Derek Pringle: his departure from the Torygraph was not handled in an entirely conventional manner 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."
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.
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