End of the Year Comments

As I end my first (partial) year of blogging about Southampton FC, I have some thoughts both about the blogging process and about our club.

First, I recognize that at its core blogging is an intensely self-centered and personal enterprise.  I am not blogging for the greater good of humanity or even the greater good of the Southampton FC community, I am blogging because I enjoy it.  At times I enjoy it too much and I spend time blogging that I should have spent earning money as a lawyer.  As a self-employed lawyer, the processes of working for money and blogging are very similar:  I think, I research, I write, and I rewrite.  Right now blogging is usually, but not always, more fun so I spend too much time blogging.  (It is not always more fun, of course.  I recently won a big case and that was lots and lots of fun. )  In any case, I would appreciate if no one told my mother how much time I have been spending blogging. 

Because I blog for my own pleasure, I have, obviously, chosen the topics for my posts almost entirely because the subject matter interested me or I thought it would interest me and by the time I realized it did not I had put in enough work that I decided to go ahead and finish.  But sometimes, I did not finish and those articles languish half written on my hard drive.  Some posts may interest me less than others but require so much less work that I go ahead and do them.  Other posts required massive amounts of work such that, under any objective standard, they were probably not an efficient use of my time.  As an example, the two posts covering the mid-season statistical analysis took over 30 hours.  I spent the time because the process was, for a while, interesting and entertaining.  I was also very interested in learning what I would learn when I finished.  Yet, by the time I finish compiling everything, I was sufficiently drained that I did not actually provide a great deal of substantive analysis of the statistics.  Oh well.

On the other hand, by far the most popular new post (in terms of page hits) in the past three months was the “Possible Reasons for not signing Jack Cork Right Now.”  That post took less than an hour from initial conception to publication.

All things being equal, I would prefer to write things that interest me and that people want to read but it is not always clear to me what those might be.  There was some interest in the match previews that I did in September but they were a lot of work and after I figured out how to do them it was not that interesting repeating the process again and again.  Also, I was using the data from Football Manager 2014 which was becoming more and more out of date.  I could have started doing match previews again after Football Manager 2015 came out but by that point my attorney workload was so heavy that I just did not have time and wanted to spend what blogging time I did on other things.  Also, to be fair, I was playing World of Warcraft’s Warlords of Draenor expansion which used up most of my spare time.

Nevertheless, I have enjoyed the blogging experience and intend to continue it.  I particularly appreciate how the people who have been reading my blog and my posts on Saintsweb have made me, for the most part, feel welcome in the Southampton FC community.  I hope that I have at times offered a useful insight on some issues or, at least, an interesting perspective on them.  Certainly, this was my goal when I started the blog because the triggering event was the intense panic over the summer transfer dealings for which I believed, as it turned out partially mistakenly, I had a plausible explanation.

In any case, I wish to thank those of you who have been reading my blog.  If anyone has suggestions or requests for subjects that I could write about, I would be happy to hear them.  Please feel free to post suggestions to the comments in the blog or to the threads devoted to my blog on SaintsWeb or The Ugly Inside.  I cannot promise I will fulfill those requests, but if I have something to say on the subject I will certainly give it a try.  Thank you again.