Welcome to Retro Round.
I have been trying to resurrect some old floppy disks but have had to resort to a printout from 18 years ago.
Our first version of Footy Tipper debuted in 1998/99. The early version was very basic. The Home, Away and Venue fields were drop downs which we would unlock and update each week.
Tipsters would complete their selections, save the spreadsheet and forward it back. On the other end, the organisers would apply a macro for the tips to be extracted and scored.
Yep, very cumbersome compared to how we run it now.
2005 was when I learnt how to code VBA from a Dummies Guide while working in Tasmania. It is the basis of what we have running today. It was definitely a learning curve and scary when I have to look under the bonnet today. I would never build it that way now.
But having said that, we have 17 years with the 2005 variant and just know it works. When Pablo asked me about introducing the UFTC Finals Series competition, it took me one day to rebuild it.
Strong are the FT bones. But I digress.
Let’s go back to 2004.
There was no Gold Coast team so we had a weekly bye.
There were two different competitions run by the ANZ (Pablo) and CommBank (Murch).
The image above is from the CommBank competition so there was no Standout. I have always, and correctly, pointed/blamed Pablo for his insidious invention. I have also hidden Murch’s contact details to protect him from fanboy spam.
It wasn’t too much longer before the competitions were combined. At our peak, we had approximately 225 Tipsters with 100 from PNG.
So a Retro thankyou to our Footy Tipper pioneers Pablo and Murch. There are still many here from Year One which I won’t mention in case I forget someone.
While I work out my old PC and disk issues, if anyone has any earlier versions of tipsheets, please send them through. I am keen to put together a Footy Tipper museum.
Finally, in keeping with the retro round theme, please don’t forget Tipster Day at Henson Park this Saturday.
In case you haven’t seen our very obvious banners, the details are below.
