If anyone tries to tell you that there was an Olympic legacy following the 2012 London Games, don't believe them. There certainly was no such thing as far as specialist Olympic correspondents are concerned.

I was reminded of The Curse of the Olympic Corr yesterday, when The Guardian included Matthew Beard on a list of those being culled from the London Evening Standard - estimates suggest that between 14 and  20 staff must go.

Beard had long been a sports reporter, working on sports news for The Independent and then, in the run-up to 2012, as the London evening paper's Olympics editor. 

Once the Olympic circus had packed up its bags and left town, Beard was re-assigned on the news desk to handle an infrastructure brief (his contacts with the likes of London 2012 CEO Paul Deighton were well-respected), and more recently he took on the role as the Standard's transport editor. So his axing in a week of London fare rises and commuter chaos at the city's railway terminals seems particularly ill-judged by his former management.

Beard had good reason to think that by moving into non-sports news after the Olympics, he'd manage to prolong his career. But the Curse of the Olympic Corr seems to stretch very far.

The job of the sports news correspondent -  which for many  metamorphosed into Olympics reporter in 2005 when London won its bid to host the Games - ought to be a key role within any news organisation, providing a link between sports and news desks for those stories which transfer from back to front pages. Ched Evans and the clusterfuck that the Professional Footballers' Association's Gordon Taylor created this week being a case in point.
whether sports news corrs have ever achieved that objective is a moot point - and something for another day, perhaps.

Whether sports news corrs have ever achieved that objective is a moot point (something for another day, perhaps). But what has happened in the past 18 months to Fleet Street's Olympic correspondents and others with similar and related roles has been extraordinary.

Below is just an off-the-top-of-the-head list, and I apologise in advance to anyone I may have omitted or who is gamely still in there, slugging away at their job. Do post a comment to advise of others who might be added. 

The number of decent, competent and even award-winning journalists who appear to have been discarded, rather than redeployed by their employers, is an astonishing indictment of the state of our business.

Matthew Beard, Evening Standard. As above
Jacquelin Magnay, Telegraph. Was woefully under-utilised by the paper, possibly the result of being appointed by one head of sport (David Bond, see below) and not to the taste of his successor. Magnay been recruited from Australia, where she had been winning awards for hard-edged journalism from before the 2000 Sydney Games. Now working as a London correspondent for range of Aussie outlets.
Paul Kelso, Telegraph. Was the paper's chief sports reporter until 2013. Now working as sports correspondent at Sky News. Some may regard this as career progress.
Robin Ellis-Scott, Independent. One of a round of job cuts made by the paper since 2012.
Colin Bateman, Express. At his 60th birthday last year, took retirement, after 35 years working at Standard and then Express, including as cricket correspondent. Had taken on Olympic gig as final career challenge, and worked through to last February's Sochi Winter Games. Has now left journalism.
Ashling O'Connor, The Times. Had been recruited from FT specifically to do sports and Olympic news. Did some freelancing for the Indy post-Olympics, but has now left journalism to work for the Inzito Partnership. 
David Bond, BBC. Was the BBC's sports editor, having been recruited when Telegraph's sports editor. Has now left journalism to work in PR.
Malcolm Folley, Mail on Sunday. Long-standing features writer, specialising in tennis but also a veteran of many Olympics. Retired last year soon after covering the Sochi Winter Games. Had plans to write some sports biographies.
Jonathan McEvoy, Daily Mail. Took on the Mail's athletics and Olympic briefs before the London Games, where he acquired reputation for hard-nosed approach - getting banned by UK Athletics for asking US-based team captain to sing God Save the Queen has got to deserve a gold star. Once the London Olympics were over, swiftly moved back to covering F1 at the Mail.
Adrian Warner, BBC London. Former Reuters and Standard sports news specialist with very strong sports politics contacts, was made redundant by regional BBC last year, despite having taken on a broader sports brief. Has now left journalism.
Ian Chadband, Telegraph. Sports feature writer with extensive Olympic sport contacts, one of the victims of last year's round of redundancies at Victoria.
Simon Hart, Telegraph. Former deputy sports editor on Sunday Telegraph, had been Telegraph's athletics correspondent for almost a decade. Has now left journalism.

There is an association for specialist Olympic correspondents. Can't help but think they'll notice a drop in their subscription income this year...

Happy new year to our regular reader.

I need your help. 

Am I alone in shouting at the television or radio every time a sports pundit or reality TV "star" uses the phrase "roller coaster"? Or tells us they're on "a journey"?

Or when I read in a national newspaper that something is "iconic", when it is not. Or that a sportsman is "legendary", when they really do exist?

I tried applying these back-bench foibles in a drinking game over Christmas. You know the sort: every time certain words or expressions are heard, you take a swig. I was pished within an hour.

I include the above, which was doing the rounds of social media over the holly and crackers, as another example of such tired and lazy broadcast journalism. But it is not only broadcasters who appear reliant on verbal crutches.

Now when I was in my first job in journalism, I was told that we "never report rumours", something which appears to be utterly disregarded in today's 24/7, rolling news era of online blogging about what some unverified Twitter account has said about the impending transfer of Lionel Messi to Tranmere Rovers.

And we were also had the paper's stylebook hard-wired into our heads, with half a dictionary's worth of words and phrases banned from our pages. There were chief subs and revise subs in those days, too, so woe betide you if you dared allow a "major" or "to launch" slip into your copy.

Some news organisations still have style books, apparently, and some even make use of them. Some are more rigid than others: reporters and subs at the American-owned Bloomberg agency are all equipped with straitjackets, just to make them feel more comfortable. Allegedly.

But what are you pet hates? What triggers your pedantry reflex?

And is sports reporting any more prone to resorting to hackneyed cliche than any other news form?

It'd be good to get your views - post your comments below...

There's been a Christmas truce, of sorts, at Newcastle United, where the club's ban on its local newspapers has been lifted.

We reported on the situation at Newcastle, including the granting of special media rights to The Sun, here.

Two weeks ago, the Mike Ashley-owned club decided to end lift the ban imposed  in October 2013 - after the Evening Chronicle, The Journal and The Sunday Sun had the audacity to do their job, and report on a fans' protest over the sportswear entrepreneur's handling of the club.

Anecdotally, the local papers have been enjoying a circulation boost since then  - so being readmitted to St James' Park might not be such a blessing after all. In time-honoured manner whenever a club has got the 'ump with a newspaper and tried to gag it with by barring it from the press box, the titles simply bought tickets to games and sent in reporters accordingly.

The Trinity Mirror regional titles negotiated the truce to include no "terms and conditions", but a ban on journalists from the Daily Telegraph remains.

That ban was imposed in September after Northeast football correspondent Luke Edwards reported that Ashley was willing to sell the club. Newcastle issued a statement to deny the story, describing it as "disgraceful journalism for which the club and its supporters should receive a full and unreserved apology". No such apology has been forthcoming.

The stand-off worsened when Edwards further reported that Ashley's ownership interest in Rangers could jeopardise the clubs' ability to qualify to play in Europe - UEFA competition rules look to prohibit owners with controlling interests in more than one club competing in the Champions League or UEFA League.

The club published a rebuttal, which is still live on its website, which Press Gazette had reported may be libellous.

They quoted lawyer Christopher Hutchings as saying: "While the club is within its rights to exclude journalists and papers that themselves print allegations about Newcastle, it may not be wise for it to make counter-accusations about the integrity of the journalists."

Now, journalists sueing a football club... That's something we'd pay to watch.

Lee Clayton, David Walker and Matt Gatward, respectively the head of sport at the Mail group, the Daily Mirror's new sports editor, and the sports editor of The Independent, have some big decisions to make.

Clayton, especially, looks to have his work cut out, following the news that Les Snowdon, his trusty No2 as the Daily Mail's sports editor, is to leave Derry Street to take up a new job as Scottish editor for The Times.


The Mail is one of the last bastions of an old-style sports desk, with plenty of reporters and production staff to manage, as well as to try to break the occasional story, all operating these days alongside the click-bait team working on Mail Online's sports coverage.

Snowdon has worked in Scotland before, having been editor of the Scottish sports coverage for the Sunday Times and as well being the editor of Scotland on Sunday before joining the Mail five years ago.

Clayton is also losing from his staff Mark Alford, who has undertaken various roles on sport, on the paper and online, since being signed up as a sub after completing the Mail's graduate trainee scheme a decade ago. Very much a Clayton protoge, Alford may not necessarily be replaced - his latest job title is "consultant sports editor" for Mail Online.

Both Snowdon and Alford are due to begin new jobs in January, Alford, according to a report on the website of the Sports Journalists' Association, moving to Sky Sports at Osterley as head of digital media.

Elsewhere in the same building off Kensington High Street, Gatward is attempting to re-build after the whirlwind interregnum under Mike Dunn (as we reported here).

With Neil Robinson, the former head of sport for The Independent, Independent on Sunday, i and the Evening Standard, having been sidelined to a night editor's role to make way when Dunn was appointed, it has been left to Gatward to pick up the pieces of the spendthrift three months when the Indy titles suddenly started pretending that they had the budget of The Sun sports desk.

The spending - on the likes of 600-quid-a-time football columnists such as Terry Venables, or the six-figure deal for Paul Scholes - is now being recouped through drastic cuts to the papers' already slender budgets for casual subs and reporters' travel.

Dunn arrived accompanied by his former buddy from The Sun and News of the World, Tim Allan; Allan was only ever on a short-term deal, and he is understood to be among the applicants for the role of "sports editorial executive" - effectively sports editor of the IoS and the i. Interviews were held last week, and an appointment expected to be made any time now.

Over at Canary Wharf, and Walker has been given an early opportunity to make his mark on the Daily Mirror's sports pages.

Walker won the game of musical chairs at Trinity Mirror's titles in the summer, as he was promoted from the Sunday Mirror, while People sports editor James Brown left the building (to re-surface at The Sun).

But two key members of staff leaving in quick succession might have come as a shock so early in Walker's reign.

To lose your football corr, in Martin "Laptop" Lipton, who's been recruited as the new deputy sports editor at The Sun , and then also have your chief sports writer in Ollie Holt defect to the Mail on Sunday, where he is to be the "new Patrick Collins", might be a double blow for Walker.

Apparently not so. According to one Trinity Mirror sports desker who was in a football press box at the weekend, "David sees it as his chance to bring in or promote those people he really rates. Nothing lasts forever, and Laptop and Ollie had both been fixtures at the Mirror for a while. David can now mix things up, without having to elbow anyone aside."

Early suggestions are that Andy Dunn, a Walker favourite when he edited the Sunday Mirror's sports pages, could figure prominently.

England's cricket captain, Alastair Cook, for all the assaults on his uncertain position in charge of the one-day side, has so far out-lasted another product of Essex county cricket, namely Derek Pringle.

For it is Daily Telegraph cricket correspondent Pringle who has become the biggest name casualty of the round of job cuts on the sports desk that we reported last month.

The 56-year-old Cambridge-educated former Test all-rounder has perhaps never enjoyed the acclaim for his cricket writing that has accompanied, say, Mike Atherton. And possibly with good reason.

But surely no one deserves the sort of treatment meted out to Pring when it came to breaking the news of his imminent departure from what, surely, is still one of the best jobs in sports writing?

As I alluded to here in Press Box, as a long-term consequence of the merger of the Daily and Sunday's sports staff and the pressures of the latest round of cut-backs, the Torygraph's head of sport Adam Sills was faced with a newspaper desk's version of Sophie's Choice: he had two staff members operating effectively as cricket corrs, Pringle and Scyld Berry, who had been the Sunday paper's specialist, and just the budget for one of them. 

The choice, in the end, was a foregone conclusion as far as the bean-counters at Victoria were concerned: one journo had a cheaper deal than the other. And one had not got on the wrong side of the Telegraph's sumptuously expensive cricket columnist, Kevin Pietersen, either...

But, as is the nature of these things, there are processes to go through, consultation meetings to attend, lip-service to fairness to be done.

According to the latest issue of Private Eye, "A couple of days before he was due to go to the office and put his case... Pringle had a phone call from Berry - who in all innocence apologised for the fact that he had been asked to stay on.

"Thus Pringle learned that the decision had been taken to give him out before he had even faced a ball."

• The departure of Pringle means that, at least until he finds another outlet that will pay his wages and expenses to travel the world and file a few hundred words each day, the cricket press boxes of the world will be denied the presence of someone who was once an extra in the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire.

 

Help. Please.

This is a genuine appeal to all news desk, business desk and features journalists who might occasionally wander over to this corner of SubScribe. Has the way you have to work changed, so that you're no longer expected to report on what has actually happened, what people actually say, but instead to display all the prediction skills of Nostradamus?

I ask because that does seem to be what is now required of sports reporters, specifically, or especially, football writers.

Long gone are the days when the only live football on our telly each year was the FA Cup final and maybe a midweek international once in a while, and when watching Match of the Day was "event television" in every household. The demise of the Saturday Pink editions of our regional newspapers are also testament to the fact that, in our modern, wired-up digital age, not a second can pass without a goal alert, score update or video clip burping on to a screen near you. Why would you want to pay for a paper which is dated even before it goes off stone?

And so, the demands on modern football hacks have changed. Rarely, even for Sunday newspaper football reporters, is the old-style match runner required because, the reasoning goes, by the time the report hits the news stands the following day, every reader will already know the result, the scorers, and they will have probably seen replays of the goals from every available angle, too.

So football reporting in 2014, especially away from live match coverage, is as often about what is going to happen as it is about what has happened. 

More crystal balls than footballs.

In an era when Fantasy Football games are used by sports sections to drive circulation and revenues, does anyone else sometimes pause to wonder how much of what their reading on the other sports pages might also be more fiction than fact?

I was reminded of this recently when I read a back page exclusive in The Independent which predicted (oh yes) that Alan Pardew, the manager of Newcastle United, was to be sacked on Tuesday morning if his side failed to win their next league fixture.

The story appeared to be impeccably sourced, from an exclusive interview with Newcastle United's owner, Mike Ashley. 

This was a tabloid-style sports splash of the sort introduced to the paper by its then new head of sport, Mike Dunn. Suffice to say, Pardew has lasted longer in his job that has Dunn.

The paper's report - not written by any of the title's established or regular football writers - was based on a chance encounter outside a Soho pub between Ashley and the reporter, Vivek Chaudhary, the former Guardian sports news correspondent.

Ashley has something of a reputation for being difficult with the media, especially those sports reporters and newspapers he has banned from Newcastle's ground. Yet here, he chatted over his beer for some minutes with the reporter.

According to Chaudhary, and published by The Independent, the journalist recognised Ashley because of his "tradmark white shirt". The reporter also wrote that Ashley told him that he did not want him to record the conversation on his smart phone.

Unusually in football, Pardew has a long-term contract from Ashley, signed in 2012 for eight years. But in this chance encounter in Soho, according to Chaudhary, Ashley "started making throat-cutting gestures in relation to what the future held for Pardew". Of course, given the long-term contract, any dismissal of the manager would likely involve millions of pounds in compensation.

That was the end of September and Newcastle duly lost at Stoke on the Monday night. But Pardew was not sacked, as had been predicted.

Instead - until their defeat by West Ham yesterday -  Newcastle went on to enjoy a fabulous seven-match unbeaten streak,  winning their last six, including away at Tottenham in the league and at Manchester City in the League Cup. 

Pardew appears safe in his job.

Me? Think that next time I'm looking for a prediction, I'll stick to the astrology column.

Let's not quibble about this, it is undoubtedly a strong book on an important subject. Announcing the winner on Thursday, the William Hill Sports Book Award judges described it as a "balanced yet fearless" investigation. It's just that it is a 2013 balanced and fearless investigation.

The Bookie Prize judges have form in this respect. They did they same in 2006, when Geoffrey Ward's Unforgivable Blackness was handed the loot with a book which had been first published in 2005. It is what happens when a book is published in another country -  the United States in Ward's case, Australia with Krien's book - and then is repackaged and republished here. How this year's four overlooked authors (there was another, 2013-first-published title on this year's shortlist) feel about being trumped in this way is not recorded.

But one other thing of interest about the winner also emerged on Thursday. Krien is only the second woman to win the Sports Book of the Year in the 26-year history of the award.

Now, there are some skewed figures for the entries - which tend to come from the larger, better-resourced publishers. So there may be some sports books published in the past year that don't get entered, and just don't get a look in. 

But nevertheless, according to the organisers, fewer than 1 in 10 of all the books entered have been written by women. 

Night Games follows the controversial rape trial of an Aussie Rules player. According to Graham Sharpe, the spokesman for the sponsors, “Quite possibly only a woman could have written it in as personal and perceptive a manner.

“It remains disappointing that on average, under 10 per cent of the books submitted each year are written by females, and we hope that Anna’s success will encourage many more women to write about sport.”

There were more than a hundred gathered together at a Sussex country church in Cuckfield yesterday for the final send-off for John Samuel, the former sports editor of The Daily Herald, Observer and, most notably, The Guardian.

Samuel's journalism career began on VE Day and continued, in that wonderfully relaxed and fulfilling freelance, semi-retired sort of way, well into his 80s, writing motoring, skiing, golf and travel features. Indeed, Samuel was writing right up until his death earlier this month.

It was his time at The Guardian, which spanned three decades, for which Samuel is best remembered, where he cultivated, recruited and developed some of the finest sports journalism talent ever assembled on a single newspaper.

When appointed, he inherited John Arlott in his pomp, soon after the Basil D'Oliveira campaign which helped to change sport, and ultimately society in South Africa, forever more. Also on the staff was John Rodda, undoubtedly the finest sports politics and Olympics correspondent of his age - and since - whose reports from Mexico City of the army shooting protesting students prior to the 1968 Games, and then in 1972, when the reporter got into the athletes' village in Munich after the beginnings of the Black September terrorist attack, defied news desks' snooty perceptions of sports writers' abilities.

In his near 20 years in charge of the sports desk on Farringdon Road, Samuel worked with and recruited some fine talents, including David Lacey, Frank Keating, Dai Davies, Matthew Engel, Paddy Barclay and Ian Ridley... There are many others, too.

Thing was, Samuel's patrician style of sports editing will probably never be seen again. Much of his best work was done in absentia, when Samuel would leave the page drawing and running of the desk to his able deputies, such as Charlie Burgess or Roger Alton. And whatever became of them?

A marvellously affectionate tribute to Samuel has been posted on the interweb by someone who knew him for less than three months - his masseur. It includes a couple of useful links, to Engel's obit in The Grauniad and some of Samuel's own recollections of his career published by the Sports Journalists' Association. It is well worth a read, and can be found by clicking here.

SAVE OUR SUBS (Part 94): A hat-tip to Lee Clayton, the ever-vigilant head of sport at the Mail for flagging up the confusion caused across the nation's sports desks by Sergio Aguero's thrilling and match-winning hat-trick for Manchester City in the Champions' League match against Bayern Munich last night.

"UEFA have City third in the table... The Mail, Times, Mirror, Star, Guardian, Tele has them fourth," Clayton tweeted, followed by the hashtagged exclamation "#huh?"

There's an important rider: Clayton also suggested that the overworked subs on the Express sports desk have City in second place in UEFA's qualifying group, with one crucial game to play to determine who goes into the lucrative knock-out stages in the new year. 

Maybe Clayton was looking at a different edition, because in the copy of the paper I bought in London this morning, the hard-pressed Express sports desk appears to be the only national paper which has reproduced the Group E table to match the European football governing body. Not that that is an guarantee of being correct... 

In truth, in any normal reading of a football table, in which three teams have exactly the same playing record and the same number of points, the usual way to determine the sides' position in the group or league would be goal difference - goals scored, minus goals conceded. 

In this case, that would put City in second place.

City - thanks largely to Aguero - have scored 7 and conceded 8, and so have a goal difference of -1, ahead of the -4s of Roma and Moscow, with the Italian club adjudged to have the advantage of the Russian club by virtue have having scored two goals more.

But this is a competition organised by the Swiss-based gnomes of European football, and so "normal" does not apply. 

UEFA's own website, which has City in third with just one game to play, in Rome next month, has the weasel word cop-out, "Standings are provisional until all group matches have been played", which is all fine and dandy for them, but is no bloody good for a sports desk sub on deadline in London on a Tuesday night.

And according to UEFA's own competition rules, the table on their website (and therefore in the Express) is incorrect.

The reason for the UEFA rider is that in the Champions' League, they have decided to make head-to-head records in the home-and-away round-robin matches the deciding factor.

With a place in the last 16 worth around £20 million to each of the successful clubs, these distinctions matter.

Nick Harris, who covers sports news (bribes 'n drugs) for the Mail on Sunday as well as running the ever-excellent  sportingintelligence.com website is a bit of an anorak in these respects, and he has highlighted how the H2H records take precedence, and therefore ought to see City at the foot of the group table.

Pity the poor sports subs, eh?

For anyone with the time and inclination to try to work out how this all works (not that it will matter by the time of the final whistle in Stadio Olimpico), the Mail has had a bash at explaining it all here.  

And in the meantime, I - probably backed by the Express - am about to start a campaign called "Bring Back Sir Stanley Rous!"

Are we on the verge of the moment when there are no staff left at all on the sports desks at Express Newspapers?

That’s the Doomsday conclusion suggested in a motion passed by NUJ chapel members last week, which described the management’s scheme to cull one-third of the titles’ jobs as demonstrating “that there is no sustainable plan for these titles”.

Attempts to produce quality journalism will be “dead in the water”, NUJ members proclaimed, as they asked owner Richard Desmond to sell to someone else who could operate the business as a profitable, going concern, rather than continue running the once proud titles into the ground.

The union’s complaint was distributed in an email from Father of Chapel Richard Palmer, sent on Thursday evening following a meeting at which executives outlined further details behind their efforts to cut £14 million costs through losing another 200 jobs. It is worthwhile noting that Express newspapers announced an operating profit of £37 million in 2013. 

The NUJ motion stated:

Among the details revealed at the meeting with the union is the penny-wise, pound-foolish decision to scrap the regionalisation of the sports pages. This is a time-honoured part of the nightly production process: there’s nothing more certain to lose sales in Manchester, say, than an Arsenal match report on the back page.

The management had previously promised that regionalised sports editions would be “ring-fenced”, so this development represents a twist of the knife that has already made some very deep cuts. The chapel motion described the decision as short-sighted: “Distinctive areas of the papers that have driven sales, circulation, and online traffic are being jettisoned without real thought or care for the consequences,” it said. 

The NUJ reports a growing number of those few staff remaining at the Daily Express, Daily Star, Sunday Express and Daily Star Sunday suffering “unacceptable stress and ill-health” as a consequence of their increased workloads. 

The NUJ chapel also condemned “the plan revealed by management this week to outsource the content of Daily Express City pages to an external provider, producing arms-length camera-ready pages … What was once a vibrant, respected department, producing content valued by readers, is being reduced to a single person reporting to the news desk”.

Yet this outsourcing of entire sections of the paper has already been tried, on sport. And with such limited success that it has hardly been progressed at all.

The scheme was first aired around five years ago, with sports coverage being outsourced to PA Sport at Broughton in Yorkshire (“If half of our pages were going to be filled with PA copy,” one insider suggested, “then they might as well layout the pages as well.”).

At one point, it was thought the whole Express and Star sports operation may be transferred there, but eventually the practicalities of running a sports desk from offices 150 miles from the news desk and the rest of the editorial operation put paid to the “cost-effective” notion. Plans for a 24-hour operation were also discussed, and quietly dropped, as was the scheme to combine all four London sports desks under the group head of sport, Howard Wheatcroft. 

At the moment, only the Sunday Express sports desk has moved its entire operation to Broughton, plus three or four production staff from the other titles.

The departures from the sports desks thus far in this latest – last? – round of job cuts have all been voluntary, but some significantly experienced sports journalists have worked their last shift or filed their last reports for the Express or Star. 

Desk man William Kings is, as far as I can fathom, the only Star sports journalist to leave. But there may be a reason for that. “It’s difficult to see how the Star could be produced if the staff is cut much more,” a sports desk colleague said. “There is now rarely a second edition after 10pm because there is not enough staff to cope.

“I come in each shift to a volley of emails inviting me to the leaving do of picture editors and news people I don't know.” 

North-west-based football and athletics reporter Kevin Francis left the Star about a month ago, but still contributes regular match reports. Steve Bale, the Express’s rugby correspondent for the last 18 years, has left (though he has quickly snapped up work at the Sunday Times), while Bob McKenzie, the paper’s motor racing writer since 2000, has taken the chequered flag on his time with the paper.

Laurie Mumford, one of that endangered species, the sports sub, has left while Colin Bateman, the paper’s former cricket corr who late in his career enjoyed a niche as an Olympic and winter sports reporter, has retired from journalism altogether. 

And the Express’s deputy sports editor, John Burton, is taking early retirement in the new year.

After which, it would be a surprise if there’s any one left to turn out the office lights, never mind get out the sports pages.