You know, compiling historic sports statistics—especially for a derby as old and nasty as Blackburn Rovers versus Burnley—isn’t something you do for fun. It’s not a weekend hobby. It’s a mission born out of necessity, frustration, and the burning need to shut a specific person up once and for all.
My journey into the deepest, darkest corners of East Lancashire football history didn’t start with a clean spreadsheet; it started with a Friday night argument in a noisy pub that went way too far. I’m a Rover through and through, and my long-suffering mate, Gary, bleeds claret. For years, he’s been chipping away, claiming that our perceived historic advantage is skewed, pulling out bizarre non-league friendly results from the 1950s that nobody cares about just to try and boost his side’s numbers.
I finally snapped. I decided I wouldn’t just argue with opinions anymore. I would arm myself with undeniable, verified facts. I was going to catalogue every single competitive and relevant non-competitive match ever played between the two clubs. I had to know the real score, not just the cherry-picked nonsense the TV commentators trot out.
The Dive into the Archives: Starting with the Easy Wins
The first step, as always, was mapping out the scope. I wasn’t just tracking wins and losses; I needed dates, venues, competitions (League, FA Cup, League Cup, various regional cups that died a century ago), and the final score. I grabbed my laptop, opened three monitors, and started the excavation.
I began by scraping all the modern data. Anything post-1992 was relatively simple. You can hit the major football stats aggregators, run a quick query, and pull reasonably reliable spreadsheets. This part took maybe an hour. It gave me a foundation, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. The real meat of this rivalry happened when men still wore flat caps to matches.
Then came the hard part: pre-war football. The Victorian era. This is where things get messy because record-keeping was inconsistent, and what counted as an “official” match changed yearly. I had to cross-reference multiple primary sources just to confirm if a game even happened.
- I hunted down the official Football League archives. This meant wading through ancient digitized scans where the font looked like it was smeared with dirt.
- I tracked down old club programs and annual reports. Many of these are only available through specialized online historical repositories—you know, the kind of websites that look like they haven’t been updated since 2003.
- I started compiling a master list, focusing initially on competitive league and FA Cup ties only, to get the backbone right.
The Verification Nightmare: 19th-Century Chaos
The biggest headache wasn’t finding the results; it was verifying them. I’d find one source stating the score in 1895 was 3-2 to Rovers, and then another reputable source claiming it was a 2-2 draw that went to a replay. Why the discrepancy? Turns out, sometimes initial telegraph reports were wrong, and the score wasn’t officially corrected until the following week’s paper. This meant I couldn’t trust any single source.
For every entry before 1930, I implemented a three-source rule. If three independent, verifiable sources (a contemporary newspaper report, a club history book, and an official league record) didn’t agree on the result, I flagged it for further investigation. This meant I was often spending an hour just to verify a single 90-minute game played 120 years ago.
I spent two full Saturdays just deep-diving into the regional cup competitions like the Lancashire Senior Cup. Nobody usually includes those stats, but to make the definitive history, I had to. And those results were the absolute worst to find—sometimes only mentioned in a tiny column in a local paper that had long gone bust.
The final stage of the process was data cleaning and structuring. I had hundreds of rows, and I needed to make it readable. I standardized the competition names, fixed all the date formats, and tallied the totals. It was about 45 hours of solid, head-down work, fueled by coffee and sheer bloody-mindedness.
The end result? A comprehensive, definitive spreadsheet detailing every clash. I finally had the real, undisputed head-to-head record, broken down by category. When I presented the meticulously verified document to Gary, he didn’t even argue. He just stared at the undeniable numbers. Silence. That silence alone made the weeks of digging and cross-referencing totally worth it. It wasn’t just data; it was concrete, hard-won victory.
