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.

 

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?

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.

These are bad times, sad times for cricket writing in this country.

The summer game has often been the province of some of the greats of sports journalism, from last century’s poets Cardus and Arlott, through to some who grace the sports pages today, even including the likes of Marks and Engel. That's Victor and Matthew, since you ask.

But with Sky Sports’ Test-centric coverage increasingly provided only by those who have at some time captained their country at the game – regardless of their merits as broadcasters or journalists – the opportunities for genuine journalists to work on cricket are becoming more limited by the day.

Earlier this year, the Press Association abandoned its commitment to ensure coverage at all county championship games by ending agreements with around 20 freelance stringers to file live copy and scores from around the grounds during the summer.

“We took the decision to bring coverage of the county game in-house,” PA Sport said at the time, leaving themselves without any reporters actually in the press box at county grounds for the summer. At least, that was, until the Cricket Writers’ Club cut a deal with the governing body, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), to pay freelancers to do what PA Sport was no longer prepared to budget for. What happens next season has yet to be determined.

PA’s cricket coverage was once the mainstay of regional evening and daily newspapers’ summer sports pages, and latterly some nationals, too, as they cut-back on stringer fees. But as not even the Telegraph, Times and Guardian bother paying lip-service to the game at county level these days, someone at the PA must have asked the question, “Why bother?” 

It gets worse. Now the august Cricketer magazine is without any writers on its staff, after the editor, Andrew Miller, and two other journalists were made redundant last month.

“How do you expect to get out a decent magazine if you don’t have any journalists working on it?” one interested party said. Others suggest that an announcement of a new “editor-in-chief” and production person – both new job titles so as not to break any employment law – may be imminent.

First published in 1921, The Cricketer’s past editors have included EW Swanton, David Frith and Richard Hutton, but in more recent times, since it was sold by BSkyB and abandoned an association with the publishers of Wisden, the monthly magazine’s fate has begun to appear about as assured as an Indian batsman playing outside his off-stump to Jimmy Anderson.

That may have something to do with its sometimes owners since 2010. Neil Davidson, is the sometimes controversial former chairman of Leicestershire County Cricket Club, while Lord Marland is a former Conservative Party treasurer.

Neither has any background in publishing. Before taking on The Cricketer, Marland, who made some of his fortune with Hunter boots, had tried to take over the ECB chairmanship, but was foiled. It was Marland’s interview with Tory leader David Cameron that appeared in the pages of the magazine which may have precipitated the decision of the previous editor, John Stern, to leave The Cricketer.

But it is little wonder neither the pre-eminent magazine on the national game nor the national news agency can make coverage of cricket pay any longer. At least one cricket website is being given full journalistic access and privileges at the press boxes at county grounds by being accredited by the ECB, even though the website tends not to pay its writers.

Who’s to say that PA Sport or the Cricketer magazine might not soon be using cricket copy and scores data provided by unpaid students and trainees, all because it is provided free.