So this morning I woke up thinking about football, specifically our local Jamaica Premier League. Needed a quick way to see who’s topping the charts right now, you know? Just a simple table showing wins, draws, losses, goals – the basic stuff everyone looks at first.
Starting Simple
Figured I’d just go straight to the source, right? Jumped onto the official Jamaica Premier League website on my laptop. Took me a minute to find the actual league table section. Scrolled past a bunch of news articles and match highlight videos. Was kinda annoyed it wasn’t right there on the front page. Found it eventually, tucked away in a menu they call “Standings”.
The Copy-Paste Struggle
Saw the table layout on their site. Decided to start simple – opened up a plain text file on my computer. Thought I could just manually copy each team’s name, played, won, drawn, lost, goals for, goals against, points… one by one. Copied Harbour View first. Pasted it. Copied Arnett Gardens next. Pasted it. This was gonna take forever.
Felt lazy after the fifth team. Also, their website table format didn’t copy cleanly. Things got messy in my text file. Weird spacing everywhere. Points columns didn’t line up. Cursed myself for wasting 15 minutes doing this manually. Needed a smarter way.
Manual Entry & Messy Reality
Gave up on copy-paste. Opened a simple spreadsheet instead – Google Sheets, cause it’s quick. Decided to just type everything in myself from scratch.
- Made the headers:
Position Team Played Won Drawn Lost Goals For Goals Against Goal Difference Points
Started typing in the team names I remembered seeing on the site: Mount Pleasant, Portmore United, Waterhouse FC, Arnett Gardens… checked the official site again to make sure I got the order mostly right. Began entering the numbers for each team next to their names. Goal difference? Forgot to calculate that! Went back:
=(Goals For minus Goals Against) – added that column.
Made a stupid mistake. Looked back at the official site and realized I had the points wrong for Cavalier SC. Typed it wrong. Felt my face get hot. Screamed internally. Had to double-check every single number I entered against the website. Tedious! Took way longer than I expected.
The Final Push
Got all 14 teams in finally. Sorted the sheet by Points column, highest at the top. Made sure the Position numbers auto-updated based on the Points sort. That felt better. Added some basic cell coloring to highlight the top three teams and bottom three for relegation watch. Used green, yellow, red – super basic stuff.
Sat back and looked at it. It was rough-looking, honestly. My formatting was messy. Some columns too wide, some too narrow. But it had the core info:
Who’s leading? Who’s got the best attack? Who’s struggling?
That’s all I really wanted for my quick reference.
Lesson Learned Again
Thought finding the table online would be the easy part. It mostly was. But getting that exact snapshot of the rankings into a quick-reference format I could easily glance at later? That took effort. Manual entry means mistakes happen. Double-checking takes time. Basic spreadsheets are your friend, but only if you type carefully!
The league standings change every week. For now, I got my quick guide. Maybe next time I try a different approach… or just bookmark the official site better!
