, with its low-key 1920s aesthetic and self-conscious theatricality.

For me, the production combined the spectacle of circus with the intimacy of a small cast drama. The athleticism on show matches that we’ve seen in Stratford all summer, but, in this case, I’d hesitate to recommend trying this at home.

FOUR STARS

Cantina will be performed at the Southbank Centre until 30th September. Tickets start at £25. 

Review: The Thick of It – Series 4

Lizzie Greene
-
0
Review: The Thick of It – Series 4

At long last we’re back in the thick of it. We left the besieged cast at the close of series 3, heading to the hustings in what was evidently a failed attempt to pack an overnight bag and stay in government. Since then Ianucci and co. have been busy conquering America with his witty, wince-inducing take on American politics, Veep, and it’s certainly been a duller three years without him. 

The cast have been as busy as their creators in this lengthy interim and it’s all change at Dosac as series 4 begins: art has imitated life and the word of the day is coalition. Hapless minister Nicola Murray is out and Peter Mannion, her beleaguered shadow from series 3, is now steering the ship – still flanked by the ever-ambitious Emma and the fantasy-fixated, floppy-haired and sublimely ineffective Phil. He doesn’t seem any more cheerful for this elevation, which may have something to do with sharing his authority, office space and ministerial wheels with thrusting junior minister Fergus and his spad Adam, the lib dem part of this failing marriage (affectionately dubbed ‘the inbetweeners’ by their Tory counterparts.)  

Though the former opposition have been moved out of their shadow roles and into the limelight, there are still some familiar faces haunting the halls of Dosac: smug director of comms Terri, played by the excellent Joanna Scanlan, is still reluctantly hanging on in there, dogging Mr Man-yum’s every footstep. Meanwhile James Smith’s long suffering Glen Cullen has jumped from a sinking ship, only to find himself just as unappreciated and disillusioned with his new lib dem buddies. Having thought he was signing up to ‘a party with principles’, Glen is exasperated to find they have promptly thrown them away to join forces with the ‘upper class-holes I worked my whole life to keep out.’  

Vincent Franklin also returns as Malcolm’s touchy-feely former nemesis, Stuart ‘knowledge is porridge’ Pearson: the chai-drinking, blue sky-thinking, Tory Spin-Doctor who’s dishing out his rhyming pearls of wisdom in overdrive, greeting the gang with tales of his meeting ‘this am with the pm’ and departing with a jovial ‘laters legislators’.  Though the players have changed, the game remains largely the same: minister screws up apparently simple task and PR pro attempts to minimise the fallout. In this instalment, Mannion (who we’re told can’t even right-click a mouse) is forced, as the coalition’s ‘front man’, to launch the new ‘silicon playgrounds’ initiative his lib dem partners have come up with. Inevitably, it all goes horribly, cringingly wrong.  

Despite this tried and tested territory, the episode as a whole feels slightly off the pace that we’re used to. It’s not that the killer lines aren’t there – Mannion claims the best ones, moaning about protesters’ ‘tent-based twattery’ and the futility of addressing school children (‘They’re volatile and stupid and haven’t got the f***ing vote. Might as well be talking to geese’). They just don’t arrive quite as thick and fast as we’ve come to expect. There was the minister-made-mess but no tense build to the arrival of the Tucker tornado. This episode also seems slightly overpopulated and the new characters are yet to make much of an impression: Fergus and Adam haven’t brought much to the table and at this point seem pretty much interchangeable.  

Nevertheless, in Capaldi’s absence, the brilliant Roger Allam as Peter Mannion MP shows himself well up to the task of carrying the episode and his dour, depressive shrugging makes a nice contrast to Nicola’s panicky wheeling about the offices. Despite not being the best episode of the lot, this is a solid start to the series and paints a strong picture of the trials and tribulations of coalition politics, from which Iannucci will doubtless be milking much comedy gold over the coming episodes. Next week the fantastic Rebecca Front returns as Nicola Murray, along with Chris Addison’s quick witted Ollie – the special advisor everyone loves to hate – and it’s sure to pick up the pace from here. Not to mention Mr Tucker himself. He’s now in opposition, and he’s not going to be happy about it. Which can only be a good thing. 

Running for President? It’s the same everywhere…

Izzy Westbury
-
0
Running for President? It’s the same everywhere…

There may be a bit more at stake, but the differences between student politics and the competition for the most powerful job on earth aren’t as big as you might think. 

The discipline, the procedure, the polished rhetoric – it was all on show at the Democrat National Convention last week. When it comes to strategy, these chaps have hit the nail right on the head. How can I tell? Because I’ve been there before.

Any successful, or aspiring, campaign follows a simple model – and it applies to all campaigns, no matter what the scale. In fact, it would seem that running for President of the United States of America is just like running for the Oxford Union, complete with slate meetings (well, a convention); albeit on a slightly larger scale. It’s all in the strategy:

To start, we’ve got Michelle Obama, the nation’s sweetheart, put in place to open the convention – and she hits the ground running. In Union terms she’d be the Secretary. The most junior of the big-guns; she’s the one all the foot-soldiers (for the Union, read ‘seccies’) come to for a heart-to-heart. She’s charming, she’s endearing, she’s self-deprecating, and above all she can relate to the individual – to the worn campaigner seeking the energy to carry on the fight, to the deprived student aspiring to better things – she was there once and, well, look at her now, and in that dress! Don’t we all want to be her? Here we’ve got empathy combined with all the characteristics of that simple but sweet girl-next-door. That’s it, lure them in…

… and then BANG – time for the heavy artillery. Step up Bill Clinton: the old hand, the ex-Pres still with a foot in the door. Still at Oxford catching up on the final year of a misplaced degree once long forgotten, the election is a welcome distraction from otherwise mundane studies and a chance to reignite past glories. He doesn’t need to be elected – so he can throw as much dirt as he likes at the other side. The ex-Pres is at liberty to say what he likes – to paint the opposition as the villains, to spell out the unfavourable comparisons. He’s got the authority, the experience, and can tell it exactly how it is, and that’s all it takes to make what he says true. By the end of his speech the entire slate has really rallied around him, you can almost feel the blood pumping.

Next we’ve got Joe Biden. In the Union, he’d be the Treasurer. The old-faithful. He came out second best to the current Pres and hasn’t quite made it. There’s still time, and one day he may reach the top, but for now is happy to play second fiddle to the big man himself. No negatives, lacking a bit of the charisma shown by the ones at the top, but savvy nonetheless and enjoying the limelight while it’s still there.

Finally, come in Barack Obama – the President. He’s got the ideals, and the oratory to go with it. He knows exactly what he’s going to say and how he’s going to say it. Most in the slate are so in awe that any mistakes that are made go unnoticed; forgiven because he simply is so great. The confidence is oozing, he’s got a smile to charm any hardened spinster and that cheeky wink is in place, just to reassure you that there’s a human side to him too.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Democrats: they’ve got the floor plan, they’ve built the foundations, but, and it’s still a big but, it remains ito be seen whether they can successfully build their house.

You see, the problem is, that no matter how sincere, how truthful and how passionate Obama and his team may appear, it might not be enough. The convention was slick, it was professional, and it got the message across. However, the problem is that all the convention really did was reinforce votes already won – anyone there was going to vote Democrat anyway. The task now is to win over the rest – the ones not at the convention and those who didn’t even know it was happening – the majority of the American electorate. Unfortunately for the Democrats, the hate directed towards Obama, spouted by more than a few members of the Republican party, is a much stronger emotion than any of hope, of aspiration or of any passion for change. To overcome that hurdle, Obama needs a new strategy altogether, one which we’ll see unfold in the weeks to come – and who knows, maybe he could do worse than revisiting the tactics used in his Harvard days…

Internship blog: news agencies

Sophie Jamieson
-
0
Internship blog: news agencies

‘Let me tell you – the girl who sat at that desk before you, she really was great.’

Hardly the most heartening words to hear on your first day. My search for some ‘hands-on’ journalistic experience had brought me to the offices of a small news agency, where instead of being thrown out into the field, I was somewhat relieved to find myself plonked on the office-bound features desk for the first couple of days.

My predecessor, it transpired, had gone on to blag a coveted job at Take a Break magazine, and left in her wake a raft of high expectations, which I was only too ready to disappoint. My boss was a friendly yet formidable man, who prided himself on his ample Fleet Street experience. As head of the agency’s features arm, his role is essentially that of a middle man, liaising with tabloids and ‘real life’ magazines on behalf of people wanting to sell their stories.

The other responsibility of the features desk was attempting to find people to meet the briefs for various newspaper or magazine features, which earned the agency an easy 50 quid a time. Emails poured in, dozens a day: ‘seeking bold ladies to bare their bums for a fun and tasteful summer feature’ … ‘Do you know anyone who’s lost 20 dress sizes in one month?’ … ‘Were your mates banged up in last year’s riots?’ … and so on.

On the upside, this did help to solve the ever-puzzling question of how magazines source their bizarre features. On the downside, I was haunted by the spectre of my predecessor, who seemingly knew someone for every possible eventuality. I, in contrast, was left wishing I knew more lunatics, exhibitionists and criminals. But as became increasingly clear, this was the easy side of the job. I quickly realised that those magazines trading in scurrilous stories of treachery and intrigue, the type I only encounter once a year on a sun lounger in Majorca, are big business, and that a softly-softly approach isn’t always good enough to convince someone to sell the story of their tragic life.

That’s not, of course, to say that there’s any coercion involved – plenty of people freely turn down the enviable opportunity of appearing in Closer – but I had rather thought that the staff of these magazines would have it easy, with people throwing themselves before the editor, keen for a couple of grand in exchange for fifteen minutes on the phone discussing their ill-fated existences. Unfortunately, as with much of life, it’s a lot harder than it looks. Sourcing people with life stories, both dismal and uplifting, requires commitment, connections and an unrivalled ability to trawl through newspapers. A canny method I learnt was to seize upon the letters page, where an unsuspecting Daily Mail correspondant might inadvertently hint that they had a great story to tell. My job then was to use the wonderful resource that is the internet to track down potentially interesting characters and find out if they would be interested in making some easy money.

Here, as with the news side of the agency, I was constantly aware of being at the tough end of journalism. Every story had to be worth something for the agency to stay afloat and targets had to be met. When working on the wire, you may find the story you’ve spent all week covering isn’t picked up at all, and even if it is you’re unlikely to get a byline for it.

This was true of the first news task I was sent on, where a reporter and I spent a day at an employment tribunal (generally recognised as the most paltry of assignments), only for the write- up not even to make it into the local press. I was left with the impression that often the reporters’ sole purpose was to be a junior tabloid reporter’s dogsbody – if the Mirror wants to see the death certificate of some Z-list celebrity’s great aunt, but they can’t be bothered to send one of their own people to that part of the country, they would pay someone from the agency to do it.

This does, however, have its benefits. While newspaper hacks in London spend a great deal of time holed up in offices rehashing press releases and wire stories, working for an agency means actually getting out there and reporting. One of my highlights was being sent to court to watch high profile cases reach their climax, finding out what you could and could not report, then learning how to craft a short article out of a day’s worth of proceedings and a dense notebook of shorthand.

The same was true of my previous week, spent at a national news agency in London. Here, desks lay empty during the day, with all the reporters out on the scene. Sometimes expeditions would prove fruitless or tedious, as when we waited expectantly for Bob Diamond to arrive for his Treasury Committee appearance, only for him to go in through the back door, or the time when we waited hours for the ‘terror threat’ electronic cigarette blighted Megabus to arrive back in London. But at other points I couldn’t believe my good luck.

One assignment saw me meet Paula Radcliffe at a press junket, while another gave me a sneak preview of the new James Bond exhibition and a free breakfast. Even a trip to film rain-drenched tourists for a piece on the abysmal weather proved exponentially more interesting than being chained to a desk number-crunching, as I imagine a typical banking internship would entail. Sure, I wasn’t paid, but no one goes into journalism for the money, and I found out a lot about where the real work in reporting goes on.

What not to take to Oxford

Xin Fan
-
0
What not to take to Oxford

The second most important party occasion of the year after Michael Gove’s birthday is slowly emerging from the dregs of its hangover period. The UMS marks are safely cocooned in imitation-mahogany frames, the semi-awkward Facebook groups are joined and cursorily stalked, and all traces of AQA have been so thoroughly purged you’ve actually asked the local priest to do that sprinkly thing around your room with the holy water. Now it’s time to look tentatively ahead to the packing. (The what?)

Veterans with months of procrastination experience will presently take to student rags to peddle apparently exclusive wisdoms about fresherdom. Often this involves recycling racy dos and don’ts, ironically compiled as some form of perverse health-and-safety leaflet. The nationals will also have a go, occasionally leaving you wondering why they tried.

With all that info in one Google search, what do you actually need to bring? You may as well just shove everything in. Of course, there are some things you can’t argue with (underwear), whereas there are some things you can (twenty-eight pairs of shoes) and some things you really can (shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles). To help whittle down your mounting tick list, here is a small sample of things you might think twice about before putting in ahead of the toothbrush.

 

Bust of Pericles

Boris Johnson famously took one of these to Balliol with him. Presumably not the real deal, although you can never be sure where the line is for the guy. At the time of writing, you can actually eBay one – from that arcadia of classical antiquity, Australia – for a hundred and twenty sterling squids. This bearded Athenian might win you the heart of a hot Corpus classicist, but in all probability will make you look a little over-keen to the student lay folk. And he probably finds being sole audience to your fumbly liaisons rather embarrassing.

 

Your favourite large teddy

Evelyn Waugh based Aloysius bear on one his poet friend John Betjeman used to carry around with him at Oxford called Archibald. (Betjeman also had a stuffed elephant called Jumbo.) However, anyone who still considers Oxford to be a minor suburb of Brideshead might receive a few bemused frowns for towing their vintage Steiff toy around with them between lectures. At best a naff Anthony Andrews tribute act and at worst an indication that you are ineligible for procreation, stuffed animals in college are best kept small and room-bound.

 

Backpack of condoms

Life ≠ Love Actually. Move on.

 

‘The Easy Way to Stop Drinking’ by Allen Carr (available for £13.46 on Amazon Books)

I’m not saying don’t invest in a copy, but you’re trying not to waste precious pennies, right? Pennies that could be put to better use at the bottom of glasses. And yes, I know what you’re thinking: I thought it was Alan Carr too.

 

Livestock

The last thing you need after a hard night’s senseless gyration is to get up and find you need to physically move more than seven metres to procure milk. The solution seems obvious: bring a cow, what udder genius – free lactose 24/7? Well firstly, it isn’t pasteurised, bitch. Secondly, they must be fed on grass, by which I don’t mean marijuana; and I’m not inclined to put Trinity’s gardener out of a job. The only place where quadrupeds are legit for any sort of lawnmowing is Magdalen and I am unsure whether they will supplement your Shreddies.

 

Fifty Shades of Grey

Unless ‘the study of humiliation on the sexual consciousness’ is a part of your course (for arts degrees, this is sometimes not a joke), it’s just not feasible to slot in a cheeky bit of bondage in amongst your essay crises and lab reports. Time is one issue; reading it is another. Involuntarily imbibing mummy porn can only lead to vexing disorientation: mentally superimposing kinky cuffs on the guy opposite you in the lecture hall, or misinterpreting your tute partner as she laments an overdue essay (“he’ll punish me when I give it to him later”). So, leave the literary marvel at home and concentrate, as you should, on more sedate, academic tomes, like J. R. Clarke’s ‘Roman Sex, 100 BC-AD 250’ (Bodleian Library shelfmark UBHU M04.C05068).


A closed attitude

One of the more annoying things you can do is roll up to university and end up hanging about with all the rugger chaps you used to play against, or making shoulder chips, visas, Jack Wills bottoms, etc. a pre-requisite of your milieu. Wake up to the joyous possibilities of higher education. Everyone feels as awkward as you, so there’s nothing to lose. Chat to everyone you meet, even the funny-smelling ones. Uppity cliques are best left to American teen serials, and striking a good note with one of your many witnesses to several years of blunder means there’s at least one more person who’ll drag you out of the gutter at 2am.


Hopes of everlasting love

Despite how books and films unfold to your pleasure, it’s not a sound assumption that dreaming spires automatically come with complimentary damsels and princes. The whole notion is, statistically, somewhat possible, but making it known that you’re “looking for love” will draw in unexpected sorts of punters at blearier times of the day.

Immigration figures are incorrect, warn Oxford analysts

Robert Lee
-
0
Immigration figures are incorrect, warn Oxford analysts

Oxford University analysts have warned that the government’s latest immigration figures may be inaccurate by up to 35,000 people.

According to Dr Martin Ruhs, director of the University of Oxford’s migration observatory, COMPAS, any statistics based on last year’s net migration figure would be misleading due to the way in which they were calculated.

The Office of National Statistics (ONS) unveiled that last year 216,000 people entered the UK. However this figure was in fact a central estimate in a range from about 181,000 to 251,000 people. With high margins of error, the government’s claim of a drop in immigration by 36,000 migrants over 2010 has been described as “statistically insignificant” with the actual figure being lower or higher by anything up to 35,000 people.

In the wake of David Cameron and Teresa May’s wishes to reduce the net migration figure to just 100,000 people per year, these inaccuracies will doubtlessly raise concerns about statistics on immigration and the methods used to calculate them. “In simple terms, the Government could miss the “tens of thousands” target by many tens of thousands and still appear to have hit it,” Dr Ruhs said, “conversely the Government could hit, or even exceed its target and still appear to have missed it.” 

He added, “There is a constant desire among policy makers in all parties, the press and other interest groups in having ‘hard’ facts and specific numbers about migration, but the reality is that sometimes these are simply not available. The uncertainty around the official migration estimates means that the figures need to be used and interpreted with great care.”

These latest worries about monitoring migration may also have an impact on the current population debate that COMPAS has been following over the past few months. An e-petition to cap the UK population to not exceed 70 million has already garnered over 140,000 signatures with campaigners wishing the government to come down hard on immigration to achieve this. 

In July, Dr Scott Blinder, Senior Researcher at the Migration Observatory said, “We cannot base major policy decisions on a finger-in-the-air decision to aim for one round number or another. Policy needs to be based on evidence. At this stage there simply isn’t enough to even debate what is at stake.”

Concerns over the accuracy of immigration statistics can only reinforce COMPAS’s worries of both the consequences of trying to cap populations and the folly of trying to draw conclusions from vague estimates.

In a recent press release Dr Ruhs commented, “The uncertainty in the UK’s migration estimates also means that it is very difficult to assess how well the government is progressing toward its target of reducing net-migration to the ‘tens of thousands’, or to evaluate the effects of specific policy changes.”

Dossier discloses drunken behaviour of Oxbridge students

Joe Iles
-
0
Dossier discloses drunken behaviour of Oxbridge students

The behaviour of students at Oxford and Cambridge has once again come under media scrutiny following the release of information to The Daily Telegraph concerning college discipline over the past two years.

According to The Telegraph and the Daily Mail, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act by 15 different colleges chart the “appalling behaviour” of undergraduates and suggest that students at the institute constitute “some of the most depraved.”

Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge came under particular fire with 44 separate incidents of indiscipline since 2010. These included letting fireworks off at 4am, parading the boat club captain naked around Sainsbury’s and throwing food at each other at a local Indian restaurant.

Oxford’s Merton College also made headlines, after incidents of “alcohol-related bad behaviour” resulted in the Myrmidons, the college’s male-only dining society, being banned from holding their summer garden party.

The records stated that, “It apparently never occurred to students that there was something fundamentally wrong with their behaviour.”

The publication of the records has had mixed responses. Whilst The Daily Telegraph branded the reports evidence of widespread “student mayhem” amongst the academic elite, a spokesperson for Oxford commented, “Oxford and Cambridge between them account for tens of thousands of young people, so it’s not entirely surprising that incidents of stupid and inappropriate behaviour do come up. When they go too far, they face the consequences – which, because they are studying at world-famous universities, sometimes include getting in the paper.”

The universities have been quick to emphasise that the welfare of students is paramount, and that any incidents which could have an adverse effect on other students and on the wider community would be appropriately dealt with.

A spokesperson for Cambridge University commented, “All colleges have their students’ welfare and their safety as a key priority: any incidents of behaviour affecting others, whether in the college community or among the public, are taken very seriously. The colleges are pro-active in dealing with the problems of excessive drinking, working with health and public order professionals to make students drink- and safety-aware. Any incidents are dealt with and appropriate sanctions imposed.”

Students expressed the opinion that Oxbridge is often unfairly treated by the media, with second year English student Bethany Cox commenting, “If you work hard, you have to play hard, and in the majority of cases this is responsibly.” A Cambridge second year philosopher concurred, remarking, “the author of the Daily Mail article probably went to Durham.”

Colleges and their Movies

Nick Hilton
-
0
Colleges and their Movies

Ever wondered what movie your college would be represented by if a poorly informed writer, armed only with Wikipedia and vague stereotyoes, took a swipe at it? Well, look no further! Current students and curious freshers can get to the heart of Oxford’s college system with this Guide to Oxford Colleges as Represented by Spurious Movie Associations!

Balliol The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Not a comment on its politics, they’re both just, let’s say, really influential.

Brasenose Dr Strangelove (1964)

 A farce about what happens when you give stupid people a lot of power.

Christchurch Cruel Intentions (1999)

It’s all a bit too upper class and incestuous but damn does it look good.

Corpus Christi Daddy Day Care (2003)

Corpus is really small and I figured this was a safer way of illustrating that than going with circus freaks.

Exeter Mamma Mia! (2008)

Better location than it is a film.

Harris Manchester Freddy Got Fingered (2001)

Let’s face it; they’re both awful names.

Hertford The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

They both involve bridges, to a greater or lesser extent.

Jesus Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

According to Wikipedia, he’s their most famous alumnus. That is now everything I know about the college.

Keble Sleepy Hollow (1999)

 That neo-Gothic façade is straight out of the mind of Tim Burton.

Lady Margaret Hall Cast Away (2000)

It’s really far away.

Lincoln The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

Both involve a certain amount of ‘living rough’.

Magdalen Bambi (1942)

They both contain their fair share of deer and animal slaughter (disclaimer: the latter part is pure conjecture).

Mansfield Beneath the Darkness (2012)

It’s quite new but you still probably haven’t heard of it.

Merton Inception (2010)

It’s expensive and thinks it’s very clever. Also, they’re both big on zero gravity fights.

New The Squid and the Whale (2005)

The reason I hate misleading titles; you think you’re in for two hours of fish based fun and you get a sermonising treatise on divorce.

Oriel The Matrix (1999)

A while ago, it was considered really good. Now? Meh, not so much.

Pembroke Heaven’s Gate (1980)

Extraordinarily expensive and, if current figures are to be believed, not very good at all. My college loyalty only stretches so far.

Queen’s Cold Mountain (2003)

It’s got a beautiful location but, all things considered, this film’s kind of boring.

Somerville Calendar Girls (2003)

Harmless and big on the X chromosome, the comparison stops when the clothes come off.

St Anne’s  Lost in Translation (2003)

It might seem slightly obscure, but the St Anne’s Porter’s Lodge reminds me of the hotel from Lost in Translation.

St Catherine’s Tron (1982)

A weird vision of the future in which everything looks terrible.

Teddy Hall The Horse in Motion (1878)

The first film ever made which, coincidentally, probably wouldn’t do very well in the Norrington Table.

St Hilda’s Mosquito on the 10th Floor (1983)

Nope, I hadn’t heard of it either.

St Hugh’s Swiss Family Robinson (1960)

Kind of recycling my LMH joke here but I’m sure you get the picture.

St John’s Avatar(2009)

The most expensive movie ever made. Some might call it crass but you can’t dispute its ambition.

St Peter’s Friends (1971)

I know, I didn’t realise it was also a movie.

Trinity Casablanca (1942)

The ultimate movie about temptation. Happy to let you look, so long as you don’t even think about touching.

University College The Movies (1925)

If only all names were this obvious and self-explanatory.

Wadham Brokeback Mountain (2005)

I have a quota of crude stereotypes that I have to fill.

Worcester My Week With Marilyn (2011)

Emma Watson was in it for about 5 minutes.

Football’s statistics revolution?

Alex Hawkins-Hooker
-
0
Football’s statistics revolution?

If Manchester City’s Performance Analysis Department are right, then football’s big news in August had nothing to do with Robin Van Persie, will probably have no impact on the Premier League this season, and for once didn’t involve the exchange of millions of pounds.

Instead, it was the announcement on their own website of the launch of a new initiative, MCFC Analytics, and with it, the public release of all of last year’s Opta data for the entirety of the Premier League season. That means every touch of every player from every team in the course of the last season will be documented, categorised and put into one enormous spreadsheet that can be downloaded from the club’s website.

This wasn’t just a dream come true for the stats-minded football enthusiast: a rare chance to test that longstanding but somewhat controversial belief that Man United should have held on to Darron Gibson, or that Ramires is the best player in the league.

City are keen to instigate a lasting change in the way statistics are used in football, by making important data available to engage the ‘analytics community’ and emulate the success of amateur enthusiasts in the statistical revolution in American sports – in short to harness the ‘Moneyball’ effect.

Moneyball is the title of a book by Michael Lewis – turned into last year’s Brad-Pitt-starring film of the same name – documenting the success of the Oakland A’s statistically informed recruitment policy under general manager Billy Beane. This approach relied on the use of ‘sabermetrics’, a term coined by Bill James, the pioneer of statistical analysis in baseball, to designate ‘the search for objective knowledge about baseball’.

In James’ view, not only was such knowledge accessible, but it was also revolutionary, and would undermine traditional subjective measures of player and team value. And so it turned out. By making use of sabermetrics principles in his recruitment of players on a low budget, Beane (played by Brad Pitt in the film) oversaw a record-breaking run of 20 straight victories for the franchise.

By now the principles of ‘sabermetrics’ are well-established in the baseball world. As owner of the Boston Red Sox, current Liverpool owner John W. Henry was one of the first to embrace these principles at a big team, with remarkable success.

However, Henry’s attempts to apply Moneyball principles to football since FSG’s purchase of Liverpool have been almost entirely unsuccessful. Stewart Downing is the obvious example. When Liverpool signed him, Damien Comolli, then Liverpool’s Director of Football, a firm believer in statistical analysis, and, interestingly, an associate of Beane’s, said, ‘We look thoroughly into data before signing players, as well as statistics, and we really think we are getting a big, big asset throughout. Maybe his [Downing’s] talent has been undervalued in English football.’

Ironically his statistics in the Premier League last season are among the most commonly known (and gleefully recited) in the average football enthusiast’s armoury: 0 goals, 0 assists. No fan needs Opta’s full data set to tell them that.

According to the team behind MCFC Analytics, at least a part of the reason for the past failure of performance analysis in football has been the cost of procuring the necessary data: whereas baseball’s statistics revolution was based on the work of amateur hobbyists such as Bill James, and is still fuelled by a thriving community of bloggers and researchers making use of freely-available data; football statistics enthusiasts have had to make do with the paltry post-game statistics made publicly available. Thus it is with the hope of empowering a community of scientifically minded football fans that Manchester City have collaborated with Opta to reverse this situation.

Whether or not the launch of this initiative truly heralds a new era for the use of statistics remains to be seen, and no doubt those who will hasten to suggest that football’s relatively fluid nature makes it far less amenable to analysis than an inherently structured game like baseball have a point.

But that is not to say that numbers have no place at all in the beautiful game: perhaps Comolli and Liverpool were simply looking at the wrong stats, or the right stats in the wrong way; perhaps their analysis was just too unsophisticated. But the fact that such a high-profile misjudgement was possible suggests that there is in fact plenty more to come from the field of performance analysis. Indeed, in baseball, the greatest success of the ‘sabermetricians’ was to identify the ‘right’ stats, and it is something along these lines that the MCFC Analytics team hopes it may be able to achieve.

Fanatic for fantasy football

James Taylor
-
0
Fanatic for fantasy football

It’s inevitable. The Olympics are long over, you’re starting to run out of money and, with all the excitement of becoming a (college) parent, you’re becoming a bit college-sick and already kind of looking forward to the start of Michaelmas.

What better way to solve your end of summer blues though, a friend posts on your wall, than to join the fantasy football league he’s starting up. Why not, you think to yourself, after all, it is free and, secretly, you’ve always thought of yourself as a future ‘special one’ and dreamt of one day being successful enough to own a coat as long as Arsene Wenger’s.

You spend the first few minutes reminding yourself which teams are actually still in the Premier League, and desperately trying to remember who that great young talent you heard people rave about during Euro 2012 was.

All this whilst admitting to your friends that you don’t really know much about football, so this should be a bit of fun, and secretly poring over summer transfer news in search of someone to give you the edge. This is Oxford, there’s no such thing as non-competitive.

You fill in the registration form, honestly believing that you’ve got a decent chance of (a) winning this thing, (b) being able to maintain such a thorough review of player profiles and possession charts once term starts. Don’t be fooled. Yes, your team looks excellent on paper, despite the fact it comprises mainly of players who either top the value list or have recently appeared on a tabloid front page. However, not even the wittiest team name (stop chuckling, it’s not that funny) can save you from the football hipster who will invariably come to top your league.

As the first few rounds of games progress, you sit back and wait for your team to work their magic, before spending the final hours of each weekend sobbing into the sheepskin coat you’d bought in an attempt to add credibility to your managerial career. While you bemoan the low-points-scoring performances of Vidic, Kompany, Silva, Aguero et al., get ready to put up with the aforementioned hipster who is eager to remind you that he has watched Carl Jenkinson since he was captain of the Finnish U-19s, and has known of Michu’s goal-scoring prowess ever since his 14 second wonder goal against Madrid last September.

Having rarely suffered the ignominy of losing, you drastically turn to Guardian Football Weekly in the hope of learning whether Swansea and Everton will continue their good start, if Southampton’s Emmanuel Mayuka could be this season’s Papiss Cisse, and whether Cisse will be last season’s Fernando Torres. In all the excitement though, you forget that Rooney will be out for another few weeks and isn’t playing, so end up losing again.

By this point, you’ve forgotten mealtimes and have turned to your 10 year old cousin, who has twice taken Accrington Stanley to the Champions League Final on Football Manager, for advice on whether to stick with Patrice Evra and Gareth Bale or transfer them for Ryan Bertrand and Damien Duff. Throughout all of this, you keep telling yourself that “it’s all just a bit of fun” and “I’m better than them at real football anyway”. Then you realise it’s either this or your vacation reading list, and get ready for a fresh title assault in September.

1...1,6231,6241,625...2,486Page 1,624 of 2,486

Support Student Journalism

Cherwell is Oxford’s oldest independent newspaper, established in 1920. We are entirely student-run. By supporting us, you will contribute to keeping our paper in print and online. Every donation makes a difference.

Donate

Explore

Follow us

More

Oxford Student Publications Limited © 2025 - All Rights Reserved | Privacy Policy

Website by James Ashley