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In my post two weeks ago I promised a shoutout to whoever was the first person to comment on it, because I had only just figured out how to turn on the comments section. One whole year after making this website, I had finally gotten round to adding an incredibly basic feature, and the time was nigh to start harvesting some sweet, sweet feedback.

And how better to farm interaction than to promise some kind of reward for interacting. Simple.

Pretty clear call to arms and a pretty clear potential reward, there. Oscar followed the instructions to the letter and corrected a factual error in the post (another boon for would-be commenters - the ability to tell me when I'm chatting nonsense), but where was the reward? Nothing.

I can only imagine he was up like a kid on Christmas Eve the night before the post went live, unable to sleep with excitement at the form his shoutout would take. Scanning the document rapidly, like someone watching sped-up tennis highlights on a phone screen, he eagerly anticipates the mention of his name. But he gets to the end, and the last shot hits the net in a limp surrender. Game, set and no match for his name on a CTRL+F search. Betrayal of the highest order.

So consider this my apology, Oscar. I hope that it suffices.

And for the rest of you, comments are still available. You probably won't have an entire intro dedicated to you, but if you sign up and subscribe then you'll also be able to point out my (not so infrequent) blunders.

With that in mind, tonight's match is not between Emmanuel, Cam and Jesus, Cam, as I erroneously stated in last week's post. Emmanuel was right, but they're playing Jesus, Oxford. Those pesky Oxbridge colleges with the same name. Its not really fair.

Emmanuel won the trophy in 2010 thanks to the inimitable quizzing prowess of one Alex Guttenplan, one of the most famous UC contestants of all time. Giving him a run for his money is Bobby Seagull, also an Emmanuel captain, who led his side to the semi-finals in 2016.

Jesus reached the quarter-finals on their last appearance, in 2019/20, and will be looking to make it beyond that stage for the first time since they won the penultimate Bamber Gascoigne series in 1986, defeating Imperial in a best of three final.

If you think that this was too much of a rambling intro comment down below, but for now let's get on with it; here's your first starter for ten.

A charming brown turtleneck and a pen in his blazer pocket, the opening starter goes to Emmanuel's Harrison, with Nosferatu. They take a hat-trick on goats before another ten pointer from the knitwearing engineer strengthened Emmanuel's position.

A quickfire double from Jesus, including the picture starter which was a surprisingly basic graph of the cosine function, tied the game, but they wouldn't score any more points for a long while...

Another from Harrison siezed back the initiative for Emmanuel and they didn't let go. They manage to hear the word generator in relation to a question about physics and not immediately say Van de Graaf, which was the correct answer, but it doesn't matter because they're getting all of the starters right anyway.

On a question asking for one of the four bodily humours, Harrison lists off all four before selecting the correct one, the quizzing equivalent of doing keepy-uppies in front of an opponent before dribbling past them. I'm losing track of how many starters he has at this point, but he takes yet another with Sorrows of Young Werther, and Emmanuel are firmly in charge.

No one gets the music starter, but Harrison (who else) wins the bonuses for Emma after an incorrect interrution from Deng. The gap has surpassed one hundred points at this stage, and another neg from Deng doesn't help matters.

Proving that he's only human, much like Tadej Pogacar's radio message at this years Tour de France did, Harrison buzzes in early with a wrong answer of his own on the next starter, giving Fourier Expansion rather than Fourier Transform. He makes up for it very quickly though, with Beyond on the following question. No harm no foul.

With Jesus 150 points adrift, Biggs saves some face for the Oxonian's, taking Frank Lloyd Wright for the second picture starter. This pushes them out of the top five lowest scores of the BBC era. A few more later on would knock them outside the top thirty, but everything from now on was merely a consolation. You can tell Biggs is a bit annoyed to have made it all this way only to be outclassed by such a large margin, but there wasn't really much else they could have done when faced with Harrison in such fine form.

As the match closed out, Emmanuel were given a bonus set on mathematicians whose surnames begin with the letter K. One of these was Klein, made famous by his eponymous bottle, which in turn gained prominence thanks to the use of a plushy version as Emmanuel's mascot in the 2016 series.

I wonder whether this was a purposeful nod by the question setters to Emmanuel's history, or if it was just a quirk of the draw. Either way, it's always fun to reference two-dimensional manifolds on which one cannot define a normal vector at each point that varies continuously over the whole manifold.

Emmanuel 240 - 60 Jesus

A hugely impressive performance from Emmanuel, Harrison in particular, who becomes the second player in two weeks to take nine starters.

As Rajan pointed out, Jesus never really got going, though he gives them the chance to show off their green fingernails, which gives them a brilliant screenshot to take home with them, if nothing else.