Mike Dunn is no longer the head of sport at the Independent group of newspapers, after less than three months in the job.

Am I allowed the indulgence of saying we told you so?

It was mid-afternoon on Friday when the texts started to buzz life into my on-mute smart phone, with the messages often punctuated with exclamation marks, from senior journalists who would never normally consider using the tabloid headline device in their copy.

"People here are glad that he's gone," was one frank view from the open-plan first floor at Derry Street, where some were suggesting that Dunn, the former sports editor at the News of the World and The Sun, was "escorted from the building", which isn't usually a good thing.

Someone else offered, "The sports desks here probably did need a bit of a shake-up, but the culture clash of his tabloid instincts and everything that the Independent has always stood for caused a lot of tensions."

The website of the Sports Journalists' Association, which broke the story, quoted an unnamed insider as saying, "He’s been here three months and many thought he was a complete disaster. He is clueless about these kind of newspapers. 

"A new MD’s come in and asked, 'Why do we need this bloke, he’s spending money like water?'”

We told you so 1: Dunn deals

The money thing was always going to be a culture clash. Dunn had spent more than a quarter-century working on often free-spending News International titles, while budgets are notoriously tight at the loss-making Independent and its sister titles.

Dunn was originally hired to help to revive the fortunes of the ailing London Live TV station. We suggested at that time that it would not be long before he gravitated over to the sports department, and when that came to pass within barely a month of his arrival, we wrote: "It is fair to say that Dunn probably has never had such skinny budgets at his disposal."

So imagine the stunned surprise on rival sports desks when one of the hottest new properties in punditry, Paul Scholes, was revealed as the new signing for The Independent. And i. And the Evening Standard. A bit of a coup for Dunn, you may have thought.

There's no such thing as exclusivity in the modern world of newspaper groups, and with the cash burden spread over three titles, Dunn must have imagined that signing up the former Manchester United and England midfielder, whose observations had been so keenly followed in his first season as a co-commentator with Sky, would pay dividends.  

But the rumour swirling around what passes for Fleet Street these days was that Scholes's annual media contract was worth £230,000. BT Sport, which snatched Scholes away from Sky, picks up the lion's share of that commitment, while the ex-player's remarks are scribbled down for the newspapers, which pay a portion of that hefty fee. 

The best suggestion of the Indy group's share of the Scholes bill is £50,000. What has become known in Derry Street as "a Dunn deal". 

We told you so 2: Relief columns

Previously, we said, "When at News International, Dunn had a reputation for being especially generous with some columnists – Terry Venables being notable..."..

The problem with old columnists is that they can be like the one in Trafalgar Square: a bit one-eyed.

Venables, who has not been in football management for more than a decade, was indeed one of Dunn's first signings in his new fiefdom. The sage words of the former Barcelona, Spurs and England manager were reputedly rewarded with £600 per column. 

Also signed up for a column was another Dunn regular, boxing promoter Frank Warren. That's possibly an odd signing when boxing is not regarded as a priority for coverage, but it also presented other problems for the sometimes holier-than-though Independent titles. 

When last month, following the death of a woman boxer in South Africa, Warren was frank enough to state, "I make no bones about it, I don’t like women’s boxing. Never have and never will", his column duly appeared in The Independent; but executives from the back bench on the sister paper, the i, ordered that Warren's column be pulled from their sports pages. 

We told you so 3: Friends reunited

"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," we said then.

It took hardly any time at all. 

Tim Allan, Dunn's ever-present right-hand man since their days together on Today, duly moved in on the desk, while the bylines of Geoff Sweet, David Harrison and Paul Smith - all reporters best known for their tabloid football work - were soon adding to the papers' meagre budgets' bills, presumably at the expense of other, longer-standing stringers.

Allan is understood to be on a rolling contract, "And they'll be rolling him out of the door next week," said one staffer.

An attempt to make the sports pages of The Independent and IoS more "poppy", will doubtless be looked back upon in a few months' time as no more than a bit of a bump in the road. An expensive failed experiment. 

But Dunn's departure (followed probably by Allan's, too), will leave a couple of senior positions vacant, since Neil Robinson, the widely respected former head of sport, was shunted over to the night editor's role to make way for the tabloid twins. Whoever takes over will have a rebuilding job on their hands, to restore morale among the hard-working sports desks.

And that's far from being done and dusted.

• Shadows of the Screws stalk Derry Street's sports desks
  

If Sports Direct owner Mike Ashley thinks he's being badly treated after his "mauling" (ho, ho) from Labour leader Ed Miliband over his retail company's "Victorian practices" and zero hours contracts, then he must surely know that is as nothing compared with the utter disdain for the multimillionaire shown by tens of thousands of loyal fans of the football club he owns, Newcastle United.

Unwittingly, over the past year, Ashley has handed some local newspapers in north-east England something rarely seen in the media industry in 2014: a circulation boost.

How has he managed to achieve that? By that most Victorian of practices, banning those newspapers whose coverage is either not fawning enough or which dare to criticise him in some manner.

Doling out bans on newspapers is a trusted, but tired, tactic of football moguls who either don't have an argument, or have long ago lost it. It may seem a little old school, but many still believe that if you're a sports hack and you haven't been banned from one ground or another, you're not doing your job properly. 

So last year, when Newcastle's local papers did their jobs and reported on fan protests over Ashley's handling of the club over issues such as having the payday loan company, Wonga, emblazoned on the proud black and white striped shirts, the club's owner issued bans that have not yet been rescinded.

Anecdotally from sources at Trinity Mirror's regional newspaper group, banned titles such as the Chronicle have seen sales soar, as Ashley has driven them on to the moral high ground and the club's fans have rallied to the titles.

The public pressure and bad publicity appears to be working. Only today has it been announced that Wonga is a gonna from the club's replica shirts in kids' sizes (though not immediately... Sports Direct must have a lot of old lines to knock out first).

At a meeting with some national sports editors this month Richard Scudamore, the head of the Premier League, expressed concerns over the continuing bans on local newspapers. But those imposed on the nationals or their staff reporters elicited a mere shrug.

The usually all-powerful Premier League is apparently content to allow its member clubs to ignore the requirements of their side of the media bargain under the licences it issues.

This is not suddenly acquired impotence by Scudamore or the Premier League. For two decades, they behaved like the three wise monkeys when it came to disciplining the almighty Alex Ferguson for refusing to fulfil his required media commitments with those outlets that had displeased him, most notably the BBC.

In Newcastle's case today,  one newspaper appears immune from Ashley's ire. That's The Sun. The Currant Bun has a lucrative multi-media deal with Newcastle to show online clips and highlights.

And therein lies Ashley's vision of a media future, where it is not just broadcasters who pay football for media rights. Ashley - and he is not alone - wants all newspapers to pay for access to the press box and training ground. The Premier League's inaction over the bans on national titles from St James' Park only helps to bring that day a little closer.

There is something admirable about the weekly fusion that is produced by the mix of Scottish football, Scottish newspapers and Scottish sports writers.

Glasgow, the city that has given us Jock Stein, Hugh McIlvanney and the headline "Super Cally go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious", has now delivered another wonderfully whimsical piece of sports writing which, you fear, might never have got past the subs' spike anywhere else. It is just a shame that one significant error did get past the sports desk.

Nonetheless, hats off to reporter Callum Baird, and his sports editor at The Herald, Donald Cowey, for having the sheer balls to publish this pondering on Taoism after a godawful Scottish Cup match at Greenock earlier this month. Baird called it "90 minutes of the most tedious, excruciating football imaginable". He's clearly not been to Millwall lately.

In fairness, Baird did have a day and a half to consider his Sunday for Monday piece after what sounds like a Saturday afternoon bore draw to end all bore draws. But that period for reflection might have given many others white screen fever, a dread inertia where you find you just have nothing to write.

The drop intro is 56 words long, and the report has, inevitably, gone viral on the interweb. The report quickly became the best-read article on the Herald's website, and it even drew a "huffy" response from the Airdrie chairman, Jim Ballantyne.

In its originally published and printed version, Baird's report read:

There was another rare moment of excitement when Joe McKee was shown a straight red card after he slid in, studs up, on Morton's Luca Gasparotto - on loan from Rangers - and left him writhing on the turf in agony. It perked up the crowd for a moment - something had happened!

That one word "Morton's" meant Ballantyne was able to point out: "It would indeed have been a rare moment if Morton's McKee had been sent off for a shocking challenge on Morton's Gasparotto!! It would clearly have been an epic moment but for the fact that Luca is actually the Airdrieonians player. But why let the facts get in the way of a Chinese history lesson?" 

Oh.

Oh well. Someone went into the online version and cleaned it up. The Herald might want to offer Ballantyne a job as a proof-reader. Remember the days when newspapers had proof-readers?

Thing is, too much of what sports reporting has become is to talk-up what is laid out before us, rather than giving a fair and honest assessment of what is, very often, a pile of poo.

The over-arching influence of televised sport has a lot to answer for. Too rarely will sports commentators ever 'fess up to the paucity of talent, skill or simple excitement in the event being contested before them. They can't: they've paid a small fortune in rights fees.

Baird had no such restraints. His final paragraph of the report (which you can read in its online entirety, including post-subbing correction, here) was possibly even more telling than his first:

"The poor crowd, shellshocked as they wandered out, were left to contemplate these five chilling words: there will be a replay."

Baird, though, was not worried for the crowd, or what passes for a crowd in the lower reaches of Scottish fitba: fewer than 1,500 had squandered their cash to see the match.

No, Baird's real concern was for himself. He told HoldTheFrontPage: “I’m just worried now that I’ll be sent to cover the replay.”


POSTSCRIPT: Morton won the replay this week, 2-0 at Airdrie (that'll pish on Ballantyne's chips), and they now have a Scottish Cup fourth round tie against Spartans, an Edinburgh side who play in the Lowland League, which is sponsored by... the Scottish Sun.

And Baird need not have worried. Someone bylined as Jack Robertson was assigned to cover the replay.

It is fair to say that when the Torygraph issued a press release to announce four appointments on the sports desk a couple of weeks ago, there was nothing that could be described as unbridled celebration around the newsroom at Victoria.

The four thrusting young Turks - Daniel Schofield, Tom Peacock, Tom Edwards and Charlie Eccleshare - must be wondering what they have let themselves in for. 

The day after the quartet's appointments were made public, an email from editor-in-chief Jason Seiken - or "Psycho" as he is permanently ridiculed in Private Eye - announced that he was about to decimate his staff. That's "decimate" used accurately, for once, with 55 jobs cut, or 10 per cent of the current staff.

Word is, these compulsory redundancies will include some of the newspaper's biggest names from the sports desk. Yet again. The word "bloodshed" has been used. 

In typical managementspeak, Seiken described it as  “ongoing editorial transformation”. Transformed into what, he failed to say. Consultations are understood to begin on Monday.

It was as recently as June this year when the Telegraph sports desk lost six top writers, demonstrating that no one is safe when Seiken wields the scythe. Four months ago, the casualties included cricket writer Simon Hughes and racing correspondent Jim McGrath.

It is barely two years since sport was at the heart of the Telegraph's offering, with front-page Olympic coverage and special supplements. But since those heady days, the papers have shed their Olympic Editor, the excellent but under-utilised Jacqui Magnay, plus industrious chief sports writer Ian Chadband and athletics corr Simon Hart. And to think that they used to have a Sebastian Coe column to expound the benefits of the "Olympic legacy". Ha bloody ha: there's been no Olympic legacy in British sports journalism, that's for sure.

The Telegraph titles continue, though, with some expensively acquired columnists, such as London Mayor Boris Johnson and the "chickenfeed" £250,000 per year he gets for a weekly column, and on sport, where former England batsman Kevin Pietersen is rumoured to be on a six-figure sum for his weekly promotion of his (auto)biography.

It is looking like some on the sports staff will lose their jobs to help pay for these star names. But they won't be the first, as the Telegraph continues to hire a handful of "click-bait tossers" to feed their website with often derivative content, while showing the door to established, experienced and proven reporters and subs.

The Telegraph job cuts in June this year followed 80 editorial redundancies in 2013 and 30 editorial redundancies in 2012. In all, more than 400 jobs have been lost at the Telegraph titles since 2005, in which time the titles moved from Canary Wharf to Victoria, and the Sunday and daily titles were merged. 

The ramifications of that merger to a "seven-day operation" are believed still to have an impact in this latest redundancy round. It's a Sophie's Choice of a process: do they let go the staff correspondent who has a decade-or-more seniority after working for the daily paper, or someone who was originally on the Sunday staff, with a less expensive contract which reflected their original, "lighter" workload?

The quality of the journalism will never be a factor in the final decision. 

Editor's blog Why is "inevitable" that change equals job cuts?

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.

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?