HOW WE COVER CASUALS GAMES

If you can’t make it to the game on matchday, you’re often left following events on social media and live score apps, but the detail and the depth of our coverage depends on a number of factors, from how many volunteers we have available to whether we are home or away. Head of Media, Dominic Bliss , breaks down how we cover Corinthian-Casuals matches…

​A notification pings on your phone screen. There’s been a goal in your team’s game, and you’re 1-0 up – and the update tells you that your favourite player scored it. So you head onto social media to praise the main man, only to see another notification on your screen moments later. “Correction”, it begins, before informing you the goalscorer was actually a completely different player. How have they muddled them up?!

It’s a familiar scenario for non-league fans following a match online because they can’t be there in person, but believe me it’s even more frustrating for the media team. It all comes down to the vagaries of non-league football coverage. After all, you might have noticed there aren’t hordes of journalists and administrators at most games at this level. The responsibility falls with a small collection of volunteers from both clubs, and if one person gets an admin detail slightly wrong, the whole thing can become a law unto itself.

So how do the details from a Step 5 non-league football match find their way to your phone? In our league, a lot of it is down to Football Web Pages (FWP), a website and app that lists fixtures for all Combined Counties and Isthmian League clubs. Their contract with those two organisations – among others – requires that a club official from the home side in any given fixture must input the line-ups of both teams, including shirt numbers, and then update the match details as it plays out. This means pressing a button when the game kicks off, and also when the ref blows for half-time and full time.

In between times, the same person must register the goals as they go in, or as soon as they get the chance, and has the option to input substitutes, bookings and red cards, as well as the attendance. Once the info is registered on FWP, it will automatically appear on the respective clubs’ official X and BlueSky pages, meaning those goal alerts you receive are input by whoever the home side has put on FWP admin duty. We update Instagram when the line-ups come in, then at half-time and full time, but goal alerts are generally reserved for X, as we think that correlates best with the nature of the respective platforms. Goal videos and interviews tend to go up on Instagram later, as part of our post-match coverage.

Many clubs will have a dedicated administrator who does all of this, and it’s often done very efficiently, but there are occasions when an already stretched team of matchday volunteers can only do the bare minimum, and sometimes quite some time after the incident has occurred. I have been present at away games in the past when the chair of the opposition is doing almost everything – greeting the visiting officials, turning on the floodlights, showing the visiting team to the dressing rooms, and then doing media duties, from updating apps to announcing everything over the PA system.

This means the media team for the away club are sometimes left powerless to rectify any errors made by their opposite number. If an error is made on the teamsheet, we have to seek out the home admin to ask them to correct it, and the same goes for mistaken identity on goalscorer, or if a sub is sent on wearing a different shirt number to that which he was registered on FWP before kick-off. So when you see the goalscorer’s name corrected five minutes after a goal has been announced, that’s what has happened. On one occasion, I had to rush to the clubhouse at an away ground to ask a member of bar staff to press the button that confirmed the game had kicked off when we were 25 minutes – and two goals – into the match.

The potential problems grew after Twitter was rebranded as X and, under new ownership, decided to limit the amount of uploads an account could post per day. Suddenly, FWP updates on matches would cease altogether midway through a match leaving fans following on social media guessing what was going on. Often, we’d spot this had happened and manually post the details until full-time, but it led to some occurrences of goal alerts doubling up and differing.

This is why you’ll notice the media admins for Casuals often look so pained and alert on away matchdays, working out what on earth has gone wrong with the updates this time.

If you spot it, please try not to show anyone up publicly, just drop us a DM and let us know things aren’t quite working as they should. Or simply trust that we’ll notice and sort it out as soon as we can. Remember, everyone in our media team is a fan who has decided to volunteer – we’re doing this out of love for the club.

For the same reason, we might not always have enough media volunteers on a matchday to capture the goals on video, or produce a full match report the following morning. We will always try to do it all, but we also understand that not everyone can make it to every game.

We like to think we keep on top of things pretty well, and we are extremely lucky to have a service as good as FWP working with our league. But every now and then, the lack of resources at this level can lead to misunderstandings and miscommunication.

Hopefully this explainer gives you a bit of insight into the matchday media operation at our club. And if you don’t have Football Web Pages’ app on your phone, download it, select Corinthian-Casuals as your chosen club, and turn on notifications for matchdays. That way you’ll be kept in the loop… to the best of our ability, at least!