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Day: 29 November 2012

Champions League exit displays City’s identity problems

Wednesday the 21st of November proved to be a busy day for Manchester City.

In the afternoon, representatives from the club visited the University of Manchester sporting the Premier League trophy to promote the “Learning Through Football” programme, an initiative that will include the contribution of student volunteers in educational projects for young children across Greater Manchester. After dark a much greater challenge lay ahead: nine-time European Cup winners Real Madrid.

The two events show both how far Manchester City has come as a football club but also the strange dichotomy of a community football club with global ambitions. One of the most celebrated and laudable achievements of City’s ascension is the community work it does and the belief that it is Manchester’s true local club. Yet at the same time the project of Sheikh Al Mansour is an international and expansive one.

The defeat to Real Madrid marked the premature end of City’s Champions League campaign for the second successive season. There are of course many reasons why City have failed to qualify on both occasions: the draws have been particularly unfavourable given that City have been grouped with European giants Bayern Munich and Real Madrid and dangerous attacking opponents Napoli and Borussia Dortmund; a general improvement in European football and decline of English sides at an inopportune moment could also be recognized, on the basis that last season Manchester United also failed to qualify.

But perhaps the real problem is that balancing the club’s local and international identity is proving tricky. Especially among City fans, the idea of the Champions League does not appear to have taken off. Just 40,000 tickets were sold for the critical Ajax game earlier this month compared to over 47,000 for the Aston Villa game two weeks later. The Etihad Stadium has sounded quieter for mid-week games than for League games, which on the surface is strange when such exciting opponents as Real Madrid are in town.

The explanation could be that Manchester City is a club still under development and building a reputation at home; the appetite for Champions League success thus seems to be less strong. For Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal, Champions League nights are extra special because of the history each club can associate to European football. The Champions League is the Holy Grail for sides that have won multiple Premier Leagues and FA Cups and so the fans respond. Manchester City has not yet asserted that domestic dominance.

Local rivalry also plays a part; for a long time City have been the neighbours living in the shadow of Manchester United, but now they have the chance to get one over the enemy every season in the Premier League. That, and the fact that winning the Champions League is a much less realistic objective, may contribute to the sentiment that winning the Premier League is more important.

However, while the transition into becoming a European force is understandably tough, City must look to protect that community link in the process. In time, the ambitions of the City faithful will catch up with those of the club itself and the Champions League will become the priority. At that point projects such as “Learning Through Football” will be even more valuable in grounding Manchester City in Manchester.

Bizarre Sport special: five of the weirdest injuries

Whilst injuries are an unfortunate consequence of participation in sport, sometimes you hear of stories that really push the limits of your imagination.  As commonplace as injuries are, sometimes there are stories that are so bizarre, so strange that they merit plenty of attention. Below is a list of five of the strangest injuries to have made the news:

1) Every team has one. The player that always over celebrates. The player that really likes to make a fool of himself. However Bill Gramatica of the Miami Dolphins took public humiliation to a new level during one game. After successfully slotting a kick and deciding to celebrate like he had just won the Super Bowl, Gramatica leapt high in the air and promptly tore his anterior cruciate ligament on landing. Safe to say Bill wasn’t celebrating again anytime soon.

2) It also not a great idea to celebrate prematurely, advice golfer Bobby Cruickshank would have done well to remember during the 1934 U.S. Open. Cruickshank fluffed his shot on the 11th hole, sending it into a creek, yet remarkably the ball bounced off a rock and landed perfectly on the green.  With Booby leading by eight shots and clearly thinking it must be his tournament he allowed himself a small celebration. What happened next is a crash course in how not to protect a lead.  Cruickshank joyously tossed his club in the air but to his display on the way down it hit him in the head and knocked him unconscious. After coming to, Bobby managed to finish the tournament but bogeyed several of the remaining holes and could only tie for third.

3) Not one for the faint hearted, Rugby League player Paul Wood suffered an injury that evoked great sympathy from men all across the world. Early in the second half of the Grand Final, Wood was on the receiving end of a stray knee which resulted in Paul rupturing one of his testicles. Remarkably Wood managed to carry on playing for twenty minutes, keeping up the hard man stigma attached to Rugby League. After the game Paul had to have his testicle removed.  For most, losing half your manhood and the Super League Grand Final in one day would leave you feeling very down but Wood was even able to joke after the operation, posting on twitter: “Just coming out the hospital to go home… Seriously feel like I’ve left something?” That’s a real man.

4) Step forward David Seaman who proved that harm can happen off the pitch as well as on it. The former England goalkeeper, who played over four hundred times for Arsenal, remained largely injury-free in his stellar career but suffered a rather embarrassing moment when at home. Whilst relaxing at home, Seaman managed to pull a muscle in his back just by reaching for the television remote which side lined him for a number of weeks.  Strangely, whilst playing for Paris Saint-Germain, Lionel Letizi suffered the same injury whilst reaching for a Scrabble piece he dropped.  Reports suggest the Scrabble game was called off soon after.

5) While kids all over the country are taught of the benefits of effective communication on a football pitch, aspiring footballers should do well to avoid the example of Alex Stepney. The former Manchester United goalkeeper managed to break his jaw after yelling so loudly. Speechless.

Retro Corner: Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings

Age of Empires was already an established real-time strategy game in 1999 when the second instalment in the long running series was released. Age of Kings was positively received by critics and is now recognised as a major breakthrough for the strategy genre.

In Age of Kings the player takes control of one of thirteen civilisations, including the Mongols, the Franks and the Vikings! Custom mode offers the gamer a choice of which age to start in, allowing beginners to start playing during an advanced age, while letting more experienced gamers start in the dark ages; the earlier the age the harder the challenge. Along with an impressive choice of civilisations the game offers a clear visual improvement on other real-time strategy games released at the time. Every civilisation has its own unique look and distinct units, allowing gamers to distinguish between their own team and the enemy through more than just what colour armour people are wearing.

A few detailed features were added to the game for the first time. Gamers could forge alliances and trade deals with other teams (up to 4 teams could compete on one map) and pool resources before attacking a stronger enemy with a more powerful combined force (any strategists’ idea of heaven). The game also takes on a maritime flavour, with island maps requiring the player to construct navies and engage in sea battles as well as land invasions.

Age of Kings provides an enjoyable campaign, facilitating a gentle progression in difficulty so players have time to hone their strategic skills. Online play is also on offer allowing friends to play online and create game-based communities. Age of kings is innovative, looks great and most importantly of all loads of fun – a must play and if you haven’t you’re only 13 years late!

 

Hitman: Absolution – Review

Very often developers will try to “reboot” a series by changing the core mechanics to breathe new life into what had become stale and stagnant. The best example is what Capcom did with Resident Evil 4. However, change can alienate old fans whilst bringing new ones into the fold. Fallout 3 was a massive departure from the old formula, but one that brought the game into the modern market. So, does Hitman Absolution meet the expectations of old fans whilst feeling fresh?

The question on any long-time Hitman fan’s lips will be “Is it as good as blood money?” Well, no. Whilst Absolution makes an attempt to be a game-changer, it sadly fails on a number of counts.

The first act, and the first two levels, starts off promisingly, with good stealth sections mixed in with excellent choices on how and when to kill the targets. Admittedly, the first “mark” dies in a cut scene, but getting to them is the journey, and the cut scene is necessary to frame the game’s plot. After that, you’re thrown into a crowded square with a specific target and options. So far, so promising. While you can’t pick your weapons and you are forced to improvise resources, it turned the game into a question of learning the level and made me look for more creative ways to kill the mark. With five difficulty modes to choose from, the hardest of which being eye-wateringly difficult, everything seemed promising.

Then it all went wrong. The first act featured forced stealth sections, with hiding from the police being incredibly frustrating. I won’t get into why – you are an assassin, let’s be fair. Regardless, whilst one can disguise themselves as a member of the police department, somehow the city’s plod all know each other, and as such, the disguise becomes almost useless as they’ll spot you pretty quickly. For those without much patience for this, just play it on easy and speed through. It’s not great.

The stealth is by no means perfect, using the “press button to stick to the wall” mechanic. Hiding in a crowd is sometimes poorly implemented, it broadly works, allowing you to use the environment to distract NPCs or disguises changing what is accepted behaviour.

But it gets better. The game opens up and you have become more creative, going to various places and forced to really try to work out how to cause some of the more creative deaths. The challenges add a huge amount of depth to this, and with only vague hints to go on, one must work out what the game wants. The nun level is nothing like the infamous trailer and is one of my favourite levels, combining stealth with careful takedowns. It’s closer to the first Assassin’s Creed. But that’s okay. It works and there’s a huge amount of rewarding replay value.

For those who want it, Contracts Mode looks to be the most interesting addition. Other players set marks, you pick the weapons (or they do) and you have to work out how to kill everyone silently, being graded on whether you were spotted, if the body was found, etc. It’s heaps of fun, and once the community produces more, it’ll be one of the most interesting multiplayer concepts in a long time.

I played this on PC with on max settings. Graphically it’s gorgeous, with great textures and animations. There was some slowdown, and apparently it’s not perfectly optimised, but patching is in process. The 360 version works fine and still manages to look impressive.

The game is not perfect, but it provides the rare single player, value for money experience. The plot is very Hitman, yet it not overly contrived, taking you and Agent 47 to some pretty… interesting places.

‘It’ll look good on your CV’

How many of you have heard this phrase whilst being at university? So pervasive in university culture has it become that it has now ousted my number one pet hate: groups of girls who think that talking to each other whilst eating freakishly loud lettuce in the purple area of John Rylands can be considered “a really hard day at the library”.

In the final year of my degree it has been drilled into my psyche in leaflets for charities, career talks and even through my lecturers who have put aside some time to tell us about how we should be concerned about that pivotal section of our CVs: extracurricular. “If you haven’t started working with those school kids down the road yet”, said my lecturer recently, “now’s the time to start thinking.”

It is this attitude towards our extracurricular activities that worries me. At this point I must make clear that in no way am I dismissing the fantastic work that so many students at this university do. There is enthusiasm in abundance within many great university societies, teams and charities. However, through my degree I have met more and more people who will do anything to get that extra bullet point on their CV.

The rise of ‘voluntourism’ – where affluent westerners pay thousands of pounds to take part in a community project – is particularly concerning. One begins to wonder whether modern volunteering, in essence an act of selflessness, is done not for those who need it, but instead for the volunteer. And these charity companies don’t attempt to hide it: “A great improvement to your CV” read one flyer distributed around the University of Manchester, offering trips in excess of £2,500 to tropical countries.

But who can blame them? In the society that we live in, we are all competing against one another to get those coveted job positions. If we weren’t, why would we have chosen to go to university? University is after all talked up as a necessary prerequisite to a good career. We are told that employers like to see multi-tasking, a good balance of work and social life, and an exponential rise (with no breaks!) in personal development, towards the CV of the perfect applicant. Who knows, perhaps in ten years time, employers will look much further back than our higher education:

“So Mr. Smith, I see on your CV that between September 1990 and June 1991, there is a gap in your acquisition of key skill sets and no signs of volunteering?”
“Um, but I was only 1 at the time you see.”
“Thank you Mr Smith; we’ll um…keep in touch.”

I still cling on to the belief that I will find my dream job by befriending the director of BBC Worldwide in a smoky downtown bar. But as graduation day creeps closer – as well as the drunk in the bar who isn’t the director of BBC Worldwide – I begin to worry about that dreaded leap from higher education. A friend of mine recently floated the idea to me that I should get some business cards printed in order to network within the world of radio. Worryingly, the first thing that came to my mind was that scene in American Psycho where Patrick Bateman views his co-workers’ superior business cards and attempts to hide his psychotic envy. I never like projecting myself, the brand ‘Thomas Glasser’, however I understand that in order to sift through the thousands of applications that employers must receive, an individual must stand out from the rest. But I hate writing down that I’m a team player. I’m not. I work better alone.

What worries me is that a generation is being urged by our peers to do constructive extracurricular activities: because if we don’t, we won’t get good jobs. These are activities that we may not even want to do, and activities that many less privileged people will never even have the chance to do. Are we therefore increasingly approaching life thinking that a minute spent enjoying ourselves is a minute wasted? There is, naturally, a solution: lie detectors in job interviews.

“So Mr Smith, we’ve wired you up. Answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ please. Did you genuinely want to travel to Malawi and help build a school, and not to go on safari?”

“OK! OK! I admit it! It was only for my CV! I can’t stand children! There! Are you happy?!”

A nice idea, but hardly a practical one. And, after all, I have to ask myself why I’m writing this piece in the first place. Am I writing it for you or for me? I’ll leave that one for you to work out.

Review: The Sleeping Beauty

In her text ‘From the Beast to the Blonde,’ Marina Warner discusses the idea that romance, and the fairy tales which owe a significant debt to the romantic tradition, offer us the tantalizing possibility remaking ‘the world in the image of desire.’ That is a sophisticated premise and would I suggest that fairy-tales do two things – they tap into a childlike wish for magic, a belief in impossibility and a certainty in the sense that reality can always be ‘remade’, but they also often access more adult themes of desire, threat and sadness. The importance of keeping a childlike innocence and joy in the story, while not letting the characters become two-dimensional or childishly simplistic, is the balancing act in play here.

This is achieved beautifully in the English National Ballet’s production of ‘The Sleeping Beauty,’ currently touring and playing at the Manchester Opera House. I went last night and was prepared to be amazed by the technical skill of the dancers, to be made jealous by the sumptuous costumes that made you wish you owned a tutu, and to wish I had the ENB Orchestra to follow me around to play at appropriate moments in life. However, I was not prepared for the honest storytelling which grounded and supported that extraordinary spectacle, and achieved what I thought was an impressive feat – make a show which is at first glance people pirouetting around in archaic costumes reveal itself to be real, relevant and believable. Whilst we are, as an audience, initially drawn in by the technical skill of the ballet, I think had it not been for that emotional depth, even the most beautiful pointe work could have left the audience feeling cold. In that sense, the movement provided a route to understanding emotion, and it was that emotion which was the main event, rather than the technical brilliance of the ballerinas flying across the stage.

That is not to say that the dancing itself was underwhelming, just that without that emotive underpinning the story would have felt hollow. That sense of honest emotion was echoed in the sympathetic and detailed costume and set design, which was a development and in some cases a reworking of the original design of the show. The artistic team seemed to share a sense that they didn’t want to make anything too obvious or easy for the audience – details of the choreography meant that at moments we did feel a sympathy for Carabosse, the wicked fairy who casts the spindle spell over the Princess Aurora. Similarly, as Carabosse discovered the Lilac Fairy about to lead the Prince to wake Aurora with a kiss, the lights played across his costume and made some parts of it appear a deeper purple colour, subtly seeming to echo the Lilac Fairy’s own costume. That was just one example of the way in which the production seemed unwilling to draw too obvious a line between ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ between the childish innocence and more adult subtleties of the story.

Whilst we do as an audience rejoice with the happy ending, part of that joy comes, I think, from those subtleties within the performance which mean we never quite forget the threat of Carabosse, but neither do we forget her loneliness and jealousy either, meaning the ballet plays in a quite a sophisticated way with our emotions. These sadder undertones keep the production from becoming to saccharine or indulgent, and ground it in a reality that reminds us, however hard we might try to, we can never wholly ‘remake the world in the image of desire’.

Creative Writing Society

A couple of weeks ago The Societies Show on Fuse FM caught up with Jonny Heath to find out about the Manchester Creative Writing Society. Aside from the interview, we were treated to examples of members’ writings and a song or two from Jonny himself. There is much to be excited about from this little group. The society welcomes students, whether already an avid scribbler or just curious about what’s going on, to come along to meetings to share, listen and enjoy each other’s work.

All information as to when the meetings take place are detailed on the Manchester Creative Writing Facebook group, where the description encourages attendance from people who are interested in “any kind of writing, be it prose, poetry, plays, stream of consciousness or erotica.” A collaboration with other creative events as well as a potential eventual publication are all in the pipeline for the group.

The essence of the group is informal and fun, and it’s a great society for anyone who has wanted to give writing a go but has not had the opportunity to do so. Judgements are left at the door so if you fancy getting involved, don’t hesitate to drop Chair Jonny Heath. Here are a couple of tasters from the group so far:
Define a ‘kiss’ by Joe Goodman

How many moments plucked?
pucked, touched, fucked.
Find the strength to define,
when lips align, a kiss.
Father son, does that disgust you?
Wife husband, does it hurt you?
This moment we use,
choose to abuse,
clutch in our dreams
and use as a means
to sacred time? A seal of love?
No stolen, polluted, an oil caked dove.
Give me a reason
I’ll stab the whore,
then kiss her cold hand
and waltz out the door.
Onto another’s love in disguise,
into the legs of stripping eyes,
to pound romance with a volley of lies
and a dove falls to earth as the ‘kiss’ dies.

Untitled by Phoebe Georgia Allan

I can go from blissed to pissed quicker than a spinning disk.
My mind flies high in the in the skies of unity,
Representing everything it should be;
freedom, sympathy and tranquillity.
Pure, A-zure.
I have days when I’m even happy to be sad,
A negative thought or sentiment I choose to dismiss,
Laugh it gone and blow it a kiss.
A great and beautiful sense of release- power, belief
and then my soma levels rapidly increase,
as I dance with the gods, our spirits purified , our bodies energised, and we whisper;
‘Now what may foeman’s malice do to harm us? What, O Immortal, mortal man’s deception’
Lib-er-at-ion
My body is tinkling
My flesh, bones soul and mind intertwined
Care free, happy as can be,
Then.
I change it up a key,
Shunning all that I preached,
Let out, lock out, and let go of every pebble of peace in my mind’s beach.
Like I’ve given birth to a beast.
Now, nothing makes sense hence
I behave like a slave to the witches’ trade
Casting spells of bad smells and I’m thinking
‘STOP!’
No more potions for these feeble motions,
A conversation with my own desperation,
‘please, take me back to the paradise of my creation,
where celebratory elation is a necessary condition of human composition.’

 

Top professions dominated by private school leavers

Attending Eton and Oxbridge remains the path to success in the UK, according to a report by the Sutton Trust.

The Trust found that 31 percent of those in top professions in the UK studied at Oxbridge, whilst 44 percent were privately educated.

Ten leading independent schools account for 12 percent of the total, with Eton College alone responsible for 4 percent. Only 21 percent went to a state school, and 27 percent to a grammar school.

Sir Peter Lampl, Chairman of the Sutton Trust, said that the figures show “how dominant leading universities and schools remain across the professions in Britain,” and that it is “important that access to our leading schools and universities is on the basis of ability alone.”

The report says that “independent schools make up 7 per cent of the school population, yet constitute over half the leading news journalists, medics, chief executives, and 70 per cent of barristers and judges”.

22 per cent of those researched had no higher education, whilst 20 per cent attended a leading university other than Oxbridge, including the University of Manchester.

Julian Skyrme, Head of Widening Participation at the University of Manchester, hailed this as “an important report.”

He said: “The nation’s ‘leading people’ in this report are dominated by people who went to top universities like Manchester and schools in the independent sector.

“Among the leading institutions in the report, we are proud that Manchester takes in the highest number of learners from state schools, lower socio-economic groups and low participation neighbourhoods.”

Around 22 per cent of students at the University of Manchester are thought to be privately educated, although the university also accepts the highest number of students from ‘low participation areas’ of the Russell Group.

The report’s findings were based on 7,637 people who had been educated in the UK, and whose birthdays were noted by national newspapers during 2011.

Last week another report suggested that poor advice and lack of confidence were preventing high achieving state-school pupils from aiming for the best universities.

Sir Peter said that the survey demonstrates “how far we still need to go to improve social mobility in this country.”