Lee Clayton, David Walker and Matt Gatward, respectively the head of sport at the Mail group, the Daily Mirror's new sports editor, and the sports editor of The Independent, have some big decisions to make.

Clayton, especially, looks to have his work cut out, following the news that Les Snowdon, his trusty No2 as the Daily Mail's sports editor, is to leave Derry Street to take up a new job as Scottish editor for The Times.


The Mail is one of the last bastions of an old-style sports desk, with plenty of reporters and production staff to manage, as well as to try to break the occasional story, all operating these days alongside the click-bait team working on Mail Online's sports coverage.

Snowdon has worked in Scotland before, having been editor of the Scottish sports coverage for the Sunday Times and as well being the editor of Scotland on Sunday before joining the Mail five years ago.

Clayton is also losing from his staff Mark Alford, who has undertaken various roles on sport, on the paper and online, since being signed up as a sub after completing the Mail's graduate trainee scheme a decade ago. Very much a Clayton protoge, Alford may not necessarily be replaced - his latest job title is "consultant sports editor" for Mail Online.

Both Snowdon and Alford are due to begin new jobs in January, Alford, according to a report on the website of the Sports Journalists' Association, moving to Sky Sports at Osterley as head of digital media.

Elsewhere in the same building off Kensington High Street, Gatward is attempting to re-build after the whirlwind interregnum under Mike Dunn (as we reported here).

With Neil Robinson, the former head of sport for The Independent, Independent on Sunday, i and the Evening Standard, having been sidelined to a night editor's role to make way when Dunn was appointed, it has been left to Gatward to pick up the pieces of the spendthrift three months when the Indy titles suddenly started pretending that they had the budget of The Sun sports desk.

The spending - on the likes of 600-quid-a-time football columnists such as Terry Venables, or the six-figure deal for Paul Scholes - is now being recouped through drastic cuts to the papers' already slender budgets for casual subs and reporters' travel.

Dunn arrived accompanied by his former buddy from The Sun and News of the World, Tim Allan; Allan was only ever on a short-term deal, and he is understood to be among the applicants for the role of "sports editorial executive" - effectively sports editor of the IoS and the i. Interviews were held last week, and an appointment expected to be made any time now.

Over at Canary Wharf, and Walker has been given an early opportunity to make his mark on the Daily Mirror's sports pages.

Walker won the game of musical chairs at Trinity Mirror's titles in the summer, as he was promoted from the Sunday Mirror, while People sports editor James Brown left the building (to re-surface at The Sun).

But two key members of staff leaving in quick succession might have come as a shock so early in Walker's reign.

To lose your football corr, in Martin "Laptop" Lipton, who's been recruited as the new deputy sports editor at The Sun , and then also have your chief sports writer in Ollie Holt defect to the Mail on Sunday, where he is to be the "new Patrick Collins", might be a double blow for Walker.

Apparently not so. According to one Trinity Mirror sports desker who was in a football press box at the weekend, "David sees it as his chance to bring in or promote those people he really rates. Nothing lasts forever, and Laptop and Ollie had both been fixtures at the Mirror for a while. David can now mix things up, without having to elbow anyone aside."

Early suggestions are that Andy Dunn, a Walker favourite when he edited the Sunday Mirror's sports pages, could figure prominently.

Help. Please.

This is a genuine appeal to all news desk, business desk and features journalists who might occasionally wander over to this corner of SubScribe. Has the way you have to work changed, so that you're no longer expected to report on what has actually happened, what people actually say, but instead to display all the prediction skills of Nostradamus?

I ask because that does seem to be what is now required of sports reporters, specifically, or especially, football writers.

Long gone are the days when the only live football on our telly each year was the FA Cup final and maybe a midweek international once in a while, and when watching Match of the Day was "event television" in every household. The demise of the Saturday Pink editions of our regional newspapers are also testament to the fact that, in our modern, wired-up digital age, not a second can pass without a goal alert, score update or video clip burping on to a screen near you. Why would you want to pay for a paper which is dated even before it goes off stone?

And so, the demands on modern football hacks have changed. Rarely, even for Sunday newspaper football reporters, is the old-style match runner required because, the reasoning goes, by the time the report hits the news stands the following day, every reader will already know the result, the scorers, and they will have probably seen replays of the goals from every available angle, too.

So football reporting in 2014, especially away from live match coverage, is as often about what is going to happen as it is about what has happened. 

More crystal balls than footballs.

In an era when Fantasy Football games are used by sports sections to drive circulation and revenues, does anyone else sometimes pause to wonder how much of what their reading on the other sports pages might also be more fiction than fact?

I was reminded of this recently when I read a back page exclusive in The Independent which predicted (oh yes) that Alan Pardew, the manager of Newcastle United, was to be sacked on Tuesday morning if his side failed to win their next league fixture.

The story appeared to be impeccably sourced, from an exclusive interview with Newcastle United's owner, Mike Ashley. 

This was a tabloid-style sports splash of the sort introduced to the paper by its then new head of sport, Mike Dunn. Suffice to say, Pardew has lasted longer in his job that has Dunn.

The paper's report - not written by any of the title's established or regular football writers - was based on a chance encounter outside a Soho pub between Ashley and the reporter, Vivek Chaudhary, the former Guardian sports news correspondent.

Ashley has something of a reputation for being difficult with the media, especially those sports reporters and newspapers he has banned from Newcastle's ground. Yet here, he chatted over his beer for some minutes with the reporter.

According to Chaudhary, and published by The Independent, the journalist recognised Ashley because of his "tradmark white shirt". The reporter also wrote that Ashley told him that he did not want him to record the conversation on his smart phone.

Unusually in football, Pardew has a long-term contract from Ashley, signed in 2012 for eight years. But in this chance encounter in Soho, according to Chaudhary, Ashley "started making throat-cutting gestures in relation to what the future held for Pardew". Of course, given the long-term contract, any dismissal of the manager would likely involve millions of pounds in compensation.

That was the end of September and Newcastle duly lost at Stoke on the Monday night. But Pardew was not sacked, as had been predicted.

Instead - until their defeat by West Ham yesterday -  Newcastle went on to enjoy a fabulous seven-match unbeaten streak,  winning their last six, including away at Tottenham in the league and at Manchester City in the League Cup. 

Pardew appears safe in his job.

Me? Think that next time I'm looking for a prediction, I'll stick to the astrology column.

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
  

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… 

Did it really take a dildo in a sports reporter’s ear to tell us that transfer Deadline Day had jumped the shark?

I spent much of last Monday afternoon in the snug of the Bullock’s Head, round the corner from SubScribe Towers, discussing various aspects of our trade with a couple of old colleagues. As you might imagine, there was much shaking of heads, repeated utterances of “the game’s gone”, and some drink may have been taken.

Throughout the afternoon, we dissected journalism, and specifically sports journalism in 2014. In the background was the constant hum of a widescreen, HD television which was tuned to Sky Sports News and its Deadline Day coverage, the countdown clock never pausing. Over the course of the three or four hours (it may have been more, but by the end I was no longer counting), Sky may as well have had their output on a taped 30-minute loop.

Because. Nothing. Happened.

Sky Sports are beginning to make a habit of this new form of non-reporting.

When Manchester United were thrashed in the League Cup last month by a franchise outfit from a Buckinghamshire new town, Sky Sports chose not to report on the aftermath of Louis van Gaal’s team’s latest capitulation, or to get some squirm-laden interviews and to assess the latest embarrassment’s significance for United’s re-building. Oh no, that was far too obvious a news line to take.

Instead, they spent the post-game analysis period debating how important the win was for Milton Keynes Dons. Seriously.

So it was then, that on Sky Sports “News” on Deadline Day (notice how we somehow now feel the need to cap the Ds – when did that happen?), this was what constituted more than 15 hours’ worth of “live” sports broadcast journalism:

1. Bloke (they were mostly blokes) wearing the station uniform of dark jacket and LibDem-yellow tie is standing outside a football ground/training ground. If they were unlucky, this being just before the schools went back after summer, the reporter will have been surrounded by gurning kids aged between 12 and 46. The reporter will, off-screen, have probably been accompanied by a cameraman and a satellite truck of some description.
   
2. There will have been at least 20 of these reporters out and about across England and Wales last Monday for Sky Sports News alone – one for every Premier League club.
   
3. To each in turn – because there was never any real “breaking news” all day long to disrupt the dull flow from Burnley to Leicester, to West Ham to Southampton, and on and on and on… – the studio presenter would throw to a reporter with some scrap or titbit of transfer “news” relevant to the club the reporter was assigned to.
   
4. The reporter would smile, nod, pretending that they heard the studio, and then proceed to “update” the audience with empty non-information, and probably refer to “Sky Sports News sources”, when what they really meant was what they’d read in the morning’s Sun or Mirror, or had just checked out on Mail Online on their tablet device. 
   
5. In all but two cases all day long, the “deals” usually involved various Carlos Kickablls who most of the reporters had never heard of, almost certainly had never seen play, and who were being recruited from or sent out on loans (ie. not a proper transfer) to even more obscure lower league clubs in Europe. It may have been late, or my eyesight was going, but I think there was even one Dutch club referred to which had KKK in its title. Or was it VVV?
   
6. And throughout it all, a tickertape continued running across the bottom of the screen, advising viewers that really, nothing had happened.

Between the end of last season and Sep 1, Premier League clubs spent a record £850m on new players. Much of that business had been done quietly and calmly, and was completed weeks before Deadline Day. To Sky’s obvious discomfort on Monday, there were just two “mega-star mega-deals” on the final day of the transfer window. One of those involved no headline transfer fee and was conducted so early in the day that there was no deadline “tension”. 

This deal was the loan (yes, another one) from Monaco to United of Radamel Falcao. Business done and dusted by 10am, it had all happened before Sky’s Deadline Day team had managed to get into their stride.

The £16 million transfer of Danny Welbeck from United happened right up to the deadline hour, but it had been flagged up for a week before so that when it finally happened, with the England striker moving to Arsenal, there was a hefty sense of inevitability about it.

Anti-climatic much?

So it was doubly unfortunate for reporter Alan Irwin, at Everton’s training ground, that in the course of his duties he was assaulted with that purple dildo. Oh the irony: when he suffered his on-air assault, Irwin was talking-up a transfer deal that never actually happened.

This dildo non-deal neatly encapsulates all that Deadline Day has become: a creation by Sky, as they observe the Premier League clubs usually squandering the millions of rights fees they have paid them, often to the detriment of the game itself, according to more than one leading football writer.

Rory Smith, a reporter for one of the national newspapers which, like most of Sky, are owned by Rupert Murdoch, took to the website of a rival broadcaster, ESPN, to pen 1,700 words about the “fetishisation” of Deadline Day. 

Smith works for The Times, so understatement was to the fore when he called Deadline Day 2014 “a bit of a slow-burner”. But he also put out there the view, shared by his Guardian colleague Barry Glendinning, “… that transfer deadline day - both in its summer and winter guises - is more eagerly anticipated than FA Cup final day”. What kind of perverse madness is this?

Smith continues: “It has been a personal suspicion for some time that there are many who prefer the soap opera of the game to the sport itself, a belief borne out by website hit rates, which suggest transfer gossip attracts more attention than do descriptions of action.” 

Smith makes a very good point, especially in the use of the word “gossip”, something which many of us were taught very early in our journalism training should never be reported, but which now – at least when it comes to football – is all too often passed off as “news” for the making of a back-page headline.

This site’s editor has in the past made the very valid comparison between the coverage given to football, and especially Premier League football, at the expense of lower division clubs and all other sports, even cricket, rugby union, tennis and golf. On Deadline Day, for all the hours that Sky spent on reporting that nothing much happened while having a dildo stuck in its ear, there was barely a minute devoted to any cricket coverage, to the build-up to the rugby season, to the latest cycling or athletics news. It was as if nothing else in the world of sport happened. Or matters. 

IT IS ALWAYS good to see your breaking news stories work out as you had first suggested. 

Thus it was last week that it was reported, as had been suspected would happen all along, Mike Dunn has taken over running the sports desks of The Independent, Independent on Sunday, i and Evening Standard.

It is expected that he will soon be joined, in a senior role probably on the Sunday title, by Tim Allan, who has worked with Dunn when he was sports editor at Today, then the News of the World (under Andy Coulson), and then The Sun.

As a consequence of Dunn’s appointment, barely a month after his arrival in Derry Street to oversee their various digital outputs, the previous head of sport, Neil Robinson, is moved to become night editor. 

And over at Canary Wharf, key sports personnel moves at Trinity Mirror are beginning to fall into place, as we first suggested with David Walker moving from sports editor of the Sunday Mirror to the same job on the daily, while Dean Morse, formerly head of sport for the Daily Mirror, becomes “weekend sports editor” looking after the competing back pages of The People and Sunday Mirror.

Dominic Hart, once Daily Mirror sports ed, becomes its head of sport.

What becomes of James Brown, The People’s sports editor, remains unclear.

But the game of musical chairs appears to be over, at least this time round

Tim Allen, the No3 on The Sun’s sports desk, has been hunting around for a new job.
 
Mike Dunn, pictured right, the not-universally-loved head of sport on the Currant Bun, is to depart once the football World Cup is over, having been effectively asked to re-apply for his own job. It appears that Allen, having been passed over in the new regime, is also now seeking “fresh challenges”.
 
And Isaac Newton was right when he postulated that every action has an equal and opposite reaction: Dunn has quickly found alternative employment. The former News of the World sports editor has landed a job with a suitably grand title to look after the digital offerings at The Independent group of papers. This is much to the astonishment of his former colleagues at Wapping, who suggest that Dunn had little interest in the website activities when he worked there.
 
The departure of Stefano Hadfield soon after the unwatched, if not unheralded, launch of London Live television channel appears to have created the opening for Dunn, or at least freed up the cash in the Indy’s tight budgets. But where the Dunn appointment might leave senior staff on the merged sports desks of the Independent, the i paper, IoS and the Evening Standard, will just have to be left to your imagination, just as it has been left to the imagination of said staff by the management.