It's Varsity! Didn't you notice?

Should Carter throw Varsity?

Yes, the Mens 1st XI have qualified for the BUSA plate knockout competition. Qualifying as winners of Northern League 3B, they are playing Scottish side Stirling this afternoon on 22 acres. Forgive me for not getting excited about Varsity, but I’d wager you’d struggle to find any sportsman or woman on campus who really cares about the event.

This is not for the lack of trying. Jo Carter has had some good ideas about raising the profile of the event, which you can read in her interview with Michael Sneddon, but I can’t help feeling that her efforts are all in vain.

Can we learn from Roses? What is it that makes Roses so special?

• We are currently joint 33rd place in the BUSA rankings, with 17 points. One of the universities that we are tied with are, you guessed it, Lancaster. Competition is most enjoyable when it is just that, competitive. York St John are joint 58th – having amassed a whopping zero BUSA points this year. It’s not fun to dominate any rival, win or lose. If we were to hold a similar competition against Loughborough (currently top of the BUSA rankings with a disgusting 635 points) we would be equally crushed by their superior strength and depth of talent. Where’s the fun in that?

• This is why Roses can boast an atmosphere. Each fixture is competitive, and each sportsman and woman actually takes an interest in clashes played in other sports. How many spectators turned up to watch our high achieving football 1st XI compete last year? Zero. The match couldn't even go ahead due to a refereeing cock up. Could you seriously see this happening in Roses?

Rugby is a high profile Roses fixture, often happening at the end of the weekend.

As a Roses player, the away fixtures are the best. Varsity will always be at home. At home it’s the same routine as any other fixture, there’s no romance in that. Roses is all about the struggle to get to sleep in a lecture hall, sharing a lecture floor as part of one single York sporting mass. Most players spend the whole weekend over on the Lancaster campus, and whenever a team isn’t playing, they find another sport to go and support. Team spirit makes playing sport worthwhile for most at this generally unsporting University, Roses is the pinnacle of this.

• St John are a bunch of pikeys. Not only have they never represented no serious threat to our sporting prowess, they go about it in a chavvy fashion. Of the sports I know, every team knows to expect a tough game when facing up against St Johns. But it’s a different form of competitiveness than those with Lancaster. There’s a nasty bitterness to playing St John. There is good reason we avoid each other on nights out. Lancaster however, are much more like us. There is a much greater deal of mutual respect.

• On a more personal note, my favourite moment of last year's Roses was the victory in the Ski racing. This year St John have asked for Skiing to be included in Varsity. Brilliant! I’m all for a wider scope of competition, but sorry to sound repetitive, how on earth can they represent any kind of competition? They have no representation at Kings - the equivalent of BUSA and NUL for most other sports, and seem to be plucking a team out of thin air. York are now ranked 3rd amongst the northern universities. Roses was brilliant because Lancaster used to dick all over us, but in each of the last three years we have improved, and now we have overtaken them. This is what Roses is all about, competition, Varsity is simply too easy.

Maybe the best thing to happen to the Varsity competition would be for York St John to complete an historic upset. Then we would start to care. Maybe, if Carter really cares about making Varsity an event to be proud of, she should be engineering a landmark defeat. That would be some legacy.

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