Oh, look who’s back for another new season. Now past the 19-year mark online, what’s new with us for the 2021-2 campaign? Not a huge amount in truth. The BoroGuide team certainly has little desire to reinvent a wheel that has been turning since summer 2002. And that now makes us feel a little bit old, to tell the truth. But there are one or two things that we have on our “to-do” list as Alex Revell and his Boro’ team shape up for our latest assault on League Two.
Match Previews
Maybe the biggest thing we’re planning is to do away with our match previews this season. They aren’t something we want to be wedded to each game. And if we ain’t going to do it properly, it’s probably best we don’t do them at all. It’s much the same reason we stopped match reports way back in day. It’s highly possible we may start a new series looking at our record against our latest opponents. But the full preview treatment? It’ll only be by popular demand.
And we don’t reckon ‘popular demand’ is something you can ever accuse us of having – let alone catering for.
Missing Game Data
Ah, the scourge of our existence. In recent weeks, we’ve redoubled our work to get to the British Library and tick off some more missing team line-ups. When we say ‘redoubled’, we mean we’ve been. Twice. In any case, we’re going to try again some more during the new season. Even if the likelihood these days is that we just confirm the two leading local papers of the time (The Comet and The Stevenage Gazette) are no longer helpful to us. The reason being a mix of no line-ups in a report or entire copies missing from the archives.
So, programmes are still looking like the most fruitful route of attack at the moment. We’d really like to get it all done by the time we turn 20 next year. But the speed of success in recent months probably means we’ll fall short. We’ll take being below 100 to be honest. Our Missing page has a full rundown of the incomplete line-ups we have and we’ll be grateful of any help. Were you at a game we’re missing info from? Do you have the next home game programme with details inside? Is your BFF someone who kept records at the time?
Just still doing the do…
The headline news is that we a) don’t believe 19 years is a sufficient place to stop and b) are still willing to keep going. It’s not a day job, though, which means we can’t commit as much time to the old gal as we’d like. It doesn’t mean there won’t be work going on in the background to keep all our stats and data up to date. Someone has to, agree? If nothing else, the idea of calling time before everything is in place makes us squirm. Or perhaps we’re being over sentimental?
Ah, we’ll leave that one to you. Here’s the new season anyway.
