Pre interview rejection of Cambridge Land Econ

So I’m an international applicant from Singapore and I was really preparing for everything possible, but I was quite surprised and confused when they decided to not interview me at Pembroke for Land Econ. My predicted were like 4A in Singapore (which is probably equivalent to 4A* since that’s the highest grade you could obtain). My personal statement was probably okay as compared to my peers in my school I once considered mine to be a lot better than theirs. Other stuff r pretty fine my secondary was with gpa3.93/4 which is also high and I have a pretty good relationship with my school teacher who wrote my reference, plus my written works submitted were some assignments highly rated by my economics teacher in school
So I was really confused like what went wrong. I postulate that it might have something to do with me having to defer 2 years to my entry? (Due to Singapore’s compulsory military service for 2y). Or is it that land econ+pembroke this year is really oversubscribed? The funny thing is that at this year little could be done better and the removal of admission test maybe upped the difficulty by a lot accidentally?

Could have been the 2 year deferral. You can try again for direct entry with your grades achieved. If the competitiveness of the course is increasing year on year, then they are less likely to accept deferrals because they won't be competitive the following year, and even more so with a 2 year deferral request.