RL Record Keepers’ Club update: the road ahead

Hi everyone

It’s been a few months since my last update, so firstly welcome to any new members. We’ve had a few newbies recently, and in fact, we now stand on 197, and as we all like a milestone, feel free to spread the gospel to try to get us to 200!

The opening of society (aka the ability to watch games in person again) has obviously been welcome, although it has had an impact on our rate of progress, with both Martin & I involved in doing club programmes of varying degrees of officialness, as well as some time ‘off’. But I’ll give a brief update below, and as seems to be the vogue right now, we’ll talk “roadmaps”: although I’ll try to avoid the pitfalls of mentioning specific dates of course 🙂 And needless to say, we’re always guided by the data in making our decisions…

Summer records & the website

The release of the summer era data went really well, and feedback has been extremely positive. Chris has continued to do further tweaks based on feedback received, so keep that coming. A few people had challenges getting on, but these were quickly resolved; anyone still struggling, just shout up & we’ll sort you out. If you’ve not been on already, a reminder: go to our website at www.rugbyleaguerecords.com, log in, and you can access the match details and player records from 1996-2019 through the “Stats” part of the menu, or other various links on the site – have a play about with it & let me know what you think, as this is the whole point of sharing to members first, to get this as user friendly as possible before we release to the wider public.

Domestic plans

The intention is to finish off the summer era, with 2020 & 2021 being added on completion of this season, plus summer representative games & internationals, prior to launching for everyone, and then we’ll be able to keep this up-to-date each week from the start of next season. For now this will sit on the back burner though, as the looming world cup means the international game will take priority.

International focus

The main focus for us over the summer though will be internationals. As most of you know, I’ve been working with International Rugby League (IRL, the game’s global governing body), alongside fellow members Tony Collins & Andrew Ferguson, in compiling a list of Recognised Senior International Matches (“RSIM”). That work is now substantially complete, and will be going to the IRL Board for approval very shortly.

I’ve included a copy of the RSIM list here, in confidence, for review and any comment (but be quick, as there’s only a short window before the next IRL Board meeting!). For those that saw the earlier draft please note this has been updated in respect of venues, and now carries both the contemporary name of the ground and a ‘master venue’, which allows us to maintain continuity despite changing names. Please note, this list is not for onward sharing, so I ask everyone to respect this, pending IRL’s official publication of it. It’s also subject to any final tweaks, so we don’t want different versions floating around causing confusion!!

Full Internationals confirmed

As I’ve flagged before, IRL had the explicit aim of casting the net wide here in compiling the RSIM list, to capture all games played by senior international teams. This has necessarily resulted in the inclusion of games which have previously been excluded for record keeping purposes from the first class career details of players and countries. I shared last year a proposal that we would maintain this distinction in the RKC, and that the IRL list would be split to Full Internationals (those involving a Full Member of the international board, or played in a tournament that contained another Full International match), and Other Internationals (everything else), and seeking feedback. The limited input I received was positive towards this approach, so this has now been adopted.

I’ve therefore also attached the RKC classification of the IRL list, sorted both by date & by classification. On the version by date, you can enter a country’s name in cell A1 to filter to the result of that particular nation, so you can see their details, or how their games are being classified. Again, any comments or feedback on this is appreciated.

Summer priority

The focus now is on capturing the details of all these Full Internationals, ahead of the World Cup that might or might not take place later this year. We are broadly there with compiling the info, which now needs formating, checking, loading to the database, and sorting for players. We’ll prioritise this by certain teams (England, GB & France, as there’s work focusing on Heritage Number for all these that we can support), and by the World Cup tournament itself. I’ll update on this in a couple of months, once we get a feel for our rate of progress.

Winter wrap up

Due to the focus on internationals, we’ll put the winter era club work on ice for a bit. We’ve made some good progress on about a dozen clubs recently, and Halifax has now been completed thanks to Andrew Hardcastle’s efforts. Once we fully focus back on this, there’s another half a dozen clubs that we can close off very quickly, but there’s a long haul ahead on this, so we’ll just keep this rumbling along in the background as time permits (likely very limited in coming months).

That’s about it for now. As always, give me a shout if needed, and one day soon(ish) we might even be able to arrange a RKC meet-up: watch this space for that in due course!

All the best