Alright folks, settling in tonight to share how I tackled this beast of a project: building a proper timeline for every single meeting between Newcastle United and Ipswich Town. Yeah, felt like digging through a mountain sometimes, but it’s done! Here’s exactly how it went down.
The Starting Point: Knowing It Would Be Messy
First, I grabbed my main laptop and fired up my usual research tools. I knew official club sites might only go back so far, and random fan sites can be all over the place. So my plan was simple: cast a wide net and hope the core facts held up.
- Started by searching general stuff like “Newcastle vs Ipswich head to head”. Tons of aggregate stats popped up – wins, losses, draws – but specific details per match? Almost zero.
- Felt a bit daunted immediately. How many years were we talking? Found some lists going back to the 1920s! Okay, deep breaths…
Diving Into the Grind
This is where the real slog kicked in. I decided my best bet was to work decade by decade, starting from the most recent and crawling backwards.
- For recent Premier League/Championship games, hit up dedicated match report archives. BBC Sport’s old reports saved my skin here! Clicked through season after season, noting down dates, venues, and the final score.
- But just scores? No way, I wanted the key moments. Who scored? Penalties? Red cards? Big misses? Had to open each individual match link, scan through the report text – painfully slow but necessary. Sometimes found minute-by-minutes, other times just a summary paragraph. Took what I could get!
- Wrote it all down messy in a text file at first: Dates, scores, scorers, major incidents. Pure data dump.
The Old Stuff: Pure Archaeology
Getting into the 70s, 60s, and earlier? This got tough. Reliable digital sources dried up fast.
- Scoured fan forum threads dedicated to club histories. Honestly, some gold in there! Found posts listing scorers for obscure 1950s fixtures – lifesavers. But had to cross-reference multiple posts to be sure.
- Dug into digitized newspaper archives. Seeing those old match reports scanned in? Awesome. But searching is clunky, and sometimes the scan quality was terrible. Eye strain city.
- Encountered huge gaps. A few games from the early days? Just the date, the competition name (“Division Two”), and maybe a score if I was lucky. Who scored? When? Lost to time. Had to accept some entries would be incomplete. Felt frustrating leaving holes, but better than guessing!
Building the Timeline Structure
Once I felt I’d gathered as much as I could (hit a wall around the early 1920s!), it was time to make sense of the pile.
- Transferred all my raw notes into a spreadsheet. First column: Date. Second: Competition. Third: Venue. Fourth: Final Score. Fifth: Key Moments. Simple headers.
- Started filling it row by row, chronologically. Sorting them properly took a minute. Found a few I’d duplicated by accident! Cleaned those up.
- For the “Key Moments” column, I aimed for just bullet-point clarity: “Shearer 15′ pen”, “Dyer sent off 78′”, “Ipswich missed penalty 40′”, etc. Short, sharp, no fluff.
Polishing Up & Wrestling Tech
Now to get this spreadsheet looking presentable.
- Wanted a clean table view. Messed with spreadsheet formatting – borders, headers in bold, making sure the date format was consistent.
- Tried exporting directly, looked garbage. So I copied the whole shebang into simple HTML table tags. Seriously, just basic <table>, <tr>, <td> stuff. Took ages manually adding all the <tr> tags but it worked.
- Dropped it into my blog editor. Added a quick intro like “Here’s every clash…” and finally hit publish! What a relief.
Honestly, it took way longer than I expected. The amount of manual digging and double-checking was nuts, especially for those older games where info feels like scattered puzzle pieces. But seeing that complete (well, nearly complete!) timeline online? Totally worth the grind.