I am going to take you back to New Year’s Day, circa 2010, when trolls were trolling under cover, and websites and social media were still whirring from the struggle of dragging themselves into the 21st century. The snow was falling, and a West Country rugby team was sat up north, watching it start to descend.
Once again, our Christmas had been short. No sooner had we broken up for the holiday than we were back in for matches on Boxing Day, and now New Year’s Day too.
My husband, although he wasn’t my husband yet then, that’s a different story, was head analyst and the most technically gifted at the time. We were in the hotel room doing what we always did before a match, getting everything ready so that the second the final whistle went, we could get straight in the car and drive home. Normally, I’d hang around for ages after a match writing up the report, tweeting live scores, updating Facebook, all the stuff nobody automated back then. We actually gave Bath Rugby their first ever Facebook page. I have no idea how many Premiership clubs even had one at that point. I am that old!
Part of getting ahead meant setting up the shell of the match report page in advance. Something like bathrugby.com/match-report/123. It would only actually go live once I gave it a title, so in my head, it was completely private. Not even a holding page. A secret page.
My husband thought it would be funny to put something in the title field while it sat there empty. Something like “Bath bail out of match because they don’t want to play in the snow, otherwise they will lose by 20 points.” I had no idea he’d done it.
Within five minutes, a fan had found it (literally by typing in URL’s until he’d come across it) and dumped it straight onto the supporters’ forum. ‘Look what I found’! I bet he thought he had the scoop of the year!
Cue, total apocalyptic chaos…
