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...

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.

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.

 

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!"

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.

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?

Happy birthday, Match of the Day.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the Premier League season kicks off tomorrow, and with it, for a 50th year, returns the original television football programme.
But like many of us as we enter late middle-age, there are increasing signs of infirmity, and even suggestions from old friends that early retirement might not be out of the question.

The BBC’s relationship with televised sport, once all-embracing, is increasingly marginalised and irrelevant, caused by its loss of rights to the satellite companies and a terminal lack of budget. Maybe, too, the 24/7 digital age is hastening the moment when the controller of BBC1 decides the time has come to abandon a highlight packages show, pretending that no one already knows the scores, and the scorers, of games that finished five hours earlier.

The Saturday “Pinks”, the special edition of regional evening papers, have all but disappeared from around the country, out-dated by a range of devices, starting with steam wireless, but now extending through television, to smartphones and tablets. Might MOTD go the same way?

There was a time when Match of the Day, and the ITV Sunday lunchtime version, the Big Match, with their limited selection of a few minutes of highlights from three or four games, was the only football on our telly, apart from the occasional disaster of a live England game from Wembley or the annual jamboree of the FA Cup final itself. Now, there’s near-saturation coverage of football, especially Premier League football, with 154 matches being shown live this season by BSkyB and BTSport.

For anyone who isn’t in a ground on a Saturday afternoon (or Sunday lunchtime or Monday evening, as kick-off times are swapped around for the benefit of the TV schedulers) and is determined enough to see their team play, there’s usually a savvy pub landlord somewhere who has his satellite dish honed in on a Greek or Turkish channel. With the sound turned down, obviously.

And therein lies another problem for MOTD. Because besides just picking up the broadcasting crumbs from the table with its heritage highlights package, Match of the Day no longer offers anything distinctive. If you’ve already seen the game, or games, and found out all the rest of the results from Sky Sports News or online newspapers’ “live” blogs, what is there about the old programme to make even the most committed sports fan switch on? The charisma of Gary Lineker? Think again…

Matthew Norman pin-pointed another of BBC Sport’s problems in his Telegraph column this week when he asked: where have all the great commentators gone? 

“The elocuted Geordie elegance of Ken Wolstenholme, Barry Davies’s caustic, sometimes bombastic intelligence, and the infectiously nasal zeal of the early John Motson. Whatever you thought of them, their voices were as instantly recognisable as those of your closest family, and their verbal stylings equally distinct.

“These days, you would have to deploy the CIA’s most sophisticated voice analysis software to distinguish the seven or eight BBC TV commentators.”

It is not just in football that the BBC appears to be losing its great “Voice of …” [fill in name of sport to suit]: John Arlott in cricket; Dan Maskell in tennis; Harry Carpenter in boxing, verbal artists of the microphone who were taught to let the pictures do their talking for them. And when they had something to say, it was worth hearing.

Increasingly, Match of the Day’s future will depend on ratings, and possibly on what fraction of digital rights the BBC can hang on to as they stand on the sidelines watching Sky and BT slug it out in the next round of multi-billion-pound negotiations. But with hundreds of BBC News staff being axed to save money, trophy programmes such as MOTD with their mega-contracts for the likes of Alan Shearer, Phil Neville and Robbie Savage to spout punditry platitudes may be playing into the final few minutes of injury time.

ON THE TOPIC OF great commentators, which we sort of were, it is worth stating here that, by accident or design, the BBC has managed to find a winning team of live action commentators for its athletics coverage, which has been operating seemingly around the clock from the European Championships in Zurich this week.

If only they would make greater use of them.

Steve Cram, schooled in the Eurosport booth of day-long stints covering the arcanities of the women’s 50-kilometre hammer-throw, has been joined recently by the non-athlete Andrew Cotter, pictured above, a philosophy graduate who learned his trade covering golf, and thus provides some calm, intelligent wit. Backed up with former javelin world record-holder Steve Backley’s analytical approach to field events (when the director deigns to show any), this trio has done very well this summer, first in Glasgow at the Commonwealth Games and now Zurich.

But then the BBC goes and spoils it by indulging surely the most incoherent and inarticulate commentator known to the world in Brendan Foster, or by pretending that Denise Lewis or Colin Jackson really do have anything worth saying.

Much, especially production personnel, has changed since BBC Sport’s forced move to Salford in 2012, and not always for the better. But with their athletics coverage, just as with Match of the Day, the BBC would do well to return to an old guiding principle of less is usually more.

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.