We’ve all been there before, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying.

Go to bed early the night before, wake up with the cockerel, and have a nutritionally stellar breakfast, before spending mid-morning getting pumped up (admittedly I don’t think I’ve ever managed any of these, but folk myths are what they are) only to receive the dreaded email from your captain at around 11, invariably beginning, “Sorry gents…”The match is cancelled: you’re deprived of your weekly game of whatever – plus, to pile woe on top of woe, you’ve probably been landed with an extra training session – great!

Cancellations are a blight upon the college game, and they seem to be getting more common. In rugby, at least, more games than I can remember are being called off at the moment, and what’s really surprising is that there have been at least three in three weeks of Division 1 competition. Admittedly, at the other end of the college rugby ladder, cancellations have always been rife. When you prepare to face Wadham, or the (now dearly departed) Graduate Barbarians, you half expect not to end up playing them. But doyens of the top league Christ Church, to name but one of the recent offenders, are not your common or garden forfeiter.

But it’s a bit too easy simply to condemn the colleges that can’t get a side out. The heart of the matter is that sometimes getting a side out just isn’t likely. Possibly it’s the captain’s fault – you’ve skimped on raising awareness of the game, or you’ve forgotten, or you can’t play this week so the wheels have come off the whole affair. This is pretty rare though: most captains know their onions otherwise they wouldn’t be in that post in the first place. Much more common is the perfect storm of commitments. I’m not sure what strange alchemy it is but there are certain Tuesdays or Thursdays where nine regular players’ tutes have been moved to the least helpful time, and three of the others had an over-eventful night out the evening before, and have spent the morning getting familiar with the inside of their toilet bowl.

In times like these there’s not a lot you can do but accept that discretion’s the better part of valour. Borrowing a few players is one thing, but you can hardly borrow fourteen.I will, however, criticise some of the regulations. There is, for example, absolutely no reason why a side who have had a game against them cancelled should receive a bonus point. This leads to a situation where luck rather than talent decides the league, and a team who have run into a few forfeitures get it in the neck for their bad fortune. Shoddy.

A special word should be reserved for the old and ignoble game known as Cancellation Chicken. Common in lower league competitions it’s when a captain, in the knowledge that neither side is likely to have a full team, attempts to lure the other captain into conceding, either by stony silence or (in a riskier form of the game) by outwardly lying about the strength of his side. It can go well – certain Division 4 sides would still be languishing in Division 5 without it – but it doesn’t half make you feel dirty.So cancellations are no good thing in anyone’s book, but they are understandable and sometimes even useful.

College sport’s a rickety old beast at the best of times, and you can get spoilt by a clean run of fixtures into thinking that it’s a well-oiled machine, rather than a thoroughly chaotic pursuit which relies on a base of cajoling, blackmailing and dragooning. I’m still holding out hope for a game next week though, so fingers crossed that this cajoling is successful.

Cricket is a most capricious of sports. Halfway through the summer, English cricket looked to be performing on a lucrative purple patch, enriched by the team’s adamant, if at times scrappy, performance in Sri Lanka, and followed by its comprehensive dismantling of a touring West Indies side. But we are, sadly, no longer enjoying the Olympian summer and as winter falls upon us, a rather frostier image of England’s future prospects is forming.

The jarring memory of an ascendant South Africa seizing the number one spot from England was indeed telling. It showed that England could not hold itself together against quality opposition even in their own backyard: the batting was a constant let-down while the bowling, a much vaunted cornerstone of England’s rise to superpower status in the Test cricket purview, lacked the spark and zip of a 2011 England side.

Add to this picture a perplexing melodrama off-stage involving Kevin Pietersen and the English Cricket Board. Despite scoring a century in the Headingley Test, allegations that KP had sent inflammatory text messages to South African counterparts, was enough to get him kicked out of the side for sure. The concomitant of this malaise is a real sense of uncertainty and instability within the England ranks: something we simply could not have seen at the start of the summer.

Now the same questions are being asked: can England compete against persistent, fiery opposition of the South African mould? Was their success over the last few years, architected through easy victories against sides of lesser calibre? The jury is still out on those two. But another persistently nagging question that will certainly be answered soon is this: can England play subcontinent conditions?

England left for India on Thursday and are now preparing for what looks to be a gruelling Test tour of the subcontinent. But I think it is safe to say their track-record, both long-term and short-term, of India has not always been a prodigious one.

The last time England won a series in India was in 1985, while recently England have shown little bite when countering spin bowling. Last year, they were hammered 5-0 in the ODI series in India, while the 3-0 whitewash by Pakistan in the UAE, exposed the cracks in the English Test edifice on dry, low, turner pitches.

The team is not exactly screaming of consistency and confidence either. This will be Alistair Cook’s first outing as Test captain after to the resignation of Andrew Strauss a. Although Cook has certainly and obviously been groomed for the role over the last few years, he has an absolute gauntlet ahead of him: By his own admission“[England] have a real, tough challenge ahead of us as a side…it has been almost 30 years since we won in India.”.  

But it is not merely spin bowling that England will have to contend with on the subcontinent. I had the pleasure of interviewing Stuart Broad recently, and he told me that out in India, it is a completely different game; not necessarily because of the pitches, but because of the people.

The Indian fan is passionate about his cricket, and when Stuart bowled Sachin Tendulkar out at Bangalore, he was rewarded with the anger and derision of 80,000 Indians. England will have to be prepared to cope with this greater and irrational scrutiny if they want to succeed out there.

So what are their chances? It is not all doom and gloom thankfully. England have reintegrated Kevin Pietersen in recent weeks into the England set-up. In Pietersen lies a key to tackling spin-bowling and a charisma and natural attacking mentality that finds considerable purchase on the subcontinent: both in performances and in courting the elusive favour of Mumbaiker public opinion.

Moreover, it is an overstatement to imply that England are going to be facing outrageously spin-friendly tracks in India.The recent New Zealand tour pitches were so unhelpful to spinners that Indian captain MS Dhoni commented: “It felt more like we were in Napier than in India”. Flat tracks which provide easy batting stimulus will be found, and these are the opportunities for England’s young guns to fire. True, Dhoni has won more Test matches in India than any captain before him, but frankly, the New Zealand tour had his side questioned, challenged and pushed to the limit far too often. Most worryingly, India’s big guns of Virender Sehwag, Sachin Tendulkar and Gautam Gambhir, men who are expected to lead the Indian attack this winter, did not fire.

But the challenge really is there. Of the touring squad, only Cook and Pietersen have made centuries in India and if we are going on recent history, England’s chances do not look good. As Stuart Broad and Alistair Cook have said, it is all about confidence.

With a series of practice matches ahead of them, England must do all they can do ensconce in the exotic pitches of the subcontinent if ever they are to prove a challenge.

Teddy Hall capitalised on Oriel’s slow start to win a game that was for the most part staid and error-strewn in unfavourable conditions. Hall went over the line three times in the first half hour to open up a lead that Oriel, for all their subsequent perseverance and occasional menace, never seemed likely to overhaul.

In a game of relatively inexpansive rugby – a response to the drizzle in the air and the underfoot squelch – Hall, especially in the first half, proved more effective in their use of the ball. The forwards recycled powerfully and efficiently, and the backs, marshalled by an influential 10-12 partnership, moved the ball quickly enough in the early stages to do damage out wide.

The number 12, James Heywood, scored the first and had a role to play as Rob Humphreys scored in the corner a few minutes later, and then again as one of the most fluid backline combinations in the game released winger Owen Silk, whose burst of pace was enough to take him round the outside of the Oriel defence unchallenged to score Hall’s third under the posts. Oriel only really grew into the game once the three try deficit had been established, with their forwards beginning to make their presence felt at the breakdown, and both centres making ground with hard-run lines.

Hall’s previous discipline started to dissipate, and on the stroke of half time Oriel got their reward for their more positive approach when a tap penalty taken inside Hall’s 22 led to a ruck from which the ball was quickly retrieved allowing a few quick passes to put the outside centre through a hole in Hall’s scampering defensive line and over for a try, making the score 19-5 at half-time.

There may have been little to warm the hearts (or the feet) of the small but hardy Oriel side-line contingent in the opening period, but they were afforded their share of off the pitch one-upmanship early in the second half as the game took a slightly farcical turn.

With Oriel camped in the opposition 22, one of Hall’s supporters took it upon himself to bring the referee’s attention to an alleged knock-on. The referee, for his part, wasn’t impressed at having his authority challenged by just any side-line loudmouth, and questioned his critic’s credentials. When it emerged that this particular loudmouth had in fact already taken his refereeing course thank you very much, the referee marched over to him, and brandished what was, in the context of this reasonably good-natured game, a very incongruous red card, much to the bemusement of all involved.

In any case, that late first-half score had given Oriel the sense that the game could still be retrieved, and a newfound purposefulness became apparent in their ball carrying. The forwards made good ground around the fringes of the ruck, providing the foundation for a period of sustained pressure on the Teddy Hall defence, who were suddenly struggling to clear their lines, or retain the ball when they did. But Oriel had their own problems with ball retention, and a number of handling errors prevented them from converting their territory into points.

When Hall’s kicker stroked a straightforward penalty over the posts a few minutes later, the game began to drift back into Hall’s favour. Neither side really imposed themselves on the second half though, and the period was dominated by a stream of scrums, penalties and turnovers as fatigue and wet weather took their toll.

The general scrappiness was punctured by the occasional line break, or string of phases, which yielded chances for both sides. It was Oriel who made the most of theirs, being awarded a penalty try after repeated ill-discipline from Hall on their own five metre line. Despite this encouragement leading to a great deal of possession in the closing stages, Oriel lacked the penetration to do any further damage.

So the score remained at 22-12, with Teddy Hall, reduced to 14 men for the last few minutes after the sin-binning of their right winger for a high tackle, defending well enough to hold onto their lead in relative comfort.  

I don’t know that much about the technicalities of power-lifting. Could you talk about the technique and what goes into it?

 In terms of competitions, there are three main lifts: the squat, the dead-lift and the bench. The squat involves squatting down and up with the weight resting on the top of your back, the dead-lift involves lifting the weight directly off the floor until lock-out and the bench involves pressing the weight off your chest whilst lying down on a bench. Basically, the total weight you lift across these three is added up and is then scored relative to your body weight. This is the way we compete for Varsity for instance.

 Talk me through the training routine for power lifting. Do you focus on particular body muscles for different lifts?

 The best way to train can be quite a subjective topic. I’ve personally experimented with a number of different programs in the past. Currently, I’m training in some form or another pretty much every day. A lot of the focus is on leg, back and core strength, but the upper body cannot be disregarded because of its importance in the bench press. If you get in the squad for Varsity, I think that the expected level of training is at least 4-5 times a week. But again, the exact training style that will yield the best results really depends on the individual. I have done some pretty intense programmes in the past, which make you work about twelve times a week, so that’s morning and evening, six times a week.

Say I’m a complete beginner and have never done powerlifting before. How do I get started?

First of all, I would come to one our club sessions so that you could receive coaching on how to sort out your form for the three lifts and to learn exactly what’s involved in the training. There are a lot of beginner programs, but perhaps the most popular is the “Starting Strength” course; where you train three times a week, and you basically concentrate just on the power-lifting moves i.e. you squat every time you train, and supplement that with mainly the bench press and dead-lifts. I would probably recommend sticking to a program like this for anywhere between 6 months to a year, until your lifts started to plateau.

How does the Varsity power-lifting competition work?

Each member of the team is given three attempts at each of the three principle lifts that I mentioned earlier. Before the competition starts you have to inform the judge how much you are going to lift for your first attempt. Once you’ve submitted that weight you cannot go down from that; if you fail your first lift, say at 170kg for the dead-lift, you are not allowed to go down from that, you can only stay the same or increase it. As a result, most people start at a conservative weight, and go up for the second and third attempt. Once you’ve had three attempts at each lift, your best lifts across the three events are totalled and then a coefficient is used to score that weight relative to your body weight, so people of different weights and builds can be compared on the basis of strength.

Do you see winning Varsity as the ultimate goal for the team?

I’d say it definitely is; but that’s not to say we don’t have other competitions. For instance, in November we have the University Championships that we have won for the last four years in a row – so we definitely take it very seriously. We want to keep that going.

Given the physical demands of power-lifting, do you see it as something anyone of any size or build can do?

The members of our varsity squad last year were of very varied builds and sizes, so I think more or less anyone can get involved: for instance, the amount of female interest in training is growing, and I think that’s another reflection that power-lifting is quite an open and accessible sport. It’s always great to see people coming through and competing in events, who previously had never done any power-lifting before.

The training sounds very time-consuming. How much does it impact on your academic work and social life?

It impacts a fair deal, not only because of the amount of time training takes up directly, but also because of the fairly strict diet and lifestyle that are required to get the most out of it. But this kind of self-discipline is not something that’s unique to power-lifting; it’s like most sports really.  As far as social life within the sport is concerned, there isn’t too much of an issue. When I first joined the club I thought there might not be much of a team mentality, because you are ultimately competing on your own to lift the weight. But it’s really not like that all. Only a very small amount of time is spent actually competing. The majority is spent training, and for safety and motivational purposes, we nearly always train as a squad.

With the process of lifting large weights, is the injury risk quite high?

I think there is unarguably the potential for injury in the sport. That’s why it is so key that you work on your form and your flexibility. Obviously, when you start lifting fairly heavy weights, there is a risk of serious injury, especially to your back: this can happen so easily and you do have to be very careful. But at the same time, if your form is correct and you are keeping fairly flexible, power-lifting has the potential to actually strengthen your back muscles and to increase bone density, thus preventing the risk of injury in the long term. I think it is definitely avoidable. Things can go wrong, but you can’t keep those negative thoughts in your head, especially leading up to a competition.

Finally, is it a hassle to have to go down to Iffley for training?

Yes it can be a hassle sometimes, particularly if you cycle there, because that can affect your training routines and rhythm. But, like most things, it’s all about finding the time to just go and get on with it.