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Just sat down at my messy desk today, realized I hadn’t touched the Atalanta vs Arsenal past stats in ages. Figured it’s time to dig in. Booted up the laptop, fired up the ancient spreadsheet software – honestly, that thing’s slower than my grandma walking uphill. Had this gut feeling there was a pattern hiding somewhere in all those old results.
Step 1: Gathering the Raw Mess
- First off, went hunting online for all their head-to-head results, way back. Took longer than expected – some sites look modern but their data’s older than dirt. Kept clicking around, getting annoyed by pop-ups.
- Stumbled across this one old football forum archive. Took a chance, scrolled for ages. Hit gold – a user posted CSV links years ago, miraculously still working! Scraped everything into a file like a kid grabbing candy. Sorted dates manually later, cursing the whole time.
Step 2: Wrestling the Numbers
Opened my stats program. Still clunky. Threw the raw data at it. Damn, it choked. Formatting was all wrong – random letters mixed in the score columns. Spent a solid hour just cleaning that junk out, deleting garbage lines one by one. Wanted to smash the keyboard.
Step 3: Actually Doing Stuff
- Punched in formulas: Home wins? Draws? Away wins? Had to triple-check ’em ’cause the program kept freezing.
- Made a simple scatter plot of goals over time. Looked like someone threw spaghetti at the screen. Useless.
- Split the data by competition type. Washed out my coffee mug while the program crunched.
- Started filtering for results when one team was on a streak – just basic wins/losses. Eyeballed percentages.
Step 4: The “Oh?” Moment
Noticed something stupidly simple. Went back years. Every time Arsenal played them away after a tough Champions League week? Their draws pile up like laundry. Not every single time, obviously, but way more often than I thought. Then checked recent seasons – Arsenal actually scraped wins, but only if key attackers were playing. Weird. Didn’t feel like a grand theory, just a dumb trend hiding in plain sight.
Final Bits
No fancy graphs this time. The data felt too messy for that. Wrote bullet points in my sticky note app instead. Conclusion? It ain’t magic. Context like fixtures and player injuries matters more than people shout about. Arsenal at home seems safer lately. Atalanta away? Risky unless Arsenal’s stars are fresh. My main takeaway? Sometimes you just gotta look hard at the stupid numbers. Next, maybe I’ll track individual player stats. Or maybe I’ll nap. That cleanup took it outta me.