̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - football

Plastic Fantastic Cambridge

plc32 — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 13:48:55 +0000

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Association Football Club (CUAFC) will wear a design that copies the match kit from their 1905 Varsity fixture with Oxford for this year's 150th Anniversary Varsity match. But the shirts, socks and shorts for the 39th Women’s Varsity Match and the 139th Men’s Varsity Match in Cambridge on Friday 15th March are a modern marvel of recycling innovation.

̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Cambridge United announce strategic partnership

jek67 — Wed, 25 Oct 2023 07:27:35 +0000

̽��ֱ��partnership will focus on three initial areas - community, inclusion and sport – with pilot programmes being planned. These will include events and visits to the Club’s stadium as part of initiatives to encourage more prospective students from deprived backgrounds around the country to apply to the ̽��ֱ��; and to enable more existing students to attend games.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� and Club have also established a high level partnership group which will meet regularly to drive progress and identify areas of opportunity. New programmes are likely to focus on supporting wellbeing and mental health, encouraging healthy lifestyles and improving access to sport.

Three of the ̽��ֱ��’s colleges will take part in the initial phase of activity as the ̽��ֱ�� and Club begin working together. ̽��ֱ��Club has also agreed that this year’s Varsity Match will take place at the Abbey Stadium on 15 March 2024.

Prof Bhaskar Vira, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education, whose remit covers ̽��ֱ�� sport, said: “ ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� is a global institution, but it is also right at the heart of our local community here in Cambridge, working with others in partnership. We know that sport can inspire people of all ages and backgrounds, and I welcome this exciting new partnership with Cambridge United which I hope will help build new and positive relationships which further benefit the city and its communities.”

Shaun Grady Chair of the Board at CUFC said: “We are very pleased to be formalising our relationship with Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� with whom we have had many different and positive contacts over recent years - and of course many of our fans work in, with and around the ̽��ֱ�� itself.

“We have identified areas where we will be looking to collaborate over the coming years: community, inclusion and sport. We are excited about the opportunities ahead to do more together for the wider benefit of the city and look forward to welcoming the new Vice Chancellor to the Abbey Stadium over the coming months.’

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Cambridge United Football Club have agreed a new partnership with the shared ambition of working together to help the wider city and the community, supporters, and current and prospective students.

"Sport can inspire people of all ages and backgrounds"

Professor Bhaskar Vira, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Education

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Fighting for the rights of football fans

zs332 — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 12:16:53 +0000

How a Cambridge researcher fought for the rights of football fans and won.

Underdogs, curses and ‘Neymaresque’ histrionics: Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press reveals what’s been getting us talking this World Cup

sjr81 — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 14:58:19 +0000

There has been no shortage of surprises during this year’s competition, and this shines through in the language data. Expressions such as premature exit reflect that several of the predicted favourites haven’t fared as well as expected, with the odd unforgivable blunder making an appearance, too.

Building on similar research conducted during the 2014 World Cup, the Press has mined over 12 million words of media coverage, to analyse the language used when discussing the various teams over the course of this year’s tournament.

Comparison with the language collected in 2014 shows that, whilst traditionally successful teams such as Brazil have gone from stylish to nervous and Argentina from having flair to struggling, World Cup 2018 underdogs such as England have gone from being inexperienced to confident.

̽��ֱ��data reflects that several teams have defied expectations – the word underdogs features frequently in media reports, along with related language like plucky, determined, and punch above their weight also making an appearance.

As fans root for their home teams, the verb overcome is commonly found alongside words such as obstacles, hurdles and adversity. Even England’s long-standing penalty curse has been overcome, whereas previous champions Germany fell victim to the curse of the holders.

̽��ֱ��introduction of Video Assisted Referee (VAR) technology has seemingly been met with mixed feelings, as it is commonly associated with words such as controversy, overturn and incident.

Despite the introduction of VAR, however, bad behaviour still abounds; the word histrionics is prominent in the data – often found alongside adjectives such as ridiculous, headline-grabbing, and amateurish. A new term has even been coined this year: neymaresque.

As well as analysing the language used by journalists and media commentators, ̽��ֱ��Press has also been asking fans to submit the words they would use to describe their national teams.

Laura Grimes, senior ELT research manager at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press, said: “It’s been great to see the correlation between the language used by the media and the descriptive words submitted by football fans. We’ve combined these two datasets to select the three words most strongly associated with each team.

“ ̽��ֱ��huge amount of language data we’ve collected and analysed gives us fascinating insight into the mood surrounding the World Cup. It’s been a dramatic and surprising tournament and this is certainly reflected by the language used in the media, as well as by football fans.”

̽��ֱ��Press is still inviting submissions for the public’s top three words to describe each national team. To contribute, simply visit www.cambridge.org/word-cup, click on any country and enter the three words you feel best describes this team.

Once submitted, you’ll be taken to a page that is updated in real time and shows the most popular words that have been submitted in a word cloud.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press has revealed the results of its global study into the language used around the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.

̽��ֱ��huge amount of language data we’ve collected and analysed gives us fascinating insight into the mood surrounding the World Cup.

Laura Grimes

Photo by Tom Grimbert on Unsplash

Argentina fans at the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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‘Para Ingles ver’ (for the English to see): the other side of the World Cup

amb206 — Sat, 05 Jul 2014 08:00:00 +0000

England’s team may have returned home, but eyes remain on Brazil. As the World Cup enters its fourth week, tensions mount in the stadiums but more so in the streets outside, with protests accompanying most matches.

̽��ֱ��World Cup is a bitter topic for many Brazilians, already angry at an undemocratic and regressive use of public funds. Football in Brazil owes much of its fame and vibrancy to the most vulnerable social groups. Megastars Romário, Pelé, Ronaldo and Jairzinho all grew up in favelas.

It is these very groups who are being evicted, priced out, repressed and shot at for the sake of FIFA’s mega-event. During the Chile-Spain match in Rio de Janeiro, 25-year-old Afonso Maurício Linhares was shot and killed by the police as he was refereeing a local football match in the Manguinhos favela just 6km from the stadium. In Belo Horizonte, an unfinished overpass constructed for the World Cup collapsed only yesterday, killing two people on a bus while others were trapped inside.

In June 2013, more than two million people took to the streets of Brazilian cities in what came to be known as the ‘Vinegar Revolt’ or ‘Brazilian Autumn’. Sparked by rising bus fares, these protests became a much larger movement against inequality, corruption, privatisation and the everyday brutality of the military police.

In Rio, as in other host cities, simmering discontent continued as World Cup construction projects resulted in unbearable levels of traffic congestion through the city’s hottest summer for 30 years. This popular anger has now re-erupted as the world focuses its attention on a country where an economic boom has done little for the majority of the population.

There is an increasing trend for city governments to use international mega-events to raise their international profile, attract investment, and provide impetus for urban development projects.

̽��ֱ��widespread resistance to the World Cup in Brazil places an onus on social scientists, activists and policy makers to ask whether the hosting of mega-events is actually ever ‘good for’ a city, and if so, for whom exactly? ̽��ֱ��neglected stadiums in Cape Town and Athens loom as a warning for the legacy of Brazil’s World Cup as well as for Rio’s 2016 Olympic Games.

Mega-events have a direct bearing on city planning. They result in programmes that prioritise flashy, short-term initiatives targeted at tourists and TV audiences rather than residents.

Last year I supervised the undergraduate dissertation of Land Economy student Annabel Cooke, who chose to write about the links between the World Cup and the ‘pacification’ projects in Rio’s favelas. These are essentially military invasions of favelas in which a specially created police force wrests control from drug trafficking gangs.

Annabel’s research shows that these programmes are provoked and sustained by Rio’s hosting of the World Cup. ̽��ֱ��focus of pacification is largely on favelas closest to the stadiums, which leads gangs to relocate to other, poorer favelas, while indiscriminate police violence under the pretext of protecting tourists is increasing across the city.

Image-based or ‘city branding’ policies are nothing new. Brazil has long had to fabricate an image of success and stability to attract investors (from states whose own wealth was generated by resource theft from Brazil and other colonies). There is even a Brazilian saying, ‘para ingles ver’, or ‘for the English to see’. This phrase dates back to a treaty signed in 1826 between Britain and Brazil supposedly ending the slave trade, which actually continued for another six decades.

Many songs written in Rio, particularly in the genre known as ‘funk consciente’, have lyrics that tell a story of two worlds. Tourists hang out in the south zone, drinking coconut water on Copacabana beach while, in the song-writers’ worlds of the favelas and north zone, thousands of people struggle with the most basic needs of security, food and clean water.

What is the outcome of strategies that are ‘para ingles ver’? If the hosting of mega-events provides the scope and impetus for contemporary urban development, who loses out behind the glossy images, and how are people responding?

As part of my PhD, I am exploring the impact of mega-events on street vendors in Rio. ̽��ֱ��vendors I interviewed have some important insights into these questions, which are pertinent not just for Brazil but for host cities of international mega-events across the world. My interviewees spoke at length about their feelings of betrayal, invisibility and indignation at the World Cup, but also their involvement in emerging political struggles.

Street vendors are one of the most vulnerable and neglected groups of workers in the city. They suffer from police extortion during the day, assaults on public transport, and pervasive violence back home in the favelas where they live.

I work as a volunteer for a small non-profit workers rights’ organisation called CAMTRA (Casa da Mulher Trabalhadora). Based in the centre of Rio, CAMTRA is doing an extensive survey of female vendors’ impressions and experiences of the Cup.

̽��ֱ��first phase of the study showed that many vendors fear that the World Cup would lead to a decrease in living standards due to increased police regulation of vending. ̽��ֱ��‘General Cup Law’ passed last year stipulates that only registered established traders can sell within a certain radius of each stadium, meaning that as one vendor asserted: “With the World Cup, only those who already have money will earn.”

For the past year, vendors have faced vastly increased commutes to work, as most live in the North Zone where infrastructure projects by the airport have led to extreme congestion on the roads. In my interviews, vendors made a clear connection between poor services and the huge sums of money being spent on the World Cup. One woman working at a clothes stall exclaimed: ‘This government spending all this money on the world cup! It needs to prioritise, there are people dying in the street here.”

Some vendors had been left homeless as a result of World Cup construction projects, and in CAMTRA’s survey of more than vendors, all those who lived in favelas felt that the police ‘pacification’ projects were directed at tourists rather than residents.

All 30 of the vendors I spoke with in depth were in favour of the street protests, arguing that the unrest was a signal that Brazilians had ‘woken up’ and might achieve some real change. Some of my interviewees recalled the massive protest movement that swept the corrupt President Fernando Collor de Mello out of power in 1992. Many predicted an increase in protests during the World Cup and in the run up to the Olympics. “People are going to come back to the streets, I promise,” an orange juice seller told me, “And in larger numbers than ever before.”

There is some indication that the Brazilian government is responding to the popular mobilisations. Just before the start of the World Cup, President Dilma Rousseff committed to maintain the increase in social spending that her presidency has seen, as part of an agreement made in response to the June 2013 protests.

She has also pledged to ring-fence the hoped-for returns from the ‘Lula’ oil field (a potential gold mine of pre-salt layer oil discovered 250km off the coast of Rio de Janeiro) claiming that in the next 35 years the government would be able to invest R$1 trillion in education and health.

̽��ֱ��World Cup and Olympic committees strive to maintain a glossy image of Brazil for corporate investors. Yet an unintended outcome of their mega-events strategy is the international attention seized by critical groups, who will hold the government to account on these public spending promises.

As well as working with CAMTRA, I volunteer as a translator for Rio on Watch, a community journalism website that is seeing high levels of traffic at the moment. As a result of reports and images that shame the government and FIFA, another picture of Brazil has emerged. Protests, state violence and political repression are now widely associated with the country, alongside football, samba and cachaça.

“ ̽��ֱ��favelas cannot be silenced,” insists Ana Paula Gomes de Oliveira, mother of 19-year-old Jonathan de Oliveira Lima who was recently killed by the police in Complexo de Alemao.

More and more people are aware of the blood, sweat and tears behind the stadiums, and political reports are creeping into the sports sections of online news sources. Brazilian protesters are not actually calling on us to boycott the World Cup matches. ̽��ֱ��popular slogan and hashtag used across Brazil, ‘Nao vai ter copa’ – there will not be a world cup – is not really a threat or campaign to prevent the World Cup from happening. Rather, it is to assert that the World Cup should not be as the governors of the host cities intended – an uncontroversial, investment-garnering, glossing over of the city scapes ‘para ingles ver’. Instead, the slogan ‘Our Cup is in the Streets’ refers to the subversion of the event into another kind of ‘cup’.

This is a ‘cup of strikes’, as the striking public sector workers in Rio claimed, a cup where the eyes of Amnesty International are monitoring human rights abuses on the streets, and where competitions between national football teams are changed into comparisons between national policies. In the photo above, the banner contrasts Brazil and Uruguay. ̽��ֱ��text reads ‘Uruguay 3, Brazil 0: legalisation of abortion, equal marriage and legalisation of marijuana.’

We do need to look carefully for this ‘other cup’. It’s not going to be publicised along the edges of the stadiums with McDonalds and Hyundai. As the street vendors assert, it is the way in which the dynamics on the streets play that determine what mega-events mean to a country. And for those attending the games, one small way to support the ‘cup of the streets’ is to buy from street vendors rather than from the FIFA-endorsed chains. Just take a short walk from the stadium, and they will be there waiting for you with an ice cold beer.

Inset images: protest poster reads "the parties in the stadiums are not worth the tears in the favelas" (credit: Rio on Watch); bikini seller and tourist (credit: eGuide Travel); caipirinha seller (credit: Keetr); Uruguay versus Brazil banner compares the two countries over recent years (credit: Renato Cinco).

Brazilians are famous for their love of football but millions of ordinary people are angry at the huge sums spent on the World Cup. Lucy McMahon, a PhD candidate in Development Studies, is working as a volunteer for two human rights organisations in Rio de Janiero. She reports on her research among some of the poorest groups.

Mega-events have a direct bearing on city planning. They result in programmes that prioritise flashy, short-term initiatives targeted at tourists and TV audiences rather than residents.

Lucy McMahon

Rio on Watch

Names of people killed by the police are stencilled on to football shirts

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Locked in combat: two French thinkers slog it out

amb206 — Thu, 31 May 2012 09:21:12 +0000

There are no goals in boxing and no red corner in football. Andy Martin’s ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper: Sartre Vs Camus (Simon & Schuster, 6 June 2012) is a story about two philosophers and their intellectual tussling in the Paris of the 1940s and 1950s. They are an odd pair, mismatched. Sartre was famously ugly, Camus was in comparison an Adonis; Sartre was a Parisian insider while Camus, ‘ ̽��ֱ��Outsider’, came from a poor family in Algeria. But they had much in common: both highly competitive, both richly creative, both prone to angst or ‘Nausea’.

Spiked with seminal moments in author Andy Martin’s own life, the book opens with a small but delicious act of felony committed by the writer as a teenager in suburban Essex, and the creeping guilt that ensued: to give any more away would spoil the narrative. Suffice it to say that Martin, today a languages lecturer at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and a poet-cum-screenwriter, was a boy with big questions and a vivid imagination.

Do other people exist, could they simply disappear leaving just their shoes and socks behind, does the boy Andy himself exist? These are the musings that lead Martin – and lead readers of ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper – to discover the works of Sartre and Camus. Along the way, he realises – and we too come to realise - that the clever, coffee-drinking, café-frequenting thinkers and their friends were locked in petty squabbles that subsumed their intellectual arguments in a contest of sheer bitchiness – and yet which remain resonant for us now.

̽��ֱ��guts of the book is a study of two heavyweights of 20^th century philosophy and literature – both winners of the Nobel prize, although Sartre famously rejected his. Whether or not we have read ̽��ֱ��Outsider or delved into Being and Nothingness, we quickly get to grips with the contrasting backgrounds and characters of the two protagonists and the mind-blowing ideas about the meaning of life and love that they kicked about as they sought to out-general one another intellectually.

Martin unravels the tricky concepts of the savage and the symbolic, in the process taking creative leaps of the imagination that he says may annoy his fellow academics. He talks about visiting the barber in Cambridge to tame his mad professor hairstyle. This leads him into a description of the cutting of Sartre’s own blond curls which severed him from a condition of angelic childishness into a state of being Sartre, a transformation that sees his mother rush upstairs in floods of tears. This neatly introduces us to ideas about beauty and ugliness, and the possibility of self-transcendence.

Philosophers are supposed to be gentle, cerebral beings: Martin’s double act is anything but. Sartre was a natural pugilist who wondered: “Can I take him or can he take me?” “I fought constantly,” he wrote of his schooldays in La Rochelle. He learnt to box and, as a teacher of philosophy, he sparred with his students and got into a fist-fight with another teacher over a sarcastic remark. He wanted to win – a boxing bout, he argued, was the “the incarnation of pre-existing violence”. Camus also got into fights but he was a footballer in love with the game. Growing up in Algeria, he played in goal but, despite the urban myth, he was never goalkeeper for Algeria. ̽��ֱ��goalkeeper is not quite part of the team – though vital to it.

Sartre and Camus met in Paris in 1943 where they were both friends of Simone de Beauvoir. They sat in cafes and wrote. Their friendship turned sour and their rivalry travelled far beyond the world of ideas. Late one night in Paris, they are spotted racing on all fours across the boulevard St Germain between two of their favourite bars. Though they disliked each other, they are locked together. After Camus’s death in a car crash in 1960, Sartre wrote: “We had a falling-out, he and I: but a falling-out means nothing – even if we were doomed never to see each other again – but another way of living together and without ever losing sight on what the other is up to in the small world that has been given to us.”

In weaving together anecdote and incident ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper introduces some of the basic concepts of philosophy, encouraging the reader to think about what makes us human – and especially what makes us behave badly. This is not a book that requires any specialist knowledge. ̽��ֱ��only real puzzler of a phrase is the dedication at the start: the book is dedicated not to mum or dad but to “a binary praxis of non-antagonistic reciprocity”. This line modifies Sartre’s original, with the emphasis more on the antagonistic – all of which is unfolded in the book.

What does all this mean today? Martin thinks that in the present context of a kind of nationalistic hysteria about winning (the Euros, the Olympics, standing on the podium) we need to think long and deep about failure. After all, most of us fail most of the time. “ ̽��ֱ��two great philosophers of failure were Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. They are the patron saints of losers and outsiders. Their writings teach us how to get over the notion of success and resign ourselves to failure and discontent. I think everyone would be a lot happier that way, by becoming truly philosophical.”

“Hell is other people,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre. His rival on the stage of occupied and post-war Paris was Albert Camus (“I am the world”). ̽��ֱ��two fell out but remained entangled. A book by Cambridge academic Andy Martin – ̽��ֱ��Boxer and the Goalkeeper – is an excursion into the worlds of the Frenchmen synonymous with existentialism and absurdism.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus are the patron saints of losers and outsiders. Their writings teach us how to get over the notion of success.

Dr Andy Martin

Antanas Sutkus, 2012

Jean Paul Sartre on the beach

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