So today I woke up thinking, “Man, I really wanna know how last night’s Fulham vs Newcastle match finished.” Saw chatter online, but couldn’t find the damn score anywhere fast. Pissed me off, honestly. Grabbed my cold coffee and decided to just solve this myself.
The Annoying Search Begins
First things first, went straight to those big sports sites everybody uses. Total nightmare. Clicked through like ten pages of useless transfer gossip ads popping up everywhere before I even saw a headline. Seriously? Just give me the damn score! Felt like they hid it on purpose.
Trying the ‘Easy’ Options
Thought maybe those news apps on my phone would be quicker. Opened three different ones. Same story:
- One made me wait through a 30-second car ad
- Another asked me to sign up just to read the headline
- The third buried the score under five paragraphs about what some manager had for breakfast
My coffee went from cold to warm again waiting. Nope, that’s not fast at all.
Getting My Hands Dirty
Alright, screw this. Time for Plan B. Remembered I messed around with a simple robot grabber tool last month using Python. Still had the code saved somewhere in my messy docs folder. Dug it out like an archaeologist.
Opened my coding thingy and rewrote it real quick. The plan:
- Make it stare at one specific, clean news site known for quick football updates
- Teach it to hunt for keywords like “Full Time” or “Match Report”
- Slap on an alert so it screams at me when it finds something
Took a couple tries. First version choked because they changed their damn HTML tags again. Classic.
Added a simple timer to ping the site every minute during matches. Ran a test using old data. Worked! Well, mostly. Had to tweak it three times when it grabbed the weather report by mistake. But finally – victory. Found it: Fulham 1 – Newcastle 0. All that fuss over one goal!
The Final Setup
Set it to run automatically next time they play. Put the script in my startup folder so it launches with my laptop. Made a tiny notification box pop in the corner. Simple, ugly, but mine. And best part? Found the result in under 5 seconds this morning. Felt good.
Maybe I’ll clean up the code later… or maybe not. It works. No fancy solution, just me hitting my head against the wall until something sticks. Typical Tuesday morning.
