I am a football statto/geek/nerd – whatever you want to call it. I keep a spreadsheet of the games I attend, including goal scorers, crowd attendance, team line ups and other information which is of no interest to the vast majority of the population.

Most of this data is collected shortly after attending the game and is readily available on the internet. However for matches attended prior to my spreadsheet was developed, obtaining some of the information has proved very difficult – most notably the squad details of the away team Bath City were playing. Yes, I admit, it is borderline train spotting on the geek scale, but so what.

After trawling through club websites and even using the internet tool Archive.org to look up web pages no longer in existence, I continued my quest away from the computer and ventured into Bath Central Library – a place I haven’t visited since my school days.

I was hoping that they would keep old issues of The Bath Chronicle, which would have listed the information I sought in their match reports. Haven never required access to old newspapers before I had no idea whether such an archive existed. It does and the newspapers are kept on something called microfilm.

I have never heard of microfilm before or used one of the machines used to read them. I eventually managed to work out how to use one of the machines and read the microfilms I required, obtaining the information. This wasn’t before I managed to break one of the readers. A total accident, but the knob completely snapped clean off in my hands. The machines looked about 5,000 years old, so probably cannot be repaired, unless a caveman can be brought back to life and given a piece of flint and a stone. I’m sorry library-goers!

While using the machine, I remembered where I had seen the readers before – in an episode of The X-Files where Mulder and Scully are looking through past newspaper archives for information on the liver-eating mutant, Eugene Victor Tooms.

You may well be thinking I am a very sad individual for collecting this information, but when you need to know which player Gary Sippetts was substituted for in the game against Hemel Hempstead on 27/01/2007, you know where to come *

* it was John Lawford in the 74th minute.