Apologies in advance for this column being brought to you for the second week running from a corner of south-east London. But Big Brother is strolling the streets of SE25, wearing a red and blue scarf and enjoying a half-time cup of Bovril while grabbing all the personal data he can get his hands on.

If you thought last week’s goings on at Selhurst Park were odd, some of the off-the-pitch developments this week at Crystal Palace have been downright weird as far as sports journalists are concerned.

For the first time in the history of mankind, a Premier League football team announced the identity of its new manager via the Twitter account of the club’s shirt sponsor. Seriously.

Can we expect the sports editor of the Sarf London Press to call the Neteller press office next time he wants a quote from Neil Warnock, the man duly anointed as the Palace’s new manager?

Neteller (not to be confused with the delicious hazelnut spread) got the jump on the news, apparently as part of its sponsorship agreement with Palace.

The normally mild-mannered and helpful press team at Selhurst was underwhelmed, as they were informed of this new protocol only shortly before the news was released. “Fuming,” was how Luke Tugby, the club’s press officer, described his reaction (on Twitter, naturally).

Tugby had previously advised his timeline (yeah, that’s what sports reporting has become) that, “Before criticism comes the way of #cpfc, the decision to have Neteller release before the club’s website is out of our hands.”

Neteller operates an online money transfer service. After Warnock was confirmed, they were busy on Twitter again, this time offering those who could be bothered the chance of a meeting with the manager who Palace fans refer to as “Colin” (in an anagramatical manner involving his full name… go on, work it out).

Might this be a harbinger of things to come? Or have sport’s commercial paymasters been managing the message in a more subtle manner for a goodly while, anyway? 

It would be good to hear your views.

BUT THERE WERE more media “innovations” to come from Palace, as Warnock gave his first press conference yesterday with the club circulating many of the pictures and quotes via something called Sportlobster.

Established last year, Sportlobster calls itself “the sports social network”, claiming that “… 1.6 million fans have joined the network. Clubs, teams and athletes across a wide and diverse range of sports are using the platform to engage with fans”.

Basically, it’s an attempt at a Facebook for sport.

Palace is the first official partnership that Sportlobster has est-ablished with a Premier League foot-ball club. They say that the deal “will enable Crystal Palace and its players to engage with fans in a ground-breaking way via the dedicated online sports network. The relationship will also provide Sportlobster with a prominent match-day presence at each of Crystal Palace’s home games, together with access to behind-the-scenes content, which will be shared exclusively with fans on the Sportlobster platform”. 

Sounds like a media outlet paying money for exclusive access.

Another view of Sportlobster is that it is a sports blog with some money behind it, which makes a lot of use of “user generated content” – or publishes almost anything that the fans of a club might submit, with little editorial interference.

"We are absolutely delighted to become the club’s official social media partner,” was what Arron Shepherd, the co-founder of Sportlobster, was supposed to have said when the deal was announced, according to a press release issued by the site.

“The club are absolutely delighted to be working in this sector in partnership with Sportlobster,” is what the Palace co-chairman, Steve Parish, is supposed to have said, according to the same press release.

The fans, meanwhile, seem less than “absolutely delighted”.

When last we checked, the Crystal Palace page of the Sportlobster site had fewer than 1,700 subscribers. More than 24,000 turned up at Selhurst Park for Palace’s first home league game last weekend.

Despite online links to Sportlobster being pushed out by the Palace communications team’s social media accounts – 127,000 people follow the club’s official Twitter feed – the uptake for Sportlobster so far appears a little modest. And that might be with good reason.

Like most top-flight clubs, Palace already has a dedicated band of supporters who generate fanzines, websites and podcasts, mostly of pretty decent quality and well-informed. And very well-read, too: one fanzine has 10,000 Twitter followers. Some of the fanzines even provide columns for the local weekly newspapers, of which there are three, plus the Evening Standard.

None of these outlets demands of their readers that they should permit them full, unfettered access to their Twitter timelines, to see who they follow and who follow them, or require that they should be able to update the subscriber’s profile or even post tweets for them. But Sportlobster does.

Any Palace fan signing on to Sportlobster through their Faustbook account will grant them access to their public profile, their friends list, their email address and other personal details.

It all has the appearance of a not-too-sophisticated data-scraping exercise.

Anyone who has the slightest reservations about the amount of personal information they share online with unaccountable third parties will in all likelihood avoid registering with Sportlobster. 

And if it makes them feel any better, they need not worry too much: from what we’ve seen on the site, they’re not missing much. 

Matt Lawton, take a bow son.

The Daily Mail’s chief sport reporter, pictured left, has set the pace this week with some good, old-fashioned reporting on the strange goings on at Cardiff City and the behaviour of Malky Mackay, their one-time promotion-winning manager, and his mate and former colleague, Iain Moody.

From an initial, supremely well-sourced exclusive – the Mail’s lawyers must have loved it – Lawton’s story has had the rest of the football press pack chasing for fresh follow-ups. The often blundering football establishment has done its best to provide some.

Since Lawton’s report first appeared, it has…  

• stopped in its tracks the hiring of Mackay as the new manager of Crystal Palace
  
• brought about yesterday the resignation of Moody as Palace’s “sporting director” (a title in which the word “sporting” is assumed not to have been adopted ironically)
  
• prompted one of the most ridiculous “justifications” for racism, sexism and homophobia as “banter” in a statement which was supposed to be an apology issued on behalf of Mackay from the League Managers’ Association
  
• and seen the aforesaid LMA this morning issue an apology for its apology of an apology. It is not impossible that further shame-faced resignations may follow
  

A quick catch-up of how we got to this point.

Mackay was the manager who got Cardiff into the Premier League for the first time in May 2013. Mackay worked closely with Moody, as the club’s executive in charge of transfers and recruitment, and last summer they spent around £50 million on the transfer of eight players, a significant spend for a newly promoted club.

Yet within months of promotion, Cardiff’s Malaysian owner, Vincent Tan, had fired Moody and then Mackay. There was much acrimony, but little clarity. Tan – the foreign billionaire that had ordered the Bluebirds to play in red – was widely derided for his apparent misjudgement. From holding a reasonable position in the Premier League under Mackay, Cardiff were relegated at the end of the season.

Moody soon got himself another job, as sporting director at another newly promoted Premier League club, Crystal Palace, where Tony Pulis had been appointed manager in November. 

Palace played at Cardiff in April, winning 3-0, a result which precipitated a final spiral in the Welsh club’s form.

It was not long after that Tan alleged that, somehow, someone in the Palace staff had acquired information about Cardiff’s starting line-up for the game, potentially important (though unlikely to be crucial) information.

From just one league point in November, Pulis transformed Palace’s form through the rest of the season and saw the side haul itself to finish 11th by May, earning him the Manager of the Season accolade.

Mackay, meanwhile, remained unemployed. Together with Moody the Scot started a £7.5 million legal claim against Tan for compensation and wrongful dismissal. In May 2014, Mackay abandoned the action. “I did not want to be in litigation and believe that it is in the best interests of all parties to have a clean break and move on,” Mackay said at that time. He also apologised to Tan.

The timing of this abandonment of legal action is now seen as significant.

For Tan was spending £750,000 on an investigation into the £50 million-worth of transfer business that Mackay and Moody had conducted the previous summer. This included his lawyers, Mishcon de Reya – the firm that handled Princess Diana’s divorce from the Prince of Wales – obtaining a High Court order to search Moody’s Balham home last March. Investigators seized thousands of documents, computer and phone records, including 70,000 text messages and 100,000 emails. Moody’s office at Palace’s training ground in Beckenham was also searched.

This documentation was to form the basis of Tan’s “dossier”. 

Last week, with the new football season just 48 hours away, Palace’s hero and saviour, Pulis, walked out of his job as manager mainly because he was not allowed free-rein over the club’s transfers. This remained the domain of Moody, who sources at Selhurst Park said was “highly rated” by the club’s owners. After three months of the transfer window and with the season about to begin, Palace had managed to sign just three players, spending less than £2.5 million.

This week, the Football Association ruled that it had found evidence that someone at Palace had sneakily got hold of Cardiff’s team sheet ahead of that game in April, and it handed down a modest and seemingly insignificant £25,000 fine to the south London club.

But once that point of fact had been established, it prompted Tan to launch a law suit against Crystal Palace for £20 million compensation for loss of earnings.

That case may struggle to be made. Cardiff finished the season 20th and last in the division, six points adrift of safety, having lost 22 of their 38 matches. 

There must be a Malaysian version of the dictum about cold servings of dishes of revenge. Because with Palace poised to sign a three-year contract with Mackay to be their new manager, re-uniting him with his mate Moody and given a transfer war chest worth around £25 million, details from the dossier of text messages exchanged between the pair from the time they worked together at Cardiff were plastered across the back pages, originally courtesy of Lawton.

The sexist, racist and homophobic text messages may just be the start. Cardiff have reported Moody and Mackay to the FA for alleged misconduct. 

The financial details of the transfer deals may yet take us back to an earlier age of football skulduggery, with Tan reckoning he paid at least £20 million over the odds for the players Moody and Mackay lined up. 

Not since Terry Venables and Alan Sugar fell-out in acrimony over the ownership and management of Tottenham Hotspur 20 years ago have the often tawdry insider dealings of a top-flight football club been so exposed in the pages of our newspapers.

On that occasion, the owner, Sugar, “won” the war of words; despite Venables being very popular among his many friends in the football press corps, as a regular “Friday night drop” of documents to one Sunday newspaper reporter kept the drip-drip of negative stories going, eroding Venables’s position in public.

Of course, Venables went on to manage England soon after he left Spurs. Mackay may not have such career opportunities ahead of him after the coverage he’s had in the Mail this week.

Happy birthday, Match of the Day.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the Premier League season kicks off tomorrow, and with it, for a 50th year, returns the original television football programme.
But like many of us as we enter late middle-age, there are increasing signs of infirmity, and even suggestions from old friends that early retirement might not be out of the question.

The BBC’s relationship with televised sport, once all-embracing, is increasingly marginalised and irrelevant, caused by its loss of rights to the satellite companies and a terminal lack of budget. Maybe, too, the 24/7 digital age is hastening the moment when the controller of BBC1 decides the time has come to abandon a highlight packages show, pretending that no one already knows the scores, and the scorers, of games that finished five hours earlier.

The Saturday “Pinks”, the special edition of regional evening papers, have all but disappeared from around the country, out-dated by a range of devices, starting with steam wireless, but now extending through television, to smartphones and tablets. Might MOTD go the same way?

There was a time when Match of the Day, and the ITV Sunday lunchtime version, the Big Match, with their limited selection of a few minutes of highlights from three or four games, was the only football on our telly, apart from the occasional disaster of a live England game from Wembley or the annual jamboree of the FA Cup final itself. Now, there’s near-saturation coverage of football, especially Premier League football, with 154 matches being shown live this season by BSkyB and BTSport.

For anyone who isn’t in a ground on a Saturday afternoon (or Sunday lunchtime or Monday evening, as kick-off times are swapped around for the benefit of the TV schedulers) and is determined enough to see their team play, there’s usually a savvy pub landlord somewhere who has his satellite dish honed in on a Greek or Turkish channel. With the sound turned down, obviously.

And therein lies another problem for MOTD. Because besides just picking up the broadcasting crumbs from the table with its heritage highlights package, Match of the Day no longer offers anything distinctive. If you’ve already seen the game, or games, and found out all the rest of the results from Sky Sports News or online newspapers’ “live” blogs, what is there about the old programme to make even the most committed sports fan switch on? The charisma of Gary Lineker? Think again…

Matthew Norman pin-pointed another of BBC Sport’s problems in his Telegraph column this week when he asked: where have all the great commentators gone? 

“The elocuted Geordie elegance of Ken Wolstenholme, Barry Davies’s caustic, sometimes bombastic intelligence, and the infectiously nasal zeal of the early John Motson. Whatever you thought of them, their voices were as instantly recognisable as those of your closest family, and their verbal stylings equally distinct.

“These days, you would have to deploy the CIA’s most sophisticated voice analysis software to distinguish the seven or eight BBC TV commentators.”

It is not just in football that the BBC appears to be losing its great “Voice of …” [fill in name of sport to suit]: John Arlott in cricket; Dan Maskell in tennis; Harry Carpenter in boxing, verbal artists of the microphone who were taught to let the pictures do their talking for them. And when they had something to say, it was worth hearing.

Increasingly, Match of the Day’s future will depend on ratings, and possibly on what fraction of digital rights the BBC can hang on to as they stand on the sidelines watching Sky and BT slug it out in the next round of multi-billion-pound negotiations. But with hundreds of BBC News staff being axed to save money, trophy programmes such as MOTD with their mega-contracts for the likes of Alan Shearer, Phil Neville and Robbie Savage to spout punditry platitudes may be playing into the final few minutes of injury time.

ON THE TOPIC OF great commentators, which we sort of were, it is worth stating here that, by accident or design, the BBC has managed to find a winning team of live action commentators for its athletics coverage, which has been operating seemingly around the clock from the European Championships in Zurich this week.

If only they would make greater use of them.

Steve Cram, schooled in the Eurosport booth of day-long stints covering the arcanities of the women’s 50-kilometre hammer-throw, has been joined recently by the non-athlete Andrew Cotter, pictured above, a philosophy graduate who learned his trade covering golf, and thus provides some calm, intelligent wit. Backed up with former javelin world record-holder Steve Backley’s analytical approach to field events (when the director deigns to show any), this trio has done very well this summer, first in Glasgow at the Commonwealth Games and now Zurich.

But then the BBC goes and spoils it by indulging surely the most incoherent and inarticulate commentator known to the world in Brendan Foster, or by pretending that Denise Lewis or Colin Jackson really do have anything worth saying.

Much, especially production personnel, has changed since BBC Sport’s forced move to Salford in 2012, and not always for the better. But with their athletics coverage, just as with Match of the Day, the BBC would do well to return to an old guiding principle of less is usually more.

These are bad times, sad times for cricket writing in this country.

The summer game has often been the province of some of the greats of sports journalism, from last century’s poets Cardus and Arlott, through to some who grace the sports pages today, even including the likes of Marks and Engel. That's Victor and Matthew, since you ask.

But with Sky Sports’ Test-centric coverage increasingly provided only by those who have at some time captained their country at the game – regardless of their merits as broadcasters or journalists – the opportunities for genuine journalists to work on cricket are becoming more limited by the day.

Earlier this year, the Press Association abandoned its commitment to ensure coverage at all county championship games by ending agreements with around 20 freelance stringers to file live copy and scores from around the grounds during the summer.

“We took the decision to bring coverage of the county game in-house,” PA Sport said at the time, leaving themselves without any reporters actually in the press box at county grounds for the summer. At least, that was, until the Cricket Writers’ Club cut a deal with the governing body, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), to pay freelancers to do what PA Sport was no longer prepared to budget for. What happens next season has yet to be determined.

PA’s cricket coverage was once the mainstay of regional evening and daily newspapers’ summer sports pages, and latterly some nationals, too, as they cut-back on stringer fees. But as not even the Telegraph, Times and Guardian bother paying lip-service to the game at county level these days, someone at the PA must have asked the question, “Why bother?” 

It gets worse. Now the august Cricketer magazine is without any writers on its staff, after the editor, Andrew Miller, and two other journalists were made redundant last month.

“How do you expect to get out a decent magazine if you don’t have any journalists working on it?” one interested party said. Others suggest that an announcement of a new “editor-in-chief” and production person – both new job titles so as not to break any employment law – may be imminent.

First published in 1921, The Cricketer’s past editors have included EW Swanton, David Frith and Richard Hutton, but in more recent times, since it was sold by BSkyB and abandoned an association with the publishers of Wisden, the monthly magazine’s fate has begun to appear about as assured as an Indian batsman playing outside his off-stump to Jimmy Anderson.

That may have something to do with its sometimes owners since 2010. Neil Davidson, is the sometimes controversial former chairman of Leicestershire County Cricket Club, while Lord Marland is a former Conservative Party treasurer.

Neither has any background in publishing. Before taking on The Cricketer, Marland, who made some of his fortune with Hunter boots, had tried to take over the ECB chairmanship, but was foiled. It was Marland’s interview with Tory leader David Cameron that appeared in the pages of the magazine which may have precipitated the decision of the previous editor, John Stern, to leave The Cricketer.

But it is little wonder neither the pre-eminent magazine on the national game nor the national news agency can make coverage of cricket pay any longer. At least one cricket website is being given full journalistic access and privileges at the press boxes at county grounds by being accredited by the ECB, even though the website tends not to pay its writers.

Who’s to say that PA Sport or the Cricketer magazine might not soon be using cricket copy and scores data provided by unpaid students and trainees, all because it is provided free.

And when the music stops, whoever doesn’t have a chair will be leaving the building.

Trinity Mirror’s merger of the newsrooms of three of its national titles, with a reported eight senior job losses, looks as if it is also about to impact the sports desks, where four into three jobs will no longer go. And all with what us sports hacks like to call “the big kick-off”, the start of the new football season, just a few days away.

At present Dean Morse is head of sport at the Daily Mirror, where Dominic Hart is sports editor;   James Brown (no, not that one) is sports editor at the People and David Walker the long-established sports editor at the Sunday Mirror. All that seems set to change within the next week or so.

All four have endured – and survived – previous staffing culls at Trinity Mirror when the business was being run by Sly Bailey, but word from Canary Wharf is that this time, at least one senior sports figure may depart. Consultations are on-going, with one of the fab four believed already to have  lodged an appeal against being compelled to take redundancy. 

New jobs for digital journalists and “investment” in data journalism have been promised by the management, in what by now is a familiar pattern across what was once known as Fleet Street. "The creation of the integrated newsroom will result in more journalists contributing more content across all platforms," a company statement said when the merger was announced.

Sources at Canary Wharf suggests that once the reshuffle has been conducted, in a high-level game of musical chairs, none of the sports desk executives will still be in the same job. Significantly, it is being suggested that the merger will see the Sunday titles’ staffing subject to greatest “streamlining”.

It took Des Lynam to say it, but Clare Balding might want to consider sticking to horse racing.

Lynam, the doyen of television sports presenters, emptied both barrels in his sport on TV column in the Telegraph today, accusing the BBC's coverage of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow of being everything from "amateurish" to Alan Partridge-like. And Balding was not immune from his criticism.

Few dare to challenge la Balding's status as a "national treasure", but as the former sports broadcaster of the year continues to appear on all our television and radio channels, sometimes apparently simultaneously, there is a growing sense of the Emperor's New Clothes about the phenomenon.

From fronting Channel 4's horse racing coverage (when she's available), to rugby league for the BBC, to Olympic and Commonwealth Games swimming, through the occasional walking or cycling travel shows on radio and TV, to her little-watched "chat" show on BT Sport, there seems to be no project that Balding will turn down. 

"She's in a trap of her own creation," one veteran television sports presenter - not Lynam - told me over lunch at Joe Allen's recently. "While she's flavour of the month, she's almost obliged to accept any reasonable offer of work. We all fear that the next call we get might be the last.

"What it demonstrates is the terrible lack of vision or imagination among some of our broadcasters' top executive producers - or a real dearth of presenting talent. But for Clare it is all a bit double-edged, because if she is over-exposed, the public may get bored of her, or the backlash might be bigger."

Balding, who had the privileged up-bringing of a woman whose father trained race horses for the Queen, knows racing inside out, and is also an adroit live presenter at most sports. Her folksy know-nothing approach can let her down sometimes, though. Such as when anchoring at the Tollcross pool in the past week and she asked how people recognised the black-hatted English swimmers. Neither Mark Foster nor Rebecca Adlington had the heart to point out that the swimmers are all in lanes for their races.

Lynam's broader criticism of BBC Sport's saturation coverage from Glasgow echoes complaints heard increasingly from other sources. 

The Blue Peter-isation of BBC sports coverage: not necessarily a direct criticism of those who have graduated from the children's programme, or Newsround, to grown-up sports and news programmes, but some of them really do need to realise that when your audience has an average age of more than 14, constantly patronising them can be a big turn-off.

The often complete absence of what might regarded as journalistic rigour about the cheer-leading style of presentation, with fawning interviews and frequently incoherent commentators, is intended to make sport appealing to those who have no interest in sport, without considering the obvious problem with such an approach.

The NBC-ification of BBC sports coverage: Lynam is from the Grandstand era, when the BBC had a bucket-full of sports rights and took it as its mission to show the best sport, live as it happened. 

Oh, how we Brits used to scoff when we heard that  American audiences did not see, say, the Olympic 100 metres final live as it happened, but were shown it on tape delay - and sometimes not at all if "Team USA" failed to deliver the anticipated success.

Alas, that's the way the BBC is going, preferring talking heads - often with little insight to offer - and pre-recorded "packages", rather than showing real, live sport. 

In Glasgow in the past week, for instance, nothing was shown of the men's high jump final until all had finished, and then just three jumps from the entire competition were broadcast. With the heptathlon - the seven-discipline event in which Jessica Ennis won gold at the London Olympic two years ago - the only second-day element shown live was final 800-metre run.

Red faces on the Red Button: The new-fangled digital offerings clearly need some work. With BBC1/2 and BBC3 providing recorded "features" and "human interest" content introduced by a dozen-strong team of presenters, in theory, the red button ought to allow the BBC to show all the sport, live as it happens, all the time. Yet somehow, at one point this week, the BBC managed to show live lawn bowls on BBC1 and BBC3 at the same time... Seriously.

The red button service for athletics was available only spasmodically, so that some competitions at Hampden Park just did not get shown. This was also where the BBC had hidden away the commentary "talents" of Rob "SHOUTS-every-OTHER-word" Walker and someone who really did sound like Alan Partridge. 

Too much of a good thing: No one at BBC Sport appears to have considered that, as Usain Bolt put it, the Commonwealth Games are "a bit shit". 

The London Olympics were rightly considered to be The Greatest Show on Earth. Sadly, no one seemed to have told Mishal Husain, the Radio 4 Today presenter, that she was at something called the Commonwealth Games and not at the Olympics, as she seemed to think on the first weekend of competition when doing the post-Breakfast Time slot. #Awkward

Wall-to-wall coverage for 12+ hours a day on BBC1/2 may have been justified for the Olympic Games, but Glasgow 2014 was not London 2012. An event called the "triathlon mixed relay", in which there were just nine competing teams, including one from the Isle of Dogs, and in which one of the competitors did breaststroke on the swim (and only one of those stats is made-up) really doesn't cut it as world-class sport deserving of more than an hour's live coverage. 

Not that any of this is likely to see the senior producers at BBC Sport change what, undoubtedly, will be described as their "direction of travel" when they get together in one of their "break-out areas" at the head office in Salford.