It’s the end of the month… Time for another update on the development of the website, and a status report on how things are going and what’s next on the agenda. Yes, there’s still lots and lots of work to do, but things are still on track for late spring next year and the start of the Euros. Hopefully!
Some of you more geeky types who may have been checking out the pages devoted to the tournament qualifying rounds may have noticed something new in the past week or so – well, a couple of things. Firstly, I have added the results of group games not involving Germany. I thought that this might be helpful in allowing readers to get a better picture of the group tables – and not have to use another resource to get hold of this information. I have so far only bothered with the basic results – if and when I have the time I might add the goalscorers so that you won’t have to go anywhere else to find out who scored for the Netherlands against Finland during the 1990 World Cup qualifying campaign.
Secondly, I have started what has been a fun-to-do sub-project – brief descriptions of every goal in every qualifying match. When surfing through the site one evening I realised that while full descriptions of every goal could be found within the main tournament match reports, there was nothing but the bare bones on the pages devoted to the qualifying matches. I therefore set out to gather enough information, drawing the line at the start of the Jupp Derwall era and the 1980 European Championships. While I have every game in my own colelction – bar a couple – from 1986 onwards, I was able to find decent highlights of most of what I was after from before this time (going back to the late 1970s) on YouTube.
I have now almost completed the goal information for all of the Euro qualifiers from 1980 onwards, and have to say that I am pleased with the results. Needless to say I will be thanking all of the many YouTube contributors who have taken the time and effort to share these memories. Without the hard work of these people, I may not have even considered undertaking this task.
So… Dates, dates, dates. I hope to have the goal info snippets completed before the Ukraine match in a couple of weeks’ time, and by then would hope to have completed the match reports from Euro 1980, Euro 1984 and the 1982 World Cup. With Mexico 1986 already complete, I will then crack on and try and get at least one tournament completed every fortnight. I will of course continue to keep everyone up to date with progress!