Record traffic as England fall flat
was a crushing blow for most of us in the Sport Interactive office in London (perhaps less so for some of our staff who hail from other parts of the United Kingdom!).
But on a professional level our job was to immediately recognise that millions of people would be coming to on Thursday to pore over the night before, and find out the very latest on .
We were told on Friday morning that just under 3.9m people did just that, which meant that we broke our record for traffic to the seven-year-old ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Sport website for the second time in two months.
In September, the day after , 3.7m people visited the site (which pipped the previous best of 3.65m who used the site the day after ).
When that many people are coming to you wanting the best coverage of a major international football match and a huge sports news story, you need to shelve any personal disappointment pretty quickly.
So whilst my colleagues in television were planning how they will cover without England, Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales, the Sport Interactive team was digging in for a monumental day for the website.
Top-hitting story was, predictably, the latest news on . But the audience was also keen to unpick the previous night's game, with , and our doing good business.
Our Player Rater, for those who have not yet used it, is a fantastic tool for everyone to influence how the public feel about their team's performance. You can register your ratings up to 24 hours after a game finishes, so many of our English users spent yesterday still getting frustrations out of their systems! Wayne Bridge, who received the lowest rating from the fans I think I've seen on our Rater, should probably not take a peek …
It was the first time we've ever used the heatmaps on the site. These are generated by one of our partners in our TV coverage, and are sometimes used on that platform, but also work incredibly well for users of the website. The statistics we received from Thursday suggested that many of you spent time analysing these graphics to see where it all went wrong for McClaren's team. I would be very interested in any feedback you have on them.
Of course, alongside all of this we were also able to show you footage of the actual game (because it was on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳), and the chance to relive it through our .
We also had our journalists analysing , and .
And our chief football writer Phil McNulty led the way with some hard-hitting comment.
But whilst the bulk of our traffic was to content around the England game, we also knew that Northern Ireland fans would be coming to us to explore which was shown on ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳2 in Northern Ireland and on the red button in the rest of the UK (which is also where could be found, as well as (on certain platforms), the key game to NI fans of Sweden v Latvia).
and watch a which included all 13 of .
So, none of the home nations will be in Austria and Switzerland, with and Wales, despite their impressive draw in Germany, having been knocked out earlier.
But we're pleased that we were able to quench the thirst of international football fans to find out more about their team's exploits, and we now start planning right across ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Sport for a Euro Championships which should still be a fantastic treat for all followers of the sport.
My colleague over in Radio 5 Live, Mike Ingham, described the tournament this week as "the World Cup without Messi and Kaka". Well, it's also minus Rooney, Gerrard and Lampard now, but we're looking forward to it all the same.
