Digital delight for football lovers

DAVY Allan loves football. He consumes every detail - match reports, statistics, historical firsts - like collecting each morsel of a delicious, flaky bridie from the local butcher. His hunger for information about Scottish football is endless.

So when The Scotsman turned its thousands of issues into a digital delight, Davy had to sink his teeth in and devour every tasty bit of information that could be found on the sporting pages. What he found was a football smorgasbord.

"The earliest mention of 'football' is from 1826 in a report about May Day at Arthur's Seat, where "a rude attempt at football was got up", he explains. "Then in 1855, [there is] a set of 'Byelaws - Penalties for playing Football on Meadows West'."

Davy, a devout Hearts supporter originally from Musselburgh, was particularly fond of two nuggets of information he uncovered: "Strangely enough, the earliest mention of Hearts in a sporting context is the Heart of Mid-Lothian Cricket Team vs The Scotsman, from July 1864 - fully ten years before the football team started up. The earliest Hearts football report is from Saturday, 28 August 1875: Hearts 0, 3rd Edinburgh Rifle Volunteers 2. The first [Edinburgh] derby against Hibs is from Christmas Day 1875. Hearts won 1-0."

Davy has combined his love of Hearts and his work skills as a data architect to develop londonhearts.com one of the biggest club-dedicated websites in the world. He has details on Scottish national football matches and also hopes to add details on Hibs results as well. The site was established in 1997 and has grown to more than 200,000 pages of information - and keeps growing, thanks to the information culled from the digital archive.

"I have been using it to systematically go through the archive, matching the match reports to the games on my database," Davy says. "So far, I have matched 2,887 games to reports in the archive. Generally, I've found it to be extremely useful. Other football historians are using it as well."

In scanning the thousands of pages of the archive, Davy notes Hearts have always managed to disappoint the fans.

"The one thing that probably stopped us winning the league in the 1930s was the sale of Alex Massie - a player who as a driving force was as important to Hearts and Scotland as Dave Mackay was a generation later. Had we kept him we would not have lost some of the shockers we did."

Davy points to probably the most difficult outcome of them all, in 1938: "We lost the title decider 4-2 to Celtic. Hearts were 2-1 up but missed loads of sitters, hit the woodwork twice and lost to three late goals.

"The saddest thing is the wider social context of the 1914 side playing while the Great War was taking place and the debate conducted in the letters page on the merits of sportsmen signing up ... then [followed by] the pages and pages of lists of the wounded and dead."

No matter who your favourite team may be, there is little doubt that The Scotsman digital archive will offer a delectable slice of history that every fan can savour.

Taken from the Scotsman