Alright, here’s how my whole messy attempt to analyze the Pumas vs. Cruz Azul matchup went down today. I figured it’d be a good coding/data project.
First Shot: Trying to Grab Data Automatically
Started bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I thought, “Hey, there’s a ton of footie data online, easy grab, right?” So I fired up my usual web scraping script – the one I use for, like, recipes or news headlines. Pointed it at a popular match stats site for this specific game. Hit run. Felt pretty smug.
Nothing came back. Blank screen. Checked the script.
- Error: “Blocked by firewall.” Site recognized the bot. Damn.
- Tried another site: Same thing. Error messages mocking me. These stats sites are locked up tighter than Fort Knox lately.
Plan B: Manual Labor Sucks
Scraping was dead in the water. No magic bullet. Okay, fine. Old school it is. Dug into the specific match page. Started manually copying the stuff I wanted:
- Pumas: Shots on target (not many), corners, fouls… the usual suspects.
- Cruz Azul: Same deal, possession percentage, passes completed… felt like doing homework, honestly.
- Special stuff: Yellow cards for each team (it got chippy!), player names who scored. Tedious. Typing. For ages.
Saved it all into a rough text file. Took way longer than I thought it would. Finger cramps setting in.
Throwing It Into My “Fancy” Analyzer
Next step: my little Python stats analyzer tool. It’s supposed to take this raw data and spit out trends, comparisons, some cool insights. Loaded up the text file, hit the run button, crossed my fingers.
The damn thing choked. Spat out a bunch of garbage errors.
- Big problem: My tool expected numbers in a strict order. The way I grabbed player names first accidentally messed up the column order for Cruz Azul’s fouls vs. corners. Tool looked at the numbers like, “What is this garbage?” and gave up.
Firefighting Time
Panic mode. Needed this for a post! Opened the text file again. Eye-balled it. Saw the Cruz Azul data was jumbled compared to Pumas. Spent another painful 15 minutes rearranging numbers in my notepad, trying to match the tool’s picky structure. Copy. Paste. Sweat. Save.
Ran the tool again. This time… it chugged along slowly. Felt like forever. Finally, it pooped out a bunch of numbers and a rudimentary chart showing possession dominance by Cruz Azul and the shot numbers. Finally, something! It showed Cruz Azul controlled the ball more but Pumas actually had slightly better chances near the end. Cool.
The Great Power Outrage of 2023 (Well, This Afternoon)
Was feeling triumphant. Saving my hard-won insights? Nope. Neighbors did something stupid, I think. Lights blinked. My screen went black. My laptop battery died ages ago because I’m too damn lazy to plug it in properly sometimes.
Power came back 5 minutes later. Booted up. Opened my analyzer tool… last saved version? Before I fixed the data. The broken Cruz Azul numbers one. The one that gave errors. My beautiful fixed data file? Gone. Never saved it after fixing, because I was just gonna run the tool and export. Idiot move.
Salvaging Operation & Giving Up
Seriously considered crying. Or breaking the laptop. Instead, I grabbed my phone. Pulled up the match summary page AGAIN. Used their little crappy bar graphs and stats summaries directly. Took screenshots. Threw together the post using THEIR OWN basic visuals because I was so done with my stupid tool.
The point? I was so focused on automating the “perfect” analysis with my own code, I wasted hours, lost data, ended up frustrated, and actually delivered worse results than if I’d just used the site’s simple stuff from the start. Kinda humbling, in a “I’m an idiot” sort of way. Should’ve just looked at the damn finished stats page they provide instead of trying to make my life harder. Automation isn’t always smarter. Sometimes you gotta just manually copy crap and move on. Lesson learned. Again.
