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COPS are searching for a University of Oxford student, who went missing over three weeks ago in the early hours of the morning. 

Benedict, known as Ben, was last seen at around 1am on Sunday, January 26 in the Cripley Road area of Botley, West Oxford.

Thames Valley Police

The Oxford student was wearing a red chequered shirt over a black t-shirt, light blue baggy jeans and trainers[/caption]

Thames Valley Police released CCTV footage of the 20-year-old the night he vanished.

He was wearing a red chequered shirt over a black t-shirt, light blue baggy jeans and trainers.

The force have now deployed a marine unit to scour a river in the area as the search continues into its third week.

Emma Picket, whose son is friends with Ben told MailOnline: “This has been really frightening and shocking and turned all the lives upside down of all the people that knew Ben.

“It’s horrible enough when someone goes missing but horrible when you don’t have answers and don’t know what’s happening.

“And obviously he’s not been found, which is really scary.”

A Thames Valley Police spokesperson said: “Thames Valley Police is continuing its investigation to search for missing man Ben, aged 20.

“Today further activity will be undertaken with the support of Lowland Rescue Oxfordshire.

“Any further activity will be conducted based on specialist advice from our tactical search teams and Lowland Rescue Oxfordshire.”

ABBIE LARKIN is hoping to hit the high notes for Ireland after bagging her first goal for Crystal Palace.

Larkin scored in stoppage time 10 days ago as Palace defeated Newcastle United in the FA Cup.

And the 19-year-old is looking to add to her solitary goal for her country on Friday when Carla Ward’s reign as manager starts with a Nations League clash against Turkiye.

Larkin said: “Hopefully! Yeah, I’d love to, anyway. I was really happy getting my first goal for Palace, even if it was a deflection.”

And the Ringsend native is happy with her lot even though Palace are propping up the Women’s Super League.

Although she usually starts on the bench, she is featuring far more regularly this term than she did in their promotion-winning campaign after moving from Glasgow City in January 2024.

She said: “It’s definitely crucial. Not playing, sitting on the bench is not going to help your development.

“Confidence is key. If you’re playing a lot of minutes, you’re going to get confident on the ball. It just helps you believe in yourself more. It’s really important.

“It’s definitely a big step, I feel like the talent is a lot higher in the WSL. It’s been hard for us, we have to put in the work and effort to try and stay up and we’re doing OK now.

“We have had some losses that we probably should have got a draw, but I mean that’s the game.”

Ward has already been to watch her in action for her club and the teenager believes she can flourish in her style of football.

She said: “I think it’s going to be more attacking, which is definitely going to benefit me. I’m such an attacking player.

“We’re all really excited for her coming in and we’re excited for a fresh start. We can’t wait.”

She also believes she has pinned down her best position after being used here, there and everywhere.

She said:  I’ve been around in a lot of positions throughout my career and yeah, I think right winger definitely stands out for me.

“I like having the touch line on my back.

“I love taking on players down the wing and I think crossing the ball and assisting players is what I like to do, hopefully getting a few goals myself. 

“Everybody likes to score and it’s an amazing feeling. You can’t think about anything else in that moment.”

If she is relishing a fresh start at international level, she is enjoying some consistency at club level as she is now at Palace for more than a year after six-month stints at, first, Shamrock Rovers and Glasgow City.

She shares a flat with her colleague for club and country Izzy Atkinson with Hayley Nolan also with the Eagles.

CLUB FORM

She said: “I am definitely settled. I get on with all the girls and I’m enjoying it.

“Having a bit of Irish culture there is amazing, and has helped a lot. We’re all very supportive of each other.

“I think most of them are trying to say they’re half Irish now. They all love me, Hayley and Izzy.

“I think just a bit of everything – a bit of our music, a lot of things, yeah.

“I sing a lot of songs. I actually love sad songs. And not just because they’re sad, I just like them. They’re just good songs.”

And it must be in the blood with her brother Brandon a gigging musician.

She said: “I play guitar too. My brother is a musician, he has two bands. 

“So he kind of taught me a few things and yeah, I just tried to teach myself a little bit. It’s just something to like do when you’re bored and stuff.”

GALWAY UNITED have added Bohemians centre half Cian Byrne on loan until July.

The 22-year-old was made available by the Gypsies following the return to fitness of Rob Cornwall, with United winning the race for his signature. 

Assistant manager Ollie Organ said: “He was on our radar, and most club’s radar. He had a very good season last year and he jumped at the chance to take him. 

“It really only transpired in the last ten days. We’ve a number of injuries in that area of the pitch and we’ve liked him for a long time. 

“When we were in the First Division, he was with Longford Town and he was outstanding in the games he played against us.”

Byrne came through the Bohs academy and spent the first half of the 2023 season on loan at Longford before returning to Bohs, where he played in the FAI Cup final. 

Last season, he made 26 appearances for the Gypsies though he was not part of the matchday squad for the season opener against Shamrock Rovers. 

Meanwhile, Horgan believes that Galway United are in a good place this season – but admitted he has no idea where they will finish in what he expects to be a competitive league.

He added: “I can’t speak for every club but I’d say the majority of clubs wouldn’t be able to answer you if you asked them where they are going to finish. 

“Last year, a serious club was going to be relegated and it happened to be Dundalk. You look this year, a big club is going to be relegated.

“We’ve brought in players that we think can improve us, to try and improve our finish last year in the top half. 

“We’re going to have ups and downs with it with the quality that is in this division, the difficult teams are going to be playing away from home.

“But there is certainly a good feel factor, a ‘Let’s go at this’. If it’s good enough, it’s enough. If it’s not, it’s not.

“There is no real fear factor, we’ll have a cut off it.”

TYRONE ace Niall Morgan has warned that prohibiting goalkeepers from going forward would be ‘a massive step backwards’ for Gaelic football.

As a key component of his side’s attacking threat, Morgan has epitomised the evolution of the modern keeper.

But the freedom afforded to the two-time All-Star and his peers could be in jeopardy amid scrutiny of the game’s new rules.

Morgan insisted: “If they stop the goalkeeper from going forward altogether, a number of goalkeepers would walk away.”

Under the enhancements introduced by the Football Review Committee, teams are required to keep a minimum of three outfield players in each half.

However, with goalkeepers permitted to join the play as a 12th man inside the opposition’s half, attacking teams can create an overload.

Derry boss Paddy Tally said the rule is ‘killing the game’ after watching Morgan help Tyrone to victory against the Oak Leafers in last month’s NFL opener.

Next time out, Tyrone were beaten by All-Ireland champions Armagh, for whom keeper Ethan Rafferty kicked 0-5.

But Morgan said: “The game has evolved so much over the last ten, 15, 20 years and I just think the changes that have been made have been positive in large ways. 

“When there was a gale-force wind in Armagh and Ethan Rafferty kicked whatever amount of points against Tyrone, how people looked at that game and saw it as a negative, I just don’t know.”

Goalkeepers can now only receive a pass from a team-mate in their own half when both players are inside the large rectangle.

But if a rule were to be introduced that restricted keepers from straying beyond the vicinity of their goalmouth, Morgan believes it would deter players from taking up the position.

The Edendork man, who plays outfield for his club, said: “I genuinely don’t see where you’d get any enjoyment out of playing that role. 

“At the end of the day, the game has developed so much. It has moved forward and I think making a drastic change like that would just pull it back so much. 

“We’re seeing young lads now wanting to be a goalkeeper, wanting to be wearing the different colour jersey, wanting to wear goalkeeping gloves and I think telling them they have to stay on the line would just regress the game so much. 

“That’s where a massive fear of mine lies. I think I made that sort of clear whenever the rules were only being made. I sort of felt they were changing us back a wee bit. 

“I think the rule change has actually been really positive because it has stopped that lateral passing in your own half.

“There’s probably some goalkeeper sitting somewhere going, ‘Please, just let me stay back because I don’t want to [go outfield], I’m happy to be an out-and-out goalkeeper.’

“But if it’s an advantage for a team to have somebody that can do both roles, then why would you take that away?”

As for the suggestion that a goalkeeper’s foray into opposing territory affords his team a numerical advantage, Morgan feels it is disingenuous.

NEW FRUSTRATION

He explained: “It’s probably frustrating for me because people are now calling it the 12-v-11 rule.

“For starters, it’s not a rule that the keeper has to come up. And it’s also 12-v-12. It’s no different to last year when it was 15-v-15. 

“Now that the teams are leaving three up and three back, magically a player on the team is disappearing.

“A friend of mine keeps texting me, saying, ‘When is the team that’s defending going to push their keeper out?'”

Morgan added that the new rules have placed additional demands on goalkeepers to ensure that their fitness is up to scratch.

The 33-year-old revealed: “Against Cork last year in the Championship, I would have thought that I came out a lot but against Derry I did three kilometres more in the game and my high-speed running was about four times what it was last year.

“I used to always say that I was going to go back to nets for the club to prolong my career. Now I’m thinking about staying outfield to prolong my career!”

LEGENDARY Offaly boss Michael Bond never lets his spirits drop after being diagnosed with amyloidosis in 2021. 

Bond was the Faithful’s secret agent in 1998 when he led them to All-Ireland glory out of nowhere. 

He was diagnosed with the condition in 2021, where amyloid proteins build up on vital organs and cause them not to work properly.

Bond’s amyloidosis affected his heart, and he was treated with intense chemotherapy to battle the disease.

The disease cannot be fully cured – but he is relishing life at 76 despite his condition. 

He said: “From August to Christmas in 2021, I was in hospital nearly all the time. I had fierce problems with breathing because my heart capacity was reduced. 

“Because of the deposits of amyloidosis on my heart, my heart capacity was reduced down to about 30, 33 per cent. And you see, it can’t pump the fluid out of the lungs. 

“It was horrendous the first couple of years because I had, let’s say, 24 chemo sessions in a row once a week and I had 24 sessions in a row the following time. 

“And of course I lost a lot of weight and it was very embarrassing when I’d meet very close people that knew me so well and didn’t recognise me. 

“You’re totally lethargic, but the point is that we had to do it in order to stop the flow of the amyloidosis – of the amyloid protein.

“I was detected, maybe four or five years too late. It’s a dangerous disease. It’s an incurable, rare disease, but it’s dangerous.

“But thanks be to God that life is good. We can’t do too much, but we’re living.”

The Loughrea man looked on from a New York bar when Babs Keating’s “sheep in a heap” were hammered 3-10 to 1-11 in the 1998 Leinster final and the SunSport columnist quit as boss.

Five days later, Bond took his first session as Offaly manager. Less than 10 weeks after that, they were All-Ireland champions on September 13.  

Their All-Ireland semi-final trilogy with Clare was one of the biggest sagas in hurling history, as referee Jimmy Cooney blew the replay up five minutes too early, with Clare 1-16 to 2-10 ahead. 

Throngs of Offaly fans sat on the Croke Park pitch in protest, and the GAA agreed to play a second replay in Thurles – which they won 0-16 to 0-13. 

They got sweet revenge on the Cats in the All-Ireland final, as Brian Whelehan starred with 1-6 in a 2-16 to 1-13 win. 

Bond is the subject of this week’s episode of TG4’s Laochra Gael, which airs tomorrow night at 9.30pm. And the Galway man admits that 10 weeks of mayhem was the stuff of dreams. 

He said: “But when I became a school principal then in ’86 you couldn’t go and train a team. 

“But the fact that Offaly was available in ‘98 during the summer holidays and I was available, it just happened, and it’s almost like a mystery that it happened. 

“It’s surreal. I mean, the length of time that I was there in ‘98 was just over 10 weeks. From the time I went in until the All-Ireland final day. So that’s surreal. It’s almost like a fairy tale.”

WE NEED to talk before it’s too late.

This relationship is not what it used to be. We were so happy, yet it all feels a bit empty at the moment. Maybe things have gone a bit stale, but how do we spice it up? 

We just don’t talk anymore. All we get is silence, and it’s heartbreaking. 

Look at the League of Ireland lads up the road, and how happy they all are.

Valentine’s day was the perfect place to start, even if Tolka Park went dark during Shelbournes’ 3-1 win over Derry. 

A fan who worked for the ESB checked it all out, and a few phone calls later it was all sorted as the Drumcondra crowd revelled in the banter. 

They rocked into the Aviva in their droves on Sunday to watch Bohs beat Shamrock Rovers 1-0 in the biggest derby of them all, ever – 33,208 of them to be exact. 

Domestic soccer is thriving and the love between fan, player and club is all mutual – because they communicate with each other. There’s a mutual respect.

The clubs care, and the League of Ireland is sexy again. The game is laced with characters and colour, from Damien Duff’s blockbuster interviews to Rovers’ dream run in Europe. 

Michael Noonan wrote himself into the history books as the youngest ever scorer in European competition when his strike gave the Hoops a famous 1-0 win in Molde last week. He had school the next morning. 

Say what you like about former Irish manager Stephen Kenny, but domestic football was always going to be the next port of call for the St. Patrick’s Athletic boss after things didn’t work out on the national stage. 

The stories are endless every week, and it’s not confined to the capital either.

Respective fan bases have fallen in love with Galway United and Cork City all over again after turbulent times at both clubs. 

Sligo Rovers and Derry City have always survived on the basis of a hardcore fan base in towns where soccer was always king, but the whole thing is back in vogue. 

Danny Grant, Roberto Lopes (Shamrock Rovers), Connor Parsons (Bohs), and Aidan Keena (St. Pat’s) have all appeared in these pages in the past week alone. 

The majority of League of Ireland players are free to speak to the media as they please, with no constraints. 

Fans are given an insight into their personalities, and their faces are growing ever familiar all the time to the general public. 

Our olympians and rugby players are the same, and that is why they are stealing the hearts and minds of the Irish people.

But let’s go back to the silence – that awful culture that has seeped into the GAA psyche and is breaking our hearts. 

We want to make this work. This is not media whinging – because it’s the public and the association as a whole who really lose out. 

The national leagues began with a whimper last month. There was an impromptu launch the day beforehand over zoom (this was because of the storm,) but it was all too little, too late. 

For years, a lot of counties have refused to let their players conduct interviews after games, hiding them away behind the door of paranoia. 

Of course, there are exceptions. In 2017, the Waterford hurlers under Derek McGrath spoke freely to the press as they pleased. 

It didn’t do them any harm, as they reached the All-Ireland final that summer for the first time in nine years. 

The Monaghan footballers have largely been the same. Conor McManus was always happy to take a call in between winning All-Stars and strutting his stuff as a legend of the game. 

There are plenty of other examples, of course. But more and more managers are pulling the shutters down around their panels.

MEDIA DUTIES

In fairness to the Dublin players who won an historic six All-Irelands in a row, they were all happy to engage with the media – when they were allowed to.

Their interviews were often pleasant and engaging, from Jack McCaffrey to Paul Mannion and James McCarthy to Michael Darragh Macauley. All great characters, but those chats were just far too rare.

Tyrone stopper Niall Morgan gave a fantastic interview last week that features in this edition, but none of his team-mates were allowed to talk after their loss to Mayo on Sunday.

The general public are starting to wake up. Under-16 tickets are €5 and no longer free, which has dischentated the ground troops even more.

Match programmes are redundant, as reams of changes and additions to the bench are announced minutes before throw-in. 

It happened in Donegal on Sunday when Michael Murphy was added to the subs.

This huge news should have been heralded all week, but was communicated just 14 minutes before throw-in. 

The same thing occurred before Mayo’s win over Tyrone with Aidan O’Shea’s return to the bench announced minutes before the game was due to start. 

The attendance at the game was 6,029 – less than half of the 12,218 that attended the same Division 1 fixture in 2023. 

The PA also announced that anyone who left the ground would have to buy another ticket if they wanted to get back in. Tone deaf. 

It doesn’t have to be this way, but unrequited love eventually forces you to move on.

On February 1, no one could have foreseen that the entire landscape of the NBA was going to change. That was when Shams Charania of ESPN posted that the Los Angeles Lakers had pulled off a trade for Luka Doncic, with the Dallas Mavericks inexplicably giving up on the 25-year-old star that led them to […]

The post Rich Paul claims Lakers’ Luka Doncic-Anthony Davis trade would not have happened if he knew about it appeared first on ClutchPoints.

UConn basketball head coach Dan Hurley revealed how the comeback victory against Villanova gives him hope the Huskies can turn their season around. The two-time defending champs were in dire straits heading into this clash with its Big East rival. UConn was coming off a brutal loss to conference bottom dweller Seton Hall in what […]

The post UConn basketball’s Dan Hurley reveals hope for Huskies after massive comeback to beat Villanova appeared first on ClutchPoints.

The Big Ten conference slate hasn’t gone as Brad Underwood and Illinois basketball would have hoped, and that unfortunate trend continued on Tuesday night. With a chance to bolster their NCAA Tournament resume and move up in the conference standings, Illinois got crushed 95-74 on the road by No. 11 Wisconsin. The game stayed fairly […]

The post Brad Underwood reveals reason why Illinois avoided Wisconsin after game appeared first on ClutchPoints.

The UCF Knights (13-12, 4-10 Big 12) visit the Oklahoma State Cowboys (12-13, 4-10 Big 12) Wednesday night. This game will continue our College Basketball odds series as we hand out an UCF-Oklahoma State prediction and pick. We will also let you know how to watch the game. Here are the UCF-Oklahoma State College Basketball […]

The post UCF vs. Oklahoma State prediction, pick, college basketball odds appeared first on ClutchPoints.