The increasingly open race for promotion to the First Division saw another twist on Friday as an impressive Pembroke College won at St John's.  As yet unbeaten in the league in Hilary Term, and unbeaten at home for fifty weeks, St John's went into the game as favourites.  Pembroke, however, outfought and outplayed St John's to win a tough and tense match 3-1.  It was the home team that took an early lead after four minutes.  Top scorer Matt Evans-Young was found unmarked on the edge of the area and passed into the net his twelfth of the season.  What followed was an open game, with both teams playing attractive passing football, lacking the bitterness which soured the second half.  Evans-Young almost doubled the lead twenty minutes after his first, having taken the ball past the Pembroke keeper, only for right back Rob Gates to intervene with a heroic last ditch tackle.  At the other end of the pitch, play was dominated by the yellow booted Etienne Ekpo-Utip.  Combining the touch and height of Berbatov with the pace and strength of Henry, he was the outstanding footballer of the afternoon.  He had a strong claim for a penalty turned down soon after following a collision with Clem Naylor.  With only two minutes to go in the first half, a similar incident produced a different result as the spot kick was given.  Ekpo-Utip drove the ball past Alex Berend, for the goal which was fair reward for his performance.  

The second half started slowly, the best chance being an Ali Craggs free-kick hitting the wall.  On the hour mark, the game started to develop an unpleasant edge.  A late challenge from Ekpo-Utip on John's centre half Paul Eastham raised complaints from the touchline, and a dispute over a tackle in midfield led to a scuffle in the centre circle.  Adam Taylor was at the heart of it, as he was for many of the flare ups after half time.  On sixty five minutes, Ekpo-Utip's second goal put Pembroke ahead.  Cutting in from the left, he shrugged off challenges from Eastham and his centre back partner Steve Jennings, and placed the ball into the bottom corner. 

 Four minutes later, an injury to Pembroke right back Rob Gates allowed for a necessary cooling down period.  Gates, challenging James Earle, fell awkwardly and dislocated his shoulder.  Play was halted as Gates was taken off the pitch and an ambulance was called.  After a six minute stoppage, cooler heads prevailed.  

The replacement of Stu Faragher with Sam Freedman signalled John's intent, but the increased space in their half was well exploited by Pembroke.  Both Chris Stovin and Taylor, playing off the dominant Ekpo-Utip, went close in the last ten minutes.  The win was sealed in the last few minutes when Stovin's shot from the edge of the box was deflected by Dave Parsons over Berend and into the net.  It confirmed the three points for a strong and competitive side who now have as good a chance for promotion as St John's or any of the other competitors. 

Review by Rees Arnott-Davies.One anticipates when seeing a play in a foreign language (especially one so distant as Mandarin) that something is always going to be lost in translation. Unfortunately, this was very much proved to be the case by 'I Love Peach Blossom', a play seeming to offer so much, but unfortunately failing to deliver. Sitting in the audience watching the breakdown of not only a relationship, but also reality, I felt all too shackled by the prison-house of language.
      
This is not to say that 'I Love Peach Blossom' didn’t have its moments. In particular, the progression from comic to tragic is carried out practically without fault, adding to the dramatic effect. Furthermore, the blurring of the lines between the suffocating reality that engulfs the lives of the characters, and the impossible play that they are trying to stage, is ultimately successful. One gets a very real sense that fiction is, for the characters, the only reality that they can escape to when their lives have reached an impasse or they are close to collapsing about their heads. And it is this sense of a deferring of the inevitability of the passage of life, which raises the play up, which makes believable what one might otherwise consider too simplistic or two-dimensional.Unfortunately, these moments of excellence are undermined by more material problems. The fact that the play is translated for the audience on a screen behind the actual stage can, at its best, lead to unintentional Brechtian moments of alienation, and at its worst lead to an entire breakdown in the dramatic project. I will not go into specifics, but needless to say, it is inadvisable to place the concluding revelation on the play slap-bang in the middle of the stage before the final scene has even started. Equally, the translation leaves more than a little to be desired, demeaning a script that might in the right hands have sparkled with vitality.
       
Nonetheless, one must always jump at the opportunity of experiencing a cultural production from outside one’s own social background, and if you were to take nothing at all away from seeing I Love Peach Blossom apart from the realisation that there is another side to theatre besides that approved by the Arts Council of Britain, it would still be worth it.

Review by Frankie ParhamConflict can always make good drama. From Homer’s Iliad to Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, warfare offers the perfect environment for man to seek the answers to questions of morality and consequently recognise his own insignificance in a brutal world. Max Seddon and Ben Judah, creators of The Desert of the Real, seem to strive for the same artistic profundity – and they almost do it.First we meet Nick (Rupert Cohen), an archetypal Oxford post-grad student,obsessing over his thesis. He is too self-centred to notice that his girlfriend, Alice (Hana Chambers), is only seeking emotional attention when she proposes a trip to Iraq.  Alice, however, ends up actually going, enlisting the help of the mysterious Dr. Regev (James Schneider) an Israeli born in Baghdad. We follow her tumultuous journey towards the capital via a crazed driver (Roger Granville), Dr. Regev’s psychopathic friend Jamal (Oliver Harvey) and an unstable American officer (John Maher).Back in Oxford, Nick pines for his girlfriend, whining at the long-suffering Chloe (Rachel Smith), who happily welcomes the arrival of charismatic Ibrahim al-Ansarn (James Kingston). The alleged Arab arts enthusiast is in fact a terrorist, out to capture Nick in an attempt to blackmail his father, who aided the start of nuclear warfare in Ibrahim’s homeland.The plot itself reflects how much Seddon and Judah are giving their audience to deal with, not to mention the number of heart-felt speeches and tantrums they burden their actors with. However, the entire cast take on the difficult task with admirable gusto, and there are a number of performances which truly stand out: Kingston is marvellously erratic, while Granville flexibly doubles as several angry Arabs. Chambers also gives the play a solid backbone, portraying the Oxford student we all relate to – oblivious to the consequences of her actions.Yet, for all the ironic juxtapositions between the petty preoccupations of privileged Westerners and ethnically-charged conflicts of the East, the play never makes clear what message it wishes to give. Are we supposed to feel remorse for Ibrahim and the sufferings of his country, after we have just seen him in a farcical tussle with a “dirty Jew”? The shift in tone is too sudden, similar to the voiceover (which acts as a diversion during scene changes): it’ll suddenly declare that another coup has broken out in the Ukraine or China. Is the world falling apart? Frankly, you don’t know what you’re supposed to be concentrating on by the end.Much of the fun of the play comes from hearing references to Oxford life (prepare for allusions to the Turf and scenes in the King’s Arms), but even this begins to wear thin. The characters are either unexplained (Dr. Regev’s intentions are completely indecipherable) or deserve much more development.  While the last scene hints at Alice’s reasons for escape,too much time is spent pulling at other strings to give an answer. It’s all intriguing enough to go and see, but too confusing to enjoy.
3/5

Max Thompson and Rachel Fraser find out what it is to be a Viking in the 21st century.

Sangwon Yoon and Jenny Moore keep us update on news this week in the mid-week news round up .
 

The excellent German blog Die Achse des Guten ("The Axis of Good") has drawn my attention to this bizarre claim in today's Daily Record:

Legendary [Loch Ness Monster] hunter Robert Rines is giving up his search for the monster after 37 years. … Despite having hundreds of sonar contacts over the years, the trail has since gone cold and Rines believes that Nessie may be dead, a victim of global warming [my emphasis].

Is this a joke? Cherwell 24 is not responsible for the content of external links

It didn't take long to notice that the Germans have no equivalent of the verb "to facebook".So I thought I'd coin one. "Facebookieren."It uses the conventional German trick of adding "-ieren" to pretty much any foreign word (cf. "abandonnieren", "kommandieren", "absorbieren") to make it from a noun into a verb Germanise it (or should that be "germanisieren" it). So far I've only succeeding in getting one other person to start using this word. Hopefully my success will improve.Does anyone have any further suggestions for some new German coinages?