Recording a match

Two taps per event, on a phone held on the sideline.

Step one: the call-up

Setting a match up asks two questions, in the order they are answered in: who travels to this game, and which of them start. The call-up happens on Thursday, in front of the whole roster; the lineup happens in the changing room, in front of the twelve who turned up. They are separate steps for that reason.

How many you call up is counted, not limited — how many travel is your business. If the squad is tagged, Filter by tag narrows the list, and one button under the chips calls all of the filtered players at once.

Step two: the lineup

The starting lineup is picked out of the call-up, and is exactly what the team throws off with. A tap that would exceed your team's court size is refused with a line saying to unselect somebody first. Starting short is allowed — a coach with ten fit players still has a match to record — but it is confirmed rather than assumed, because the commonest reason for a short lineup is a missed tap.

Somebody has to be in goal. A match recorded without a keeper credits every save and every goal conceded to nobody, and no screen afterwards can put that right, so starting is refused rather than warned about. If you are recording a training game or scouting the other side, turn the requirement off in Settings.

GK names who starts in goal. A keeper on the bench takes the gloves by coming on, which is a decision taken during the match. Going back a step keeps everything already picked, so correcting a call-up from the lineup costs two taps.

The recording screen

The recorder owns the whole screen — no header, no tab bar. During a match, navigation chrome is wasted space and an accidental tap away from the recorder is expensive.

Everything recordable belongs to somebody. Each player on court owns one full-width row, and the rows divide whatever height the screen has left between them, so everybody is on screen at once without scrolling. A squad playing 1+4 gets bigger targets than one playing 1+6, which is the right way round.

A player's row is five columns: who it is, then Attack, Defence, Discipline and Substitution. Choosing the kind of action on the row is what keeps recording at two taps and keeps the second one short — the sheet that opens holds one group of buttons instead of every event a handball player can produce. A keeper's saves and goals conceded sit under Defence, because that is when they happen.

The two teams are tapped in the score bar. Anything that belongs to a team and to nobody in it — your goal off a scramble nobody saw, and everything the other side does — is recorded from that team's box at the top. Name and score sit in a rounded card, and the card is the button.

An empty place is a row too. A team that threw off short shows outlined rows carrying a single Add player button, so a latecomer walks straight into one.

The clock

A fresh session starts with the clock already running. Recording begins at throw-off and your hands are full; a clock still waiting for a second tap is only discovered minutes later, by which point every event recorded so far carries the wrong minute. Over-running is the cheaper mistake — pause it or nudge it back.

Elapsed time is derived from the wall clock, not from a ticking counter, so it stays correct when the phone locks, the tab is backgrounded, or the page reloads.

Substitutions, suspensions and the gloves

Substitutions open the bench as a grid of cards. The player coming on replaces the one going off in place, so the row you learned during the first half stays where it is.
Suspensions are recorded under Discipline, on the player's own row.
The gloves can change mid-match. A youth squad rotates them, so handing them over is a swap: the player going in goal takes GK and the outgoing keeper takes the position the new one was holding.

Undo

Undo steps the whole recording back one action, up to fifty deep — including substitutions and half changes, which restore the court and the clock along with the event list. Annotations such as a shot zone or an assist fold into the event they belong to, so one Undo removes a whole recorded action rather than peeling it apart.

No signal in the hall

Sports halls rarely have a connection, so recording never waits on one. Every event is written to the device as it happens and pushed to the server when the signal returns. A phone locking mid-match, an accidental reload or the browser evicting the tab all resume where you left off, and an interrupted recording stays resumable even after switching teams.

Once the match is finished, see reading the statistics.