Thursday 20 December 2012

The Last Blog

So here we are: the day before world's end. A scary, scary thought - everything you once cared about, obliterated, gone. Forever. It isn't even a punchline to a joke. It's the punchline to a calendar.

Obviously that's all the evidence we need to assume that December 21st is the day that everyone and everything gets obliterated. You can cry all you like about not seeing your hamster again, you'll also be dead so what difference does it make? In fact, I'll go as far to say that you'll be a similar size pile of ash or gloop as the little critter by the end of it, in your smoking shoes, of course.

Everyone's had long enough to prepare and even marketing sections of major corporations have got involved with Lynx promoting their 'Final Edition', and who knows, maybe the DFS sale will finally end? But how have you prepared? You haven't? Well, luckily I've prepared for four possible eventualities, and you're more than welcome to tag along and join my clan and help repopulate the world (blokes need not apply, you can do one).

Zombie Apocalypse

The first port of call for any horror fan is this classic scenario: the dear are rising and your great-grandparents, who used to seem so friendly and welcoming with that 'old person' smell, want nothing more than to eat your brains. If you see your beloved childhood pet charging at you, don't give it one final stroke, because that's what it will be.

Not on my watch. Twat them round the head with a shovel, punch them square in the face - just do whatever it takes to get those undead beasts to leave you alone. If zombie films and games have taught us anything it's that they're lumbering creatures who have a default speed of 'slow', so it should even be quite easy to outrun them in your car, or even your child's scooter.

If worst comes to worse just surround yourself in a zombie's mortal enemy: the fence. There's no way past it. Can't go over it, can't go under it, can't go round it. Apocalypse survived.

Nuclear Explosion

Now this is the biggy - it'll cause unimaginable anarchy, incredible mutations, horrific scars and scorching burns, but you'll be fine.

Testwood Sports College in Totton has a stage - under this stage is a small area where people who read this blog can chill out and let what happens outside happen, as, if rumour be true (and let's hope it be...), you're safe from absolutely anything. I'm not sure why the safest place to be is under a stage in a school, but I have a good feeling about it.

Clearly this isn't going to work without supplies, so the group will nominate someone to arm up with some fireworks and a few sharpened stage planks to go hunting. I'd like to take this opportunity to say that I'm exempt from this as it was my idea. It's a dog eat dog world out there, so it's every man for themselves. The person must be as cunning as they are brave and as brave as they are stupid. Any politicians volunteering? Repeat until I'm the last one left. Apocalypse survived.

Tidal Wave

Everyone knows that the overwhelming majority of the Earth's surface is covered with water, so there isn't a lot you can do in way of prevention here, but that doesn't mean all is lost. Every beachside town and every gift shop in the country is full of inflatables, buckets and kids fishing rods. All you have to do is pitch in a few quid each with your family members (or not if you can't stand them), buy these essentials and tie them together with some rope.

By doing this you'll have something to float (live) on, buckets to do your business in and keep food (separately) and fishing rods to catch fish with. I dare say that animals such as cows and pigs won't be quite smart enough to do this, so there'll be plenty of them for the taking if you get fed up of fish and chips every night. Apocalypse survived.

Planetary Collision

Granted, there isn't a lot you can do about this one, I mean, this catastrophe would be on an astronomical scale, but what's the harm in trying to survive? All you have to do is jump onto this other planet as it smashes into us. Grab hold of a rock or something. That way you've avoided the initial impact by jumping and you can still survive because the rogue planet will be in our atmosphere. I'm a genius. Apocalypse survived.

So there you have it... The easiest ways to survive the impending apocalypse. Experts say that there's a one in infinite probability that it will actually happen tomorrow, but nobody cares about experts. At least you can be safe in the knowledge that if they're right and nothing does happen we'll be able to go to the DFS sale wearing the new Lynx fragrance: Survivor. You heard it here first.

Wednesday 12 December 2012

Critical Evaluation - WINOL (Semester 1)



My first semester on WINOL went a lot better than I could have expected and that’s largely due to the fact that, as a team, everyone works efficiently to produce an incredibly high quality product, and nothing shows that off better than the Alexa rankings.

At the start of term WINOL had slumped to a level around the 1.8 million mark, the website’s lowest ever ranking. This was because it had not received any attention over the summer, nobody is going to look at a dead website with no new news. Raising it back to where it belongs was always going to be a challenge but with a combination of great news stories, well-filmed sports highlights and fantastic features. WINOL now sits in the top 500,000 in the world and in the top 10,000 in the UK; it’s the highest ranked student output in the country, and also has a higher Alexa ranking than The Hampshire Chronicle’s website.

WINOL’s primary output is news and over the course of the semester the stories have improved massively. In our first bulletin there was a story on bottle collection which was important to a few locally, but it does not have massive amounts of news value. However, in later bulletins there have been stories of national importance that we have adapted to work locally, such as the ash tree disease.

We were also lucky to have national stories developing locally – the closure of the Ford factory in Southampton is a great example of this, and with interviews with people at Ford and trade union representatives we made sure that balance was maintained.

On a technical level the stories have also improved. Early in the term there was no use of natural sound but recently this has started to shine through. In particular, there’s a story on new jobs being created in Southampton which is full of natural sound of machinery. The most striking of which is at the start of the VT where a circular saw is being used.

It isn’t just the VT’s that have improved greatly – the presentation of WINOL as a whole has kept up with the high standards set by the reporters. One way that this has been achieved is by using a coming up belt; this isn’t just a tactic to make the broadcast seem more professional, it’s a device to keep the viewer interested by advertising some of the stories that are still to come. It also serves as a reminder to people that we also cover sport.

Another way that this has been achieved is through OOV belts which add slickness to the broadcast and also show that we have other stories that are newsworthy. We also experimented with a highlights reel at the end of the bulletin to create more traffic for our website.

During the course of the semester there were three huge successes – the Hampshire Police Commissioner Debate, coverage of the American Elections and 99 News.

The HPCD had a total of 101 viewers watching it live on uStream, along with another 250 who filled the auditorium. These are incredible figures for a vote that had a notoriously low turn out.

The coverage of the American elections was dogged with problems from the start, but you wouldn’t have thought this if you watched it live on uStream. Obama had already been declared the winner before we went live, so that lead to constant changes to packages in a small amount of time. My involvement in this was making graphics – I made a motion one for a package on the swing states where it zoomed in and out of the map, with different states flashing when they needed to. Only some of this made it to the final edit. Other graphics I made didn’t make the final cut, including one involving a green screen and a map for foreign affairs. It was the first student broadcast to do live interviews across the Atlantic and it made the front page of Journalism.co.uk.

99 News was the first daily student news broadcast in the country and was something that I was involved in – I made the main graphics for it, including the countdown in the bottom corner. I was also my debut as a presenter, a role that  I enjoyed. The project as a whole gave WINOL a boost and the bulletins have around 500 combined views.

The sport team worked incredibly well together, always helping each other out when they needed it and this shows in the output. Every week there would be highlights of football, ice hockey and a sports news story or feature. Some of the sports news stories would make it into the main news bulletin – this was largely down to how well they were produced and how relevant they were to the local community.

The main issue for the sports desk wasn’t how good it’s output was, it was the circulation that Sportsweek received. Despite promoting it on social media, football websites and the like, the number of viewers is significantly lower than they used to be. I believe that the reason for this is competition; we simply don’t get our highlights packages up quick enough.

AFC Totton have someone else down there filming their games who gets the highlights up on the same night. The quality isn’t anywhere near as good but as long as football fans can see their side’s goals they don’t care. We need to be beating this competition and stealing their views. It’s worth noting that our student competition don’t have a separate sports show and their sports coverage is very limited, so this keeps the WINOL platform head and shoulders above them.

One suggestion I have to improve the viewing figures for Sportsweek is to do it in a Match of the Day style where there is analysis after every game, rather than just a quick link into the next package. We could even do a live stream version at some point as well.

Certain features drew more traffic than others; the highest flier of the semester was an interview with the wrongly convicted Paul Blackburn, which has over 500 views. It’s this content that helps WINOL keep ahead of its rivals, and with fierce competition from other student broadcasts such as East London Lines, the output had to be consistently brilliant.

Another feature that worked very well was an interview with Hitler’s neighbour. I feel that the reason the hard-hitting, confessional interviews drew greater viewing numbers than any gonzo pieces is because they are generally more invigorating. I’d much rather watch a confessional interview than someone play an ‘odd sport’ because I’ll learn more from doing so.

Saying that, the gonzo pieces are especially important to WINOL’s output as they reach out to the primary target audience – students. Although this is a hard audience to target, as their attention span is usually low, I feel that we drew them in. The feature on wrestling has 182 views, most of which are from the student demographic. This has worked well because wrestling usually draws large student audiences, so the idea was to draw them in with content that they are familiar with. By having a go myself it added a slightly comedic effect, whilst also acknowledging how difficult it is for the athletes involved, something that students will understand.

Social media has also played a part in WINOL’s rise to the most-viewed student broadcast in the country. By using Twitter and Facebook to plug stories a new audience is drawn in of a winder demographic. WINOL has something for everyone to enjoy.

My role as a sports reporter was to film football matches and gather sports stories whenever I needed them. I feel that my work improved a great deal over the course of the semester. The first football match I filmed I was worried about zooming in too far, so I shot wide to be safe. The problem with this was that it was much harder to see the ball, so from then on I stayed up close to the action, aiming to immerse the viewer in long-ball football.

There were four VTs that I feel especially proud of, but I also know that they can be improved upon:

The first is a news story on AFC Totton purchasing a defibrillator; the first of it’s kind in English football. I used a drop intro where I started outside St. Mary’s stadium and ended up in Totton’s Testwood Stadium. The problem with this was that it seemed a bit gimmicky – it didn’t add anything to the piece other than a visually nice start. Another issue with this VT was that it featured a guilty building due to a lack of shots. Although I haven’t done many of these stories this was the first thing I got rid of. Having approved images of Fabrice Muamba allowed us to name-drop. I reached out to his agent on numerous occasions for a comment but eventually he stopped replying.

Another VT I felt worked well was when I followed AFC Totton to Bashley for the return of manager Steve Riley to his former club. I did a piece to camera on the pitch with the players training behind me and also grabbed interviews with Steve before and after the game. I tried to get some vox-pops from Bashley fans on their feelings towards him, but nobody wanted to speak to me. The main issue with this match was that there was no high vantage point to film from, so I had to film on pitch level. This still looks okay but it wasn’t ideal and the game didn’t look as good as it could have had their been an option.

I also covered the ‘WINOL Derby’ between Totton and Basingstoke. To do this effectively I had to find a link that would appeal to both sets of fans and luckily there was one: Stefan Brown scored the fastest hat-trick in FA Cup history whilst playing for Totton, but he now plays for Basingstoke. I played on this at the start of the VT by starting in one changing room and finishing in the other. The only problem with this was that the away room didn’t have any shirts hanging up so it looked a bit plain. I used WINOL archive footage of the hat-trick and interviewed Stefan before and after the game. I had four cameras at the game, two behind the goals and two up the top. I feel like I under-used the tight shot camera but there wasn’t a reason to as the highlights wouldn’t have suited it.

My best package of the year was a piece of gonzo journalism where I went wrestling, but this wasn’t without faults: I didn’t dive into the action quick enough, I dwindled around outside the training warehouse for too long, the interview wasn’t as interesting as it could have been, and I wasn’t allowed to be slammed because I couldn’t land safely. I have similar ideas lined up so I aim to improve on this. There are areas where it works really well: I actually got to practice some skills and I got really good natural sound and used this to punctuate sentences whenever possible.

One thing I did try that didn’t work out was a piece to camera with the players entering the pitch behind me, but you couldn’t hear my voice. The issue was that the camera records straight into a mp4 format so I couldn’t edit the individual sound channels. After hours of enhancing the audio I couldn’t use it. I tried to dub it but this just sounded worse because it knocked out some of the atmosphere.

I also spent one Wednesday as sports editor, a role that I found very challenging, especially as sport was two minutes too long and had to be cut down. I also had to make a fat minute out of a polo package, which was difficult as I had none of the actual footage, so I had to use what was there already and make it shorter without losing any of the narrative. It looked a bit shoddy as I only had ten minutes to do it but I’ve recently edited it further and it now works much better than it did.

WINOL has succeeded in it’s aim to reclaim the top-spot in UK student journalism and if the output quality continues to improve there’s no reason for it not to stay there. However, innovation is the key so the ideas need to keep flowing, and with a multi-format website there’s no reason for them not to.

Thursday 29 November 2012

HCJ2 Seminar 5 - Freud

Freud and Psychoanalysis

- Creator of psychoanalysis
           -Talk between patient laying on couch, and a doctor

- Convinced everything was sexually linked

- The Interpretation of Dreams
           -Dreams result of sexual repression

- Thought, feelings, volition - unconscious mind

- Sexual impulses are important as potential causes of mental illness, artistic and cultural creation

- Existence of subconscious evident because of every day mistakes, reports of dreams, symptoms of neurosis

- Oedipus Complex - infantile sexuality
           -Oral (pleasure gained from mouth), Anal and Phallic (touching genitals) stages
           -Boys attracted to mother and jealous of father, start becoming more like them to steal mother
           -He was sure there was a feminine equivalent but never quite worked it out

-The Ego and the Id
           -The mental apparatus = id: repository of instinctual impulses
                                                   ego: influence of external world
                                                   superego: develops from id, dominates ego, represents inhibitions of
                                                                    instincts that are characteristics of man

           -All three need to be in harmony or mental disorders will develop

The Freudian Unconscious

- Most of our mental life is unconscious

- Slip of tongue is a better guide to someone's intentions

- Dreams are always fulfilment of repressed fantasies

- Examination of neurotic symptoms
            -Austrian bloke, too fat, tries to slim, wards off love rival

-Id: unconscious locus of love and hunger

-Ego: reason and common sense

-Superego: observes, judges and punishes ego

Wednesday 21 November 2012

So.

My blog has somehow passed the 10,000 view count. So I thought I was relatively qualified to come up with a list of how to get your blog more views:

1) Set it as your homepage

2) Set it as your parents' homepage

3) Set it as your sibling's homepage

4) Tell them that tabs don't work and that they have to open a new page every time they want a new site

5) Sit back and watch the magic happen

6) Oh, and write a few things every now and then. Readerships and all that...

Tuesday 13 November 2012

Philosophy in the Modern World - Chapter Notes: 9 & 10

CHAPTER 9

Bentham

"Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereigns - pain and pleasure."

Maximise happiness = Maximising pleasure

Pleasure is a sensation - eating, drinking, sex, wealth, kindness to animals, belief in Super Being

Quantification of pleasure and pain - Utilitarianism - The greatest happiness for the greatest number - Democracy

Principle of asceticism - Approving of actions to the extent that it diminishes happiness
                                    - Can't be pursued by a living creature - why chase something that's bad for you?

Principle of sympathy and antipathy - judges things as good or bad in accordance with own feelings
                                                         - Moral sense & Common sense

John Stuart Mill

Foolish to deny that people have desires and pleasures greater than animals

Happiness = Contentment and dignity

Difference between what is moral and what is just

Difference between justice and moral rights - legal rights can be unjust and just claims can conflict with the law

Equality - "Everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one" shares with Bentham

Schopenhauer

Will is not affected by birth and death

It is only a phenomenon that one individual is distinct from another

Will is a thing in itself and is separate from nature and human nature, which is a necessity

The only way to escape will is renunciation - Reduce egoism - the idea that you are the centre of everything and the world revolves around you

Kierkegaard

The ascetic person is deluded to think their existence is one of freedom, it is limited

A despairing person is someone who has no hope higher than what they have in their current life

Self - creating your own characteristics. Aesthete's are always in a state of pregnancy, waiting to give birth to their new 'self'

Nietzsche

Master morality - noble birth, bravery, candour, blondness

Slave morality - humility, sympathy, benevolence, the underdog

Transvaluation of Values ^^^^^ - blamed on the Jew - revolt of the slaves was successful

'The weak and failures shall perish: that is the first principle of our love of man kind" - Antichrist

Ascending and Descending people - only Nietzsche could tell who was who

Supermen - Highest form of life, Will to live (power)

Humanity is a stage on the way to the Supermen - "Man is a bridge and not a goal"

Doing away with yourself almost earns you the right to live

Analytic Ethics


G. E. Moore

Highly values goodness

Goodness - not a natural property but could be a property of natural things

R. M. Hare

Make room in ethics for Logic - Moral reasoning

Value statements - 'Good boy' etc - Giving something (object or person) a label of quality

Philippa Foot

A judgement cannot be treated as a moral judgement because of universalisability and prescriptivity - cannot make actions 'good' or judge someone with red hair as 'good'. Everyone has different opinions on matters of what's good or bad. Good for me could be bad for you.

CHAPTER 10

Aesthetics of Schopenhauer

Art influences desire, which influences will

Disinterested Contemplation liberates us from tyranny - scene absorbs attention without effort - beauty
                                                                                     - threatening scene - sublime

Kierkegaard on Music

Aesthetic people devote their life to seeking immediate pleasures

Music expresses sheer sensuality - most abstract of arts

Nietzsche on Tragedy

Origin of art is to cheer up humans and tell misery where to go

Apollo and Dionysus

Monday 12 November 2012

How to - Zoom into Images

Images in news reports are boring - they don't move. But there are ways round this and because I've had a few people ask how to do it, I'm tapping up this little 'how to' blog.

Zooming into still pictures gives them more life and keeps them in line with the rest of the piece as everything keeps moving.

To start with you want to a picture and drag and drop it into Final Cut Pro. I've chosen one of my dog as a puppy. You want to make it last about 15 seconds for the sake of this tutorial.

Now, as you can see the image isn't the right size, but that shouldn't matter because you can zoom in on it if you don't want the whole thing in shot. To do this you click on the image in the timeline to select it. You then take your curser to the box in the top right corner of your window where it should say 'Video' and 'Info'. Select 'Video' then use then find the scale slider. Move this left and right to zoom in and out.


Your image is now zoomed in but this may not be the section you want to focus on. To change the position of the image stay in the same box, but instead of adjusting the scale select 'Position' instead. The X axis moves your image left and right whereas the Y axis will move it up and down. You can adjust these values until the image is in the position you want it to be in.


Now you know the basics we can move on to the next part of the tutorial, the bit that makes everything 'move' - Keyframes.

To start with you want to take the 'Playhead' (the line that moves along your video's timeline as it plays) and place it at the start of the image. Adjust the Position and Scale values to what you want it to look like before it starts to zoom in. I'm going with the default settings: Scale - 100%, Position - X: 0 Y: 0.


When you place your mouse over the values you will see a plus sign appear in a diamond to the right hand-side of the adjusters. Click this on both the Position and Scale values to lock them in place. They will turn yellow once they are set.





You then want to move the playhead further along the image to where you want the image to start zooming in. Don't change any of the values, just click the diamonds again to set the position. Ideally it should be around the two second mark.


Now you have to move the playhead to where you want the image to stop zooming in, around four seconds from the end of it so that the viewer has time to take it in.






Return to the Position and scale sliders and adjust them to how you want the final zoomed in image to look, then press the diamonds again to set the keyframes.

When you watch the video it should now zoom in on the image, jazzing it up a little bit.





You can also use this technique to rotate the images (Rotation) and apply them to video files.

Monday 22 October 2012

FA Cup Fourth Qualifying Round - AFC Totton 2 - 3 Cambridge City

AFC Totton crashed out of the FA Cup at the hands of Cambridge City, the final hurdle before the league clubs became involved.

The visitors started brightly, opening the scoring after just two minutes.  An out-swinging corner found David Theobald, whose thundering header crashed the underside of the crossbar before hitting the back of the net.

Totton pressed for an equaliser and they eventually got it. After scoring a hat-trick on Tuesday, Mike Gosney got on the end of Dave Allen's cross, heading past the sprawling keeper at the far post.

The Stags looked in control until City scored against the run of play. Totton couldn't scramble a cross clear and were made to pay when Adrian Cambridge connected with a superb 20 yard volley on 36 minutes.

Mike Gosney wasted a chance to put the hosts level, his free kick was poorly struck and didn't make it past the defence.

An equaliser never looked likely, Totton's long ball game was easily tamed by City's sturdy defence, and their dominance was rewarded after 60 minutes, David Prada hit a fantastic curling shot into the top corner, giving Barfoot no chance.

Dave Allen pulled one back for Totton - his volley hit the ground before bouncing over City's keeper. It proved to only be a consolation goal and when the final whistle went it was Cambridge and their fans celebrating. The magic of the FA Cup lives on within them as they welcome MK Dons in the First Round proper.


Wednesday 17 October 2012

Seminar Paper - Karl Popper and Logical Positivism

One of the main aims of the Vienna Circle was to lay down universal philosophical statements that are true and clarify which statements aren't philosophical and are false. This school of thought is known as 'Logical Positivism.' To do this they would take empirical statements such as 'everybody dies' which are records of experience and verify them using the verification principle. The verification principle is the idea that for something to be true it has to be verifiable with proof, the scientific method. For example 'everyone dies' has been learnt through experience, so far there hasn't been a case where someone hasn't died. This is the protocol that the idea is based on, although it is not impossible for it to be falsified. Opponents of this view-point say that statements are true to individuals, but to avoid solipsism Schlick said that so long as two people can agree on the definitions of words they can have a discussion using the language of science. If two people are arguing over what a trike is, but can agree that 'tri' means three then they can have a discussion.

Descartes is a victim of the verification principle, along with other Romanticists. His famous statement 'I think therefore I am' does not make sense and is tossed aside by logical positivists. Their argument? That you cannot verify that you exist by thinking. This is a sensible approach; by not taking anything at face value Logical Positivists extinguish any statements that can't be proven, leaving us with what they see as the bare facts about the world. These include necessary truths which are truths that are necessary for our understand of our surroundings, but don't tell you anything new. All triangles have three sides isn't exactly enlightening, it's just a truth that exists everywhere in the universe.

The verification principle itself raises some questions; is it a tautology? Was it verifiable by experience?In other words, was it its own worst enemy?

As for the first question it doesn't seem to be. It doesn't leave results as plainly obvious as 'all beginners are just starting,' instead it proves statements to be correct using the scientific method. It creates its own answers, rather than repeating itself. Whether it is verifiable by experience is a different matter, who's to say that the truths that it produces are correct? For years Aristotle's heliocentric theories were taught as facts in the top universities around the world, but over time this has been proven false. We currently study physics alongside Einstein's Laws of Relativity which states that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but even this has been questioned recently. If we can't verify what is true, how can the verification principle be verified itself?

Karl Popper attempted to answer this question by dismissing the verification process and replacing it with a falsification process. He argues that by falsifying theories with the scientific method we can eventually whittle our way down to the truth. This is a pain-stakingly long process, but one that has been in on-going for centuries. Ideas are there to be disproven, first it was Aristotle, then it was Francis Bacon. Einstein may be next.

But that's not to say that Popper thought that history was teleological and we would end up with absolute truths about everything. He believed that ideas would continue to be falsified and that we would never come to a final conclusion - history may be going somewhere but there was no definitive end that other theories such as Marx's idea of Communism being the light at the end of the tunnel suggested.

As part of the falsification process Popper answers questions that Hume's use of induction poses. He states that science assumes that nature is like the past and things that happened in the past will happen time and time again. This is called induction, but induction itself is not scientific. It begins with an idea and then experiments take control of whether it is true or not. Einstein, he says, allowed people to test his theory of relativity, by doing this he opened his idea for criticism. If his test passed the experiments the theory stood strong, however, if it fails any tests it is immediately falsified and cast aside. So long as I don't float up at any moment, Newton's theory of gravity stands as correct, but it is always being tested.

What is important about Popper is that he understood that everything is potentially untrue. Nothing is unfalsifiable. There will always be something out there, whether it be on a distant star or in the distant future, nothing is certain.

Wednesday 10 October 2012

AFC Totton 3 - 2 Merthyr Town


Despite the close score-line, AFC Totton made light work of swooping their Welsh counterparts aside in a thrilling encounter at the Testwood Stadium.

Totton started bright, forcing a few smart saves out of Town keeper Giles Cutlan before Jonathan Davies’ in-swinging corner appeared to evade everybody in the box to creep in at the near post. Although Davies claimed the goal, the ball seemed to get a touch off the out-stretched leg of Merthyr’s skipper, Steve Williams.

Richard Gillespie added his 17th goal of the season in all competitions with a powerful strike from 18 yards, having out-muscled a defender to run on to Dave Allen’s chipped pass.

Allen later found himself on the score sheet after Gillespie squared the ball past the keeper, gifting the midfielder with the simple chance of walking the ball into the net to make it 3-0 before the break.

Totton didn’t hold back after the break either, with Mike Gosney finishing a tantalising run by striking the ball directly at Town’s keeper, and then Richard Gillespie knocked down another long ball, only to find his shot blocked by Cutlan’s legs.

Merthyr gave their supporters something to cheer shortly afterwards. A string of passes found Ryan Prosser on his own in the six yard box and the number 9 could barely miss as his shot rasped over Gareth Barfoot into the net.

The Totton keeper was caught napping on 90 minutes, but Jamie Rewbury’s lob proved nothing more than a consolation goal as the final whistle blew after kick off.

Totton face Cambridge City at home in the next round.