The archive

The archive is the part of this site that was not written for it. Two seasons of day-to-day coverage were filed by the old desk, and all of it was carried over address for address when the site was re-set: nothing was merged, nothing was renamed to read better and nothing was thrown away for being short. The season pages below are the way into it, and each of them lists everything filed in that season with the date it was filed on.

Reading it is a particular exercise. A news archive is not a book, and it does not improve if you start at the top: the pieces were written against each other, a day or a week apart, and half of them only make sense once you know what the previous one said. Working upwards from the bottom of a season page follows the story in the order the desk actually found it out, which is usually the order in which it stops being confusing.

Two things about it are worth knowing before you go in. The first is that nothing has been updated. Where a report says a player is expected to sign, that is what was expected on the day and not what happened; where a figure appears, it is the figure that was published and not the one that turned out to be right. Corrections, where the desk made any, live on the later piece that carries them and keep their own date. The second is that the lengths vary wildly, because the desk filed two-line notes and long columns into the same stream. A short page in this archive is a short page, not a broken one.

The material is reachable three ways, and they answer different questions. This page and the season pages under it sort by date, which is the right route if you know roughly when something happened. The section index sorts the same pieces by desk, which is the right route if you know what the piece was about. The labels the old site applied by hand sort by keyword, which is the narrowest route of the three and the only one that is incomplete — labels were applied unevenly, and plenty of pieces never got one.

Before these desks existed the same material was sorted into the categories the old site used. Those addresses are still live and still answer, so the lists are kept as they were filed — every piece in them also sits under the desk that holds it now, and the counts below are what each old category holds today.