For all our concerns about the seemingly terminal decline of the newspaper industry, and all the hassle of getting through security to enter a stadium to work at another event on another Saturday, the fact remains that we sports journalists are a uniquely privileged bunch. 

We get to watch some of the world’s top sport, or Millwall, usually from the best seats in the house, often with food and drink provided gratis, and then we get paid for it. Hopefully.

And in general, there’s a lot of decent people working in our business, too. Occasionally, something happens that reminds us of that, and which ought to make us all very grateful for the lives we lead.

Anyone who heard about the accident suffered by Times sports photographer Marc Aspland six months ago could not fail to be horrified by the circumstances. Left unconscious by the roadside, the award-winning photographer suffered terrible injuries. 
But we could also be gladdened by a simple gesture of support and goodwill for their strickened colleague from his mates, which his fellow snappers dreamt up, and with nothing more than a hashtag and a smile, has managed to go viral.

Aspland was riding his bicycle in March when he was involved in a collision with a car. His broken bones are now all mended, or plated, but he suffered severe brain trauma in the crash. 

Recovery from that, Aspland says, “is a long slow road”.

Aspland has been out and about recently, visiting some of his workmates and colleagues as they have been photographing the England football team in their training camp before their recent internationals.

But he has missed a sporting summer of World Cup, Commonwealth Games, Wimbledon, a couple of cricket Test series. And we have missed his images.
“This Times photographer is learning something called patience!” he says.

There have also been a couple of recent developments, though, which have helped to boost his confidence and encourage him on along his long, hard road to recovery.

Multi-award-winner Aspland has been described as “less a sports photographer, more a photographer of sport”, so when the Royal Photographic Society awarded him an Honorary Fellowship, that was a pretty big deal, and recognition for the craft of sports photography, too. Or the Art of Sports Photography, as a book of Aspland’s finest work, using pictures taken over the course of his 25-year career, and published this month, is called. 
You can find out more about the book, and even order a copy, here.

“It’s all been a little overwhelming,” Aspland said, though you sense that what may have touched him most of all is that the hashtag #GWSMarc – for Get Well Soon – has gone viral on the interweb.

All sorts of sports stars, colleagues and mates have taken part. From the likes of Rugby World Cup-winner Jonny Wilkinson, Olympic champion Jess Ennis, most of the England cricket team, former Wimbledon champions Boris Becker and Andy Murray, Ryder Cup golfer Ian Poulter, jockey Frankie Dettori, even Sir Elton John - it's probably a Watford thing; Aspland started out on the Herts Advertiser - have all done selfies or taken part in a mini-video from well-wishers. It hasn't taken much, after all, but the gesture has meant much to Aspland.

Yeah, sports journalists are a decent bunch really.

Sports journalists will be paying special attention over the next few months to the back pages of The Independent and London’s Evening Standard, as a new head of sport starts to exert influence.

Less obvious, possibly for reasons of self-preservation, will be what the sports desk staff of those titles, together with Independent on Sunday and i, make of a new boss who was a key management figure in the most expensive employment tribunal in British newspaper history, a case that even warranted mention at the Leveson Inquiry.

Mike Dunn officially took charge of sport at the Kensington offices this month, barely six weeks after his arrival from The Sun, originally to take charge of the business’s digital operations, including the struggling local TV station, London Live.

How long it takes for Dunn’s regular camp followers to catch up with him in Derry Street and appear on the sports pages of his latest employers, only time will tell, though it is fair to say that Dunn probably has never had such skinny budgets at his disposal.

Already, there’s talk of Dunn’s regular team mate, Tim Allan, taking charge of the Sunday paper's sports section. Who else might join him?

Football writer Rob Beasley has been a particular Dunn favourite, and followed him from News of the World to The Sun. In an area of journalism renowned for a bit of rough and tumble, Beasley is unique in having been escorted from the press box at Wembley on Cup Final day, after getting into a fight with a Manchester United supporter. Twenty years ago, it cost him his then job at PA. He’s never looked back.

Beasley and another Dunn sports desk regular, Geoff Sweet, were both witnesses in the Glenn Mulcaire phone hacking case at the Old Bailey last year, where they gave evidence about their time on the sports staff at the News of the World, and were asked whether their work ever benefited from the help of Mulcaire’s “special” techniques.

In evidence, Beasley said he never met Mulcaire and had never heard his name until the arrest in 2006. Beasley was called to court because his own name and mobile phone number were found in one of Mulcaire’s notebooks alongside that of the former Chelsea striker, Adrian Mutu, who was sacked by the club when a drug test showed he was using cocaine.

"I didn't know the guy existed," Beasley said of Mulcaire when in the witness box. Asked if he had ever seen, heard or suspected that anyone within the paper was involved in accessing voicemails unlawfully, Beasley said: "Absolutely no idea at all."

Were Dunn now to sign Beasley for the Indy titles, it  would take a major chunk from the stretched sports budget. Unless he determined to re-allocate funds from existing commitments. 

When at News International, Dunn had a reputation for being especially generous with some columnists – Terry Venables being notable – while cutting the expense claims of staff reporters, even when properly supported with receipts, all to keep the accounts department happy.

One especially favoured Dunn freelancer is professional Brummie, Bob “Bomber” Harris,  who was hired by Dunn to cover this summer's Eastbourne tennis and the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow for The Sun, despite the paper having its own specialist staff reporters. Harris, who suffered a serious stroke last year, is properly regarded as “old school”: when working for Thomson Regional newspapers in the 1980s, he invited decathlete Daley Thompson to become the godfather of one of his children as a means of getting an “in” with the double Olympic champion. That probably won’t be an option for Harris today, since his next birthday will be his 70th.

It’s reasonable to speculate that there probably won’t be a huge exodus of sports reporters from The Sun to rejoin their former boss at The Independent: only three reporters, all Dunn recruits, turned up for his leaving bash this summer. 

And don’t expect Dunn’s arrival to do anything but increase the amount of football coverage already in the sports pages of the Indy titles, particularly the Standard. “He knows nothing about any sport apart from football,” one former colleague said. “I know it sounds impossible, but Dunn managed to dumb down sports coverage at The Sun when he arrived.”

WHERE SPORTS STAFF at the four titles may be particularly watchful will be Dunn’s management style, should any of them be deemed to “step out of line”, or fail to deliver on a particular story.

As his former sports editor on the Screws, Dunn was one of six defence witnesses called by News International to contest News of the World football reporter Matt Driscoll’s unfair dismissal claim six years ago. Unsuccessfully, as it turned out, since the case resulted in a payout of nearly £800,000 for Driscoll. 

The tribunal found that Driscoll had been the victim of "a consistent pattern of bullying behaviour", led by the paper’s then editor Andy Coulson. Whatever happened to him?

Driscoll had been at the News of the World for ten years when he was sacked in April 2007 while on long-term sick leave for stress-related depression, which the tribunal found had arisen directly as a result of bullying. "The original source of the hostility towards the claimant was Mr Coulson, the then editor of the News of the World; although other senior managers either took their lead from Mr Coulson and continued with his motivation after Mr Coulson's departure; or shared his views themselves,” the tribunal’s written judgement reads. 

Elsewhere, the tribunal was critical of Dunn: "We find that Mr Dunn, has with the benefit of hindsight and in order to attempt to bolster the respondent's case, exaggerated any shortcomings the claimant may have had."

The previously admired Driscoll was undermined to the point that – when in his late 30s - he suffered anxiety and stress and had a panic attack which saw him admitted to hospital with a suspected heart condition.

"I was tipped over the edge," Driscoll said in a subsequent interview.

"Overnight Coulson decided I was a bad journalist, and that was it. 

“A tabloid newspaper office is like a mini totalitarian state, where an editor can decide anything, and nobody challenges it."

On Dunn, his immediate boss on the sports desk, Driscoll said: “He was later found to have exaggerated loads of things. It's sad because he had to do it for his bosses."

Where did that Driscoll interview appear? In The Independent, of course… 

DOWN IN THE BULLOCK’S HEAD the other day with a couple of old friends, and the topic of the declining standard of sports writing, in print and online, was chewed over.

The write-it-off-the-telly approach of many national papers’ sports desks and using “click bait tossers” – actually, we were ruder than that – came in for especial criticism, while the shedding of hundreds of experienced subs’ jobs was also blamed for the fall in standards.

The all-consuming obsession with football (see last week’s column) doesn’t help. Too often, sports desk staff can tell you who played left-back for Accrington Stanley in 1967, but look blank if you ask them to name the current Wimbledon women’s champion or the British men’s record-holder at 1,500 metres.

Two recent examples that crossed m’desk at work highlighted the issue.

PA Sport was putting out some copy from the European swimming championships in Berlin. It was unclear whether the national agency was actually staffing this one-time must-cover event, or whether they were just pumping out what I call “talking six-point”, and having someone in their Yorkshire office writing lacklustre copy based on nothing more than the results appearing on the organisers’ website.

In a single session, the Great Britain swimmers managed to win three gold medals, including breaking a world record. First mention of the world record came in the ninth paragraph of the PA copy. There was no mention by PA that this was the most successful hour in the history of competitive British swimming.

Maybe the reporter didn’t know that. They might have done had they’d been in Berlin. But surely PA Sport still employs some sub-editors who can manage a quick re-write to nose on the news and manage to ensure that the home towns or club affiliations of the six medal-winning Britons that night are properly mentioned, for the benefit of the local newspapers who actually pay for this crap?

No better over at the Little Shard and the shiny new offices of The Times, which always prided itself as being a paper of record. For the three-day event at the World Equestrian Games, the 400-word report was written not by a specialist correspondent at the venue in Normandy, but by a stringer in the Home Counties watching the telly.  

The intro suggested that William Fox-Pitt, the world No1 rider, had “exceeded all expectations”. Fox-Pitt finished third. Maybe they just had low expectations of the world No1. 

Suitably deferential, since the British team included the Queen’s grand daughter, Zara Phillips, the reporter praised them for winning silver medals. But the reporter failed to mention until very late in the piece that one of the team’s horses dropped down dead after the second of the three days.

It was not just the reporter who missed the story, but the sub-editor and the sports desk’s copy-taker, too. Or are we just flogging a dead horse over this?

Did it really take a dildo in a sports reporter’s ear to tell us that transfer Deadline Day had jumped the shark?

I spent much of last Monday afternoon in the snug of the Bullock’s Head, round the corner from SubScribe Towers, discussing various aspects of our trade with a couple of old colleagues. As you might imagine, there was much shaking of heads, repeated utterances of “the game’s gone”, and some drink may have been taken.

Throughout the afternoon, we dissected journalism, and specifically sports journalism in 2014. In the background was the constant hum of a widescreen, HD television which was tuned to Sky Sports News and its Deadline Day coverage, the countdown clock never pausing. Over the course of the three or four hours (it may have been more, but by the end I was no longer counting), Sky may as well have had their output on a taped 30-minute loop.

Because. Nothing. Happened.

Sky Sports are beginning to make a habit of this new form of non-reporting.

When Manchester United were thrashed in the League Cup last month by a franchise outfit from a Buckinghamshire new town, Sky Sports chose not to report on the aftermath of Louis van Gaal’s team’s latest capitulation, or to get some squirm-laden interviews and to assess the latest embarrassment’s significance for United’s re-building. Oh no, that was far too obvious a news line to take.

Instead, they spent the post-game analysis period debating how important the win was for Milton Keynes Dons. Seriously.

So it was then, that on Sky Sports “News” on Deadline Day (notice how we somehow now feel the need to cap the Ds – when did that happen?), this was what constituted more than 15 hours’ worth of “live” sports broadcast journalism:

1. Bloke (they were mostly blokes) wearing the station uniform of dark jacket and LibDem-yellow tie is standing outside a football ground/training ground. If they were unlucky, this being just before the schools went back after summer, the reporter will have been surrounded by gurning kids aged between 12 and 46. The reporter will, off-screen, have probably been accompanied by a cameraman and a satellite truck of some description.
   
2. There will have been at least 20 of these reporters out and about across England and Wales last Monday for Sky Sports News alone – one for every Premier League club.
   
3. To each in turn – because there was never any real “breaking news” all day long to disrupt the dull flow from Burnley to Leicester, to West Ham to Southampton, and on and on and on… – the studio presenter would throw to a reporter with some scrap or titbit of transfer “news” relevant to the club the reporter was assigned to.
   
4. The reporter would smile, nod, pretending that they heard the studio, and then proceed to “update” the audience with empty non-information, and probably refer to “Sky Sports News sources”, when what they really meant was what they’d read in the morning’s Sun or Mirror, or had just checked out on Mail Online on their tablet device. 
   
5. In all but two cases all day long, the “deals” usually involved various Carlos Kickablls who most of the reporters had never heard of, almost certainly had never seen play, and who were being recruited from or sent out on loans (ie. not a proper transfer) to even more obscure lower league clubs in Europe. It may have been late, or my eyesight was going, but I think there was even one Dutch club referred to which had KKK in its title. Or was it VVV?
   
6. And throughout it all, a tickertape continued running across the bottom of the screen, advising viewers that really, nothing had happened.

Between the end of last season and Sep 1, Premier League clubs spent a record £850m on new players. Much of that business had been done quietly and calmly, and was completed weeks before Deadline Day. To Sky’s obvious discomfort on Monday, there were just two “mega-star mega-deals” on the final day of the transfer window. One of those involved no headline transfer fee and was conducted so early in the day that there was no deadline “tension”. 

This deal was the loan (yes, another one) from Monaco to United of Radamel Falcao. Business done and dusted by 10am, it had all happened before Sky’s Deadline Day team had managed to get into their stride.

The £16 million transfer of Danny Welbeck from United happened right up to the deadline hour, but it had been flagged up for a week before so that when it finally happened, with the England striker moving to Arsenal, there was a hefty sense of inevitability about it.

Anti-climatic much?

So it was doubly unfortunate for reporter Alan Irwin, at Everton’s training ground, that in the course of his duties he was assaulted with that purple dildo. Oh the irony: when he suffered his on-air assault, Irwin was talking-up a transfer deal that never actually happened.

This dildo non-deal neatly encapsulates all that Deadline Day has become: a creation by Sky, as they observe the Premier League clubs usually squandering the millions of rights fees they have paid them, often to the detriment of the game itself, according to more than one leading football writer.

Rory Smith, a reporter for one of the national newspapers which, like most of Sky, are owned by Rupert Murdoch, took to the website of a rival broadcaster, ESPN, to pen 1,700 words about the “fetishisation” of Deadline Day. 

Smith works for The Times, so understatement was to the fore when he called Deadline Day 2014 “a bit of a slow-burner”. But he also put out there the view, shared by his Guardian colleague Barry Glendinning, “… that transfer deadline day - both in its summer and winter guises - is more eagerly anticipated than FA Cup final day”. What kind of perverse madness is this?

Smith continues: “It has been a personal suspicion for some time that there are many who prefer the soap opera of the game to the sport itself, a belief borne out by website hit rates, which suggest transfer gossip attracts more attention than do descriptions of action.” 

Smith makes a very good point, especially in the use of the word “gossip”, something which many of us were taught very early in our journalism training should never be reported, but which now – at least when it comes to football – is all too often passed off as “news” for the making of a back-page headline.

This site’s editor has in the past made the very valid comparison between the coverage given to football, and especially Premier League football, at the expense of lower division clubs and all other sports, even cricket, rugby union, tennis and golf. On Deadline Day, for all the hours that Sky spent on reporting that nothing much happened while having a dildo stuck in its ear, there was barely a minute devoted to any cricket coverage, to the build-up to the rugby season, to the latest cycling or athletics news. It was as if nothing else in the world of sport happened. Or matters. 

IT IS ALWAYS good to see your breaking news stories work out as you had first suggested. 

Thus it was last week that it was reported, as had been suspected would happen all along, Mike Dunn has taken over running the sports desks of The Independent, Independent on Sunday, i and Evening Standard.

It is expected that he will soon be joined, in a senior role probably on the Sunday title, by Tim Allan, who has worked with Dunn when he was sports editor at Today, then the News of the World (under Andy Coulson), and then The Sun.

As a consequence of Dunn’s appointment, barely a month after his arrival in Derry Street to oversee their various digital outputs, the previous head of sport, Neil Robinson, is moved to become night editor. 

And over at Canary Wharf, key sports personnel moves at Trinity Mirror are beginning to fall into place, as we first suggested with David Walker moving from sports editor of the Sunday Mirror to the same job on the daily, while Dean Morse, formerly head of sport for the Daily Mirror, becomes “weekend sports editor” looking after the competing back pages of The People and Sunday Mirror.

Dominic Hart, once Daily Mirror sports ed, becomes its head of sport.

What becomes of James Brown, The People’s sports editor, remains unclear.

But the game of musical chairs appears to be over, at least this time round