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...

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.