It’s the end of the calendar year for the Nationalmannschaft, just over a hundred days until the next international fixture, and so plenty of time for me to start filling in the gaps ahead of the Euro 2012 finals next June. Here’s the list of the latest site updates, as well an outline of the planned additions…
Some of you may have noticed that I have now finished the goal information for all of the qualifying matches played between 1978 (Euro 1980 qualifiers) and the latest such fixture against Belgium played last month (October 2011). In order to do this I have scoured every possible source for footage, and bar the odd tiny gap here and there the record is now complete.
I must have spent at least a month on and off doing this research and have to admit to enjoying every second of it – even during those moments where I found myself having to watch a piece of scratchy converted VHS footage time and again just to determine the identity of some Finnish centre-forward or a pixellated Albanian defender. There might as a result be a few instances where I have made some tiny misidentification errors – if there is anything obviously erroneous, please feel free to drop a comment my way and I will quickly correct it.
A few days ago the fixtures for the 2014 FIFA World Cup qualifying tournament were arranged, and these have now been set up on a new page which will of course be updated as soon as the qualification process starts at the beginning of the 2012-13 season. If you would like to have a peek at the fixtures, they can be found here – you will also see that “Brazil 2014” has also been added to the FIFA World Cup section on the main menu.
Also added to the main menu in the “Trikots” section is a new page on the recently-released 2011-2013 shirts, which is at the moment an ongoing work in progress – I am yet to add the new white shirt to my collection, and the green shirt has not yet been officially released for sale. I will of course be updating this new page as soon as I have anything new.
The only thing that remains are the major tournament match reports from Euro 1980 onwards, which I plan to pick up on again sometime next week. The idea will be to do at least two or three reports a week, but even that is a lot harder than it sounds. First I need to watch the match again while continually pausing, scribbling and rewinding, and then I have to somehow convert what are usually a messy collection of notes into something that sounds interesting to read.
Before all this of course is my being able to dominate the television for long spells at a time without annoying the Frau – well, not too much anyway…