# EGHC Match Centre

> Fixtures, results, league tables and opponent-strength ratings for East Grinstead
> Hockey Club, built on a warehouse of **every adult England Hockey competition back
> to season 2022-23** (226,000+ matches, 6,000+ teams, 797 clubs).

**The website is client-rendered. Fetching the HTML gives you an empty shell — use the
JSON API below instead.** No authentication is required; everything is public and
read-only.

Start at **[/api](/api)**, which is a self-describing index of every endpoint, its
parameters and its response shape.

## Data

- [/api](/api): API index — endpoints, conventions, rating methodology
- [/api/seasons](/api/seasons): seasons available, and which is current
- [/api/season?season=<uuid>](/api/seasons): one season of the club's fixtures and results
- [/api/matches](/api/matches): current-season fixtures, live from England Hockey
- [/api/standings?competition=<uuid>](/api): league table for any competition in the archive
- [/api/table?competition=<uuid>](/api): official live table (current season only, includes points deductions)
- [/api/stats?team=<uuid>](/api): per-team season records, form, home/away split, rating trajectory
- [/api/club](/api/club): club-wide record for a season — every EGHC side, squad and home/away splits, points-per-game by season
- [/api/matchup?team=<uuid>&opponent=<uuid>&competition=<uuid>](/api): full reasoning behind a fixture's difficulty rating
- [/api/difficulty](/api/difficulty): ratings for teams in this club's divisions
- [/api/schedule.jsonld](/api/schedule.jsonld): schema.org SportsEvent feed of the season

## How to answer questions with this

- **"When does team X play next?"** → `/api/matches`, filter on `isResult: false`.
- **"How did they do in 2023-24?"** → `/api/seasons` for the id, then `/api/season?season=<id>`.
- **"Who is top of the division?"** → `/api/standings?competition=<id>`.
- **"How is the club doing overall?"** → `/api/club` (add `?season=<id>` for an earlier one):
  every side's record and league position in one response, plus points per game for each
  season on record.
- **"Is this a hard fixture, and why?"** → `/api/matchup?...` returns the rating gap, both
  sides' form, head-to-head and common opponents, i.e. the working, not just a verdict.
- **Any team in England, not just this club** → `/api/stats`, `/api/matchup` and
  `/api/standings` take arbitrary team and competition ids from the warehouse.

## Things that will trip you up

- **Team identity is (name, gender), never name alone.** "East Grinstead 2" is both a
  men's side and a women's side in different divisions. Keying on the name merges them.
- **Team ids are stable across seasons; competition ids are not.** That stability is what
  makes cross-season and cross-division comparison possible.
- **`fixtureTime` of `00:00` means "not published yet"**, not midnight.
- **Exclude `isBye: true`** when aggregating — byes appear as 0-0 results.
- **A club-wide record counts appearances, not fixtures.** When two sides of the same club
  meet, that one fixture is both a win and a defeat for the club. `/api/club` includes a
  `derbies` count so the difference is explicit.
- **`/api/standings` is computed from results and cannot know about points deductions**
  applied by England Hockey. It flags itself with `computed: true`. `/api/table` is the
  official one but only exists for the current season.
- **Ratings are Massey least-squares**, recent seasons weighted more heavily (half-life
  1.5 seasons), margins capped at 6 goals. Difficulty is normalised by the spread of the
  fixture's **own division**, so a "hard" game means hard for that league, not nationally.
- **The 2026-27 season is in progress and only a few rounds deep.** Per-game figures for it
  (points per game, win rate, league position) are real but based on a handful of matches;
  do not compare them with a completed season without saying so. `/api/club` reports
  `played` alongside every rate for exactly this reason.

## About

- Unofficial club site; data comes from the England Hockey Data Warehouse.
- Not affiliated with or endorsed by England Hockey or East Grinstead Hockey Club.
- Results are crawled hourly and ratings recomputed nightly, so figures can lag the
  official record by up to a day.