The document discusses hypotheses about differences between modern and vintage football match reports. It analyzes a 1878 report from The Times and a 2012 report from The Mirror. The methodology section describes using The Times archive to find old reports on the FA Cup. The analysis finds that modern reports use more images due to technology but have similar readability scores. It finds little similarity in adverb usage between reports. Discourse structure differs, with the old report as one paragraph and the new using paragraphs separated by images.

2. HYPOTHESES:-
Language used in modern contemporary football reports is less formal than
the language used in vintage football reports.
• More concise now, sentence length/ structure
• More images used now
• Difference of media types used
• Terminology of specialist lexis changed ?
• Similar adverbs used ?

3. ‘’METHODOLOGY SLIDE’’
The main resource we used was the times archive/database because it
provided a good amount of extremely old football match reports, this is
an important feature because in theory the older the text, the more
differences it'll have compared to a modern one.
Although a difficult resource to use, once you get the hang of it the times
archive is quite a rewarding resource to use. The search terms that
provided the best results, revolved around searching for the ‘ FA Cup ‘
or the ‘ FA Challenge Cup ‘ as it was formerly known. Prior research
showed that the FA Cup is one of the oldest competitions in football and
would probably yield the oldest reports possible.
Most websites we searched were useless when searching for vintage match
reports as their archives didn’t stretch back far enough, so these were
immediately discarded.
We gathered other texts that also were on the subject of the FA Cup final
but they were more modern than the one we decided upon, so again
discarded it because we felt it would have less mentionable differences
than an older text.
Our selected text is a valid comparative for the starter text because they
have a similar target audience and are both also focused on the subject
of a well covered big cup final match.

4. SYSTEMATIC ANALYSIS
Graphology:
We hypothesised that modern day football reports would be more likely to have
images than vintage ones, partially due to the technology that is available and
also the media used to distribute the text.
Modern day reports are more likely to be published to an online version of a
popular UK newspaper, in this case the Mirror, making it easier for images to
feature on there.
In contrast, the report from 1878 was published only in the Times newspaper as,
clearly, they didn’t have use of the internet. Because of technology available,
the use of images is absent due to printing capabilities and also the fact that
cameras were still in their infancy.

5. SYSTEMATIC ANALYSIS
Readability:
Originally, we predicted that vintage match reports were more likely to be
dragged out with longer sentence lengths and more of an elevated lexis,
however, the online ‘’readability tools’’ proved us wrong.
Once both texts were digitalised we put them into the calculator and allowed it to
calculate the results that are seen below.
Old New
Although the new one was more than twice as long, the percentage of complex words was
almost identical to the old. However the average words per sentence turned out to be more in
the new. Allegedly the new one is supposed to be harder to read than the old, although we think
that’s because of the quantity of foreign names in the report, this could well be because the
system doesn’t recognise these names as actual words.

6. SYSTEMATIC ANALYSIS
Similar use of adverbs?
We found that between the two match reports, the use of adverbial phrases is not
similar at all, for instance there are only two adverbs throughout the more
recent piece of text, whereas in the old text there are none. Despite there
being no obvious adverbs in the new text there are words that are technically
classified as adverbs, yet in the context of which they are being used we do
not feel that they qualify.
The two adverbs which we found in the more recent piece of text are:
- Finally - an adverb of time
- Increasingly - an adverb of frequency

7. SYSTEMATIC ANALYSIS
Discourse Structure
The discourse structure between the two texts is very different, for example the
old report from 1878 doesn’t seem to follow any form of discourse structure
as the text is just one large chunk of writing which is not broken up by
separate paragraphs. The match report from 2012 however is structured in
paragraphs (with each paragraph being separated by an image).
The organisation of the two pieces (in referral to time ordering) is similar as both
work their way through the respective matches from the first minute until the
last one, as all sporting reports do in order to make sense.