Two sports biographies top the best-sellers list.
Lord's cricket ground has been staging the first London festival of sports writing.

And sports writers have even been given their own half-hour on Radio 4's erudite Open Book programme. So you would be forgiven for assuming that writing on sport for a living has never been better. 

Until you took a look at the six-book shortlist which was announced last week for this year's "Bookie Prize", the bookmaker-sponsored Sports Book of the Year.

"Not exactly the most inspiring shortlst I've ever seen," said one sage old friend in a pause for breath one night earlier this week after we had got the first edition -  and the nigglesome 7.45pm kick-off runners - out of the way.

Now my chum is one of those old-school subs who devours books like us mere mortals consume hot dinners. For many years, he even used to review sports books for a national newspaper. So his views on the subject were worth hearing.

What did he mean? "Well, the Matt Dickinson book on Bobby Moore ought to be a shoo-in for the award. The five other titles are no where near as strong.


"Two of the books shouldn't even be on the shortlist. The clue's in the title: 'the 2014 Sports Book of the Year'," he said, stressing the last three words. 


"They were first published last year."

The first of those, Anna Krien's Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport, which has been lauded around the globe for its portrayal of a "grotesque culture of contemptuous, vicious misogyny" (according to The Independent), was first published in Australia in May 2013. Or what we on the sports desk normally refer to as "last year".

Similarly, Kilian Jornet's Run or Die - the autobiography of Spanish ultra-distance runner, who the American magazine Runner's World has somewhat optimistically described as, “Trail running’s first true breakout star" (no, neither have I) - was also first published outside the UK almost six months before the 12-month qualifying period for the 2014 Sports Book of the Year entries.

Both books were subsequently republished in this country, during the entry period, and entered by their publishers, eager for the boost in sales each title might enjoy from the ensuing publicity.

The Bookie Prize - so-called because of its sponsorship since 1989 by bookmakers William Hill - has been down this road before. In 2006, they handed the prize and a handsome cheque (the 2014 winner will get a not-to-be-sniffed-at £26,000) to Geoffrey Ward for his excellent book about the former heavyweight world champion, Jack Johnson, Unforgivable Blackness. 
The only trouble was that that book had been on bookshelves for so long that Ward had had time to make a TV documentary based on it which had won an Emmy in America in 2005...

Of course, the organisers can apply whatever rules they like to their own competition, which may explain how in 2000 they came to reward serial cycling cheat Lance Armstrong for his "autobiography" - which he got someone else to write for him - It's Not About The Bike, without a flicker of suspicion that the American might have been telling a few porkies. 

Given that one of the award's most outstanding winners, Paul Kimmage, had been investigating Armstrong for years, the American getting a book-writing prize was a bit of a slap in the face.

Anyway... The idea that a book - or this year, two - can displace from the shortlist other deserving writers' works which have genuinely been first published in the year of the competition is becoming increasingly absurd, as Amazon and other online retailers enable the keen and savvy to buy books, or their Kindle editions, from anywhere around the world.

John Gaustad, the co-founder of the Bookie Prize, should realise that better than most. His fate is a lesson to all of us in the sports writing or publishing business.

For nearly two decades, Gaustad owned and ran the much-admired Sports Pages bookshop on Charing Cross Road. The shop has been closed for some time now, as Gaustad was unable to compete with the online book trade, principally Amazon. 

In between judging somewhat dated sports books, Gaustad has been earning a living driving a minicab. 

Extraordinary to relate, but The Times, which within living memory was proud to be regarded as the "newspaper of record" in sporting terms, is at present operating without a golf correspondent, a chief sports writer or a tennis correspondent.

After the departure of Peter Dixon - who could hardly have thought himself to be as irreplaceable as he has proved to be - and the plain daft exit of Simon Barnes, the third leg of sports editor Tim Hallissey's unwanted staffing hat-trick has come with the axing of the controversial Neil Harman.

The circumstances which led to Harman's sacking, for that is what it is, were outlined fully here.

Confidentiality clauses used to suppress information often frustrate journalists' working lives, so it is doubly galling when such contractual niceties are used to keep things schtum on a development within the profession. Even this week, News UK corporate types were informing media correspondents that nothing had been decided in respect of Harman's fate. 

Yet one suspiciously well-informed American website - possibly helped by some of Harman's erstwhile colleagues in the tennis press boxes around the world - was reporting the dismissal of the paper's tennis correspondent at the end of September. 

And this week, Private Eye confirmed the news. Our own enquiries suggest that the Eye report is well-founded.

Harman was suspended by The Times in July, pending an internal enquiry into whether he had committed acts of plagiarism while doing the "day job" for the paper. 

The former Mail football reporter had undertaken massive amounts of freelance work and book-writing as lucrative sidelines, including an Andy Murray biography published immediately after the Scot's Wimbledon victory last year. Harman admitted his over-enthusiastic use of cut-and-paste in the 2013 Wimbledon yearbook, but according to the Eye, it was shown to be a technique he had practised for at least six years; it even claims that he reproduced entire 600-word articles.

The internal inquiry by Bob Tyrer, of the Sunday Times, found no evidence of such plagiarism in Harman's work for his newspaper, but sources at the Little Shard suggest that the dismissal was achieved by utilising one of those catch-all contractual clauses which talk grandly of bringing the paper into disrepute.

It is questionable whether Harman could have continued to do his job for the paper, as the All England Club was considering withholding the reporter's Wimbledon accreditation. This is one of the more distasteful elements of the affair, since the sports editor of another national newspaper - an inhabitant of a glasshouse who has a plentiful supplies of cobbles to throw around - was apparently energetically lobbying Wimbledon to pull the plug on Harman's media access.  

Nor are the blazeratti innocent of flagrant hypocrisy here: Wimbledon happily continued selling the yearbook throughout the championships fortnight, despite being made aware of the plagiarism issues in April this year.   

Harman is believed to be considering a legal challenge to his dismissal from The Times. In his late 50s, another senior journalism job seems unlikely to come his way. Work for the "dark side" in PR might be possible. It has also been suggested that Harman has received an offer to write a book about the episode. 

And that's one book that will have to be all his own work.

Perhaps the irony was intended.

When ESPN issued a press release to announce the signing of Simon Barnes, they accompanied it with a picture of their new star columnist in his bird-watching mode, as you can see, right.

In seeking some logical explanation for The Times to allow one of its most prized journalistic assets to leave the paper, some had suggested that chief sports writer Barnes, when indulging his other interest in his weekly twitcher columns, had managed to displease some of the land-owners who read The Thunderer through his complaints and criticism of the deliberate poisoning of hen harriers in or near some of northern England's shooting estates.

This attempted explanation for the otherwise inexplicable was described to me by one Times sports desker as "utter bollocks".

Nearer the truth was the version that Barnes himself put out there: the paper's creaking budgets could not afford him any longer. One of his former sports editors, Tom Clarke, described the decision as "a stunning mistake".

Barnes's re-emergence with ESPN.co.uk is surely another sign of the direction of travel of our business. The web presence of the US-based cable sports channel has specialist cricket (through Cricinfo), rugby (scrum.com) and F1 sites, as well as football sites which have resources at their disposal which the sports editors of our struggling national titles can only dream about.

When his signing was announced, Barnes said, “You can watch sport through the narrow window of patriotism but you miss the half the sport and all the point. I’m delighted to have the chance to write on a global platform about sport that belongs to the world.”

Whatever, Barnes's departure from The Times might turn out to be one of the best moves of his lengthy career. For Barnes, 62, has this week also landed himself an undoubtedly lucrative gig, writing on nature matters for the Daily Mail.

Maybe Tom Clarke was right.