You know how it is. You spend half your week dealing with your actual job, and the other half dealing with the absolute statistical nonsense spewed by your mates. This week, it was Dave. Big mouth, massive Portsmouth fan since the 90s, and convinced they are somehow historically superior to Burnley, even now. We’ve got a big weekend coming up, and he started throwing out historical scores from 20 years ago like they mattered. I needed to shut him up, armed with solid, recent facts.
I swear, trying to get clean, recent head-to-head (H2H) data for two teams that bounce between leagues is always a total mess. That’s why I went digging. I needed the real picture: what do the current standings tell us, and what does the last five times they actually played look like, not some ancient history where half the players are now TV pundits.
The Start: Initial Frustration and Wasted Clicks
I jumped straight onto Google, right? Standard practice. First mistake. Typing in “Portsmouth vs Burnley recent form” just throws up a massive wall of transfer gossip and articles written by some automated bot from 2018. I scrolled through three pages of garbage. One site gave me the last five matches, but the data was three seasons old and listed the division wrong. Another one was trying to sell me betting tips. Total shambles.
I realized quickly I couldn’t trust the aggregated sites that just pull snippets. They are fast, but they are never right when you need the granular details for a specific, non-top-tier matchup.
So, I scrapped the generic search strategy entirely. Time to get surgical.
Phase Two: Finding the Real Data Points
To truly understand the matchup, you need two distinct sets of data. You can’t just look at who won last time. You need context.
I focused my search specifically on official sources and highly reputable stat sites that track historical league data, even when teams drop down. I bypassed the news sites and targeted the statistical archives. It took maybe 45 minutes of constant filtering, but I started pulling threads together.
Here’s the breakdown of what I chased down and cross-referenced:
- Current League Standing (The Confidence Factor): I needed to see where Burnley and Pompey sat right now, relative to their expectations. This wasn’t just about the points; it’s about momentum. If one team is flying high and the other is scrapping to stay above the drop zone, that mental edge is huge. I pulled the official table from the league site itself to make sure the position, points, and goal difference were locked down as of Tuesday morning.
- Recent Head-to-Head (The Direct Evidence): This was the tough part. I had to locate and verify the scorelines for the last five times these specific clubs faced each other in league or cup play. I didn’t care about friendlies. I compared three different historical databases just to confirm the date and the division. You wouldn’t believe how often those older cup fixtures get mislabeled.
- Goals Scored/Conceded in the Last 10 Matches (The Form Guide): H2H is nice, but recent form tells you who is currently playing well. I calculated the running average of goals scored and conceded over the last two months for both sides. I was looking for patterns—are they conceding late? Are they scoring early and sitting back?
I dumped all this verified information into a simple spreadsheet. Nothing fancy, just the numbers: W-L-D count, goals scored (GS), and goals conceded (GC). Seeing it all lined up made the picture crystal clear.
The Result: Preparing the Ammunition
What the data showed me was fascinating, and exactly what I needed to counter Dave’s rubbish. While historically, Dave’s team might have had some glory days, the recent track record—the stuff that actually matters going into this week—told a different story.
I found a specific patch of history where Burnley absolutely dominated the fixture for three straight years when they were both in the same division, including a hefty 4-0 win that Dave conveniently “forgot” about. Crucially, the current league standing for Burnley gives them a huge psychological advantage, regardless of where this match is being played.
The entire exercise wasn’t just about finding a score; it was about building an argument based on facts. I didn’t just walk up to Dave and say, “We’re better.” I went up and presented him with the verified sheet:
“Look, mate, since 2010, when we’ve been in the same league, we’ve taken twelve points from you. You’ve taken five. And guess what? This week, we are sitting three places above you. Your historic claims are officially irrelevant. Now tell me again about that 1987 cup run.”
The best part about logging the entire process like this is that it forces me to verify everything. It stops me from getting caught up in the emotional noise of the rivalry and sticks strictly to the practice of data collection. It took me a good chunk of the evening, but the look on Dave’s face when he realized his bragging rights were statistically nullified? Priceless. That’s why we do the research. It’s not just about the game; it’s about winning the argument.