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...

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.

Two sports biographies top the best-sellers list.
Lord's cricket ground has been staging the first London festival of sports writing.

And sports writers have even been given their own half-hour on Radio 4's erudite Open Book programme. So you would be forgiven for assuming that writing on sport for a living has never been better. 

Until you took a look at the six-book shortlist which was announced last week for this year's "Bookie Prize", the bookmaker-sponsored Sports Book of the Year.

"Not exactly the most inspiring shortlst I've ever seen," said one sage old friend in a pause for breath one night earlier this week after we had got the first edition -  and the nigglesome 7.45pm kick-off runners - out of the way.

Now my chum is one of those old-school subs who devours books like us mere mortals consume hot dinners. For many years, he even used to review sports books for a national newspaper. So his views on the subject were worth hearing.

What did he mean? "Well, the Matt Dickinson book on Bobby Moore ought to be a shoo-in for the award. The five other titles are no where near as strong.


"Two of the books shouldn't even be on the shortlist. The clue's in the title: 'the 2014 Sports Book of the Year'," he said, stressing the last three words. 


"They were first published last year."

The first of those, Anna Krien's Night Games: Sex, Power and Sport, which has been lauded around the globe for its portrayal of a "grotesque culture of contemptuous, vicious misogyny" (according to The Independent), was first published in Australia in May 2013. Or what we on the sports desk normally refer to as "last year".

Similarly, Kilian Jornet's Run or Die - the autobiography of Spanish ultra-distance runner, who the American magazine Runner's World has somewhat optimistically described as, “Trail running’s first true breakout star" (no, neither have I) - was also first published outside the UK almost six months before the 12-month qualifying period for the 2014 Sports Book of the Year entries.

Both books were subsequently republished in this country, during the entry period, and entered by their publishers, eager for the boost in sales each title might enjoy from the ensuing publicity.

The Bookie Prize - so-called because of its sponsorship since 1989 by bookmakers William Hill - has been down this road before. In 2006, they handed the prize and a handsome cheque (the 2014 winner will get a not-to-be-sniffed-at £26,000) to Geoffrey Ward for his excellent book about the former heavyweight world champion, Jack Johnson, Unforgivable Blackness. 
The only trouble was that that book had been on bookshelves for so long that Ward had had time to make a TV documentary based on it which had won an Emmy in America in 2005...

Of course, the organisers can apply whatever rules they like to their own competition, which may explain how in 2000 they came to reward serial cycling cheat Lance Armstrong for his "autobiography" - which he got someone else to write for him - It's Not About The Bike, without a flicker of suspicion that the American might have been telling a few porkies. 

Given that one of the award's most outstanding winners, Paul Kimmage, had been investigating Armstrong for years, the American getting a book-writing prize was a bit of a slap in the face.

Anyway... The idea that a book - or this year, two - can displace from the shortlist other deserving writers' works which have genuinely been first published in the year of the competition is becoming increasingly absurd, as Amazon and other online retailers enable the keen and savvy to buy books, or their Kindle editions, from anywhere around the world.

John Gaustad, the co-founder of the Bookie Prize, should realise that better than most. His fate is a lesson to all of us in the sports writing or publishing business.

For nearly two decades, Gaustad owned and ran the much-admired Sports Pages bookshop on Charing Cross Road. The shop has been closed for some time now, as Gaustad was unable to compete with the online book trade, principally Amazon. 

In between judging somewhat dated sports books, Gaustad has been earning a living driving a minicab. 

Extraordinary to relate, but The Times, which within living memory was proud to be regarded as the "newspaper of record" in sporting terms, is at present operating without a golf correspondent, a chief sports writer or a tennis correspondent.

After the departure of Peter Dixon - who could hardly have thought himself to be as irreplaceable as he has proved to be - and the plain daft exit of Simon Barnes, the third leg of sports editor Tim Hallissey's unwanted staffing hat-trick has come with the axing of the controversial Neil Harman.

The circumstances which led to Harman's sacking, for that is what it is, were outlined fully here.

Confidentiality clauses used to suppress information often frustrate journalists' working lives, so it is doubly galling when such contractual niceties are used to keep things schtum on a development within the profession. Even this week, News UK corporate types were informing media correspondents that nothing had been decided in respect of Harman's fate. 

Yet one suspiciously well-informed American website - possibly helped by some of Harman's erstwhile colleagues in the tennis press boxes around the world - was reporting the dismissal of the paper's tennis correspondent at the end of September. 

And this week, Private Eye confirmed the news. Our own enquiries suggest that the Eye report is well-founded.

Harman was suspended by The Times in July, pending an internal enquiry into whether he had committed acts of plagiarism while doing the "day job" for the paper. 

The former Mail football reporter had undertaken massive amounts of freelance work and book-writing as lucrative sidelines, including an Andy Murray biography published immediately after the Scot's Wimbledon victory last year. Harman admitted his over-enthusiastic use of cut-and-paste in the 2013 Wimbledon yearbook, but according to the Eye, it was shown to be a technique he had practised for at least six years; it even claims that he reproduced entire 600-word articles.

The internal inquiry by Bob Tyrer, of the Sunday Times, found no evidence of such plagiarism in Harman's work for his newspaper, but sources at the Little Shard suggest that the dismissal was achieved by utilising one of those catch-all contractual clauses which talk grandly of bringing the paper into disrepute.

It is questionable whether Harman could have continued to do his job for the paper, as the All England Club was considering withholding the reporter's Wimbledon accreditation. This is one of the more distasteful elements of the affair, since the sports editor of another national newspaper - an inhabitant of a glasshouse who has a plentiful supplies of cobbles to throw around - was apparently energetically lobbying Wimbledon to pull the plug on Harman's media access.  

Nor are the blazeratti innocent of flagrant hypocrisy here: Wimbledon happily continued selling the yearbook throughout the championships fortnight, despite being made aware of the plagiarism issues in April this year.   

Harman is believed to be considering a legal challenge to his dismissal from The Times. In his late 50s, another senior journalism job seems unlikely to come his way. Work for the "dark side" in PR might be possible. It has also been suggested that Harman has received an offer to write a book about the episode. 

And that's one book that will have to be all his own work.

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.

DOWN IN THE BULLOCK’S HEAD the other day with a couple of old friends, and the topic of the declining standard of sports writing, in print and online, was chewed over.

The write-it-off-the-telly approach of many national papers’ sports desks and using “click bait tossers” – actually, we were ruder than that – came in for especial criticism, while the shedding of hundreds of experienced subs’ jobs was also blamed for the fall in standards.

The all-consuming obsession with football (see last week’s column) doesn’t help. Too often, sports desk staff can tell you who played left-back for Accrington Stanley in 1967, but look blank if you ask them to name the current Wimbledon women’s champion or the British men’s record-holder at 1,500 metres.

Two recent examples that crossed m’desk at work highlighted the issue.

PA Sport was putting out some copy from the European swimming championships in Berlin. It was unclear whether the national agency was actually staffing this one-time must-cover event, or whether they were just pumping out what I call “talking six-point”, and having someone in their Yorkshire office writing lacklustre copy based on nothing more than the results appearing on the organisers’ website.

In a single session, the Great Britain swimmers managed to win three gold medals, including breaking a world record. First mention of the world record came in the ninth paragraph of the PA copy. There was no mention by PA that this was the most successful hour in the history of competitive British swimming.

Maybe the reporter didn’t know that. They might have done had they’d been in Berlin. But surely PA Sport still employs some sub-editors who can manage a quick re-write to nose on the news and manage to ensure that the home towns or club affiliations of the six medal-winning Britons that night are properly mentioned, for the benefit of the local newspapers who actually pay for this crap?

No better over at the Little Shard and the shiny new offices of The Times, which always prided itself as being a paper of record. For the three-day event at the World Equestrian Games, the 400-word report was written not by a specialist correspondent at the venue in Normandy, but by a stringer in the Home Counties watching the telly.  

The intro suggested that William Fox-Pitt, the world No1 rider, had “exceeded all expectations”. Fox-Pitt finished third. Maybe they just had low expectations of the world No1. 

Suitably deferential, since the British team included the Queen’s grand daughter, Zara Phillips, the reporter praised them for winning silver medals. But the reporter failed to mention until very late in the piece that one of the team’s horses dropped down dead after the second of the three days.

It was not just the reporter who missed the story, but the sub-editor and the sports desk’s copy-taker, too. Or are we just flogging a dead horse over this?

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

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.

Beware. Some part of what follows may have been cut and pasted from another publication or website.

The idea of journalism being the profession that ate itself was underlined over the course of the last few days with the outing of Neil Harman, pictured left, as a plagiarist over a book he edited for the All-England Club last year.

Harman, the long-time tennis correspondent of The Times, has admitted he is guilty as charged, and today was suspended by the Thunderer. 

The allegations originated in the United States, and carried more than a tinge of professional spite. And a hint of holier-than-thou hypocrisy. Harman even found that his personal Facebook page was hacked, so that someone could alter his employment status to "former" correspondent. Classy.

Harman, previously an enthusiastic tweeter, has quit both Facebook and Twitter following the storm that has blown up around him.

The nub is that he copied chunks of other people's work - from American dailies, The Guardian and Sports Illustrated - and used it in the 2013 edition of the Wimbledon Yearbook. 

In all, around 30 instances of over-enthusiastic use of cut-and-paste, without proper attribution, was discovered by the dogged investigative sleuths of Slate. Someone, somewhere has spent a considerable amount of time and effort trawling through editions of the Wimbledon Yearbook and cross-checking with other publications' reports from SW19.

You can read the whole of the Slate piece here.

Roy Greenslade's Media Guardian news report provides a more succinct version of events.

Now, no one is going to condone what Harman did. But there has been more than a touch of a witch-hunt going on here - the Times man, until he resigned the post, was the co-president of the International Tennis Writers' Association, but it would be fair to say he has never been universally popular with his press box colleagues at home or abroad.

As one of the tennis journalists who saw their work appear without permission or provenance in the Wimbledon Yearbook told me today, "To be honest, I'm not that bothered about it. For one, I'm not that precious. 

"But it's not as if he was using my writing to in some way make him look like a better writer. The book was an end-of-season rush-job, and he was also working on an Andy Murray book at the same time.

"Elsewhere in the book, he's included proper attributions to the people whose copy he's used. But he's failed to do that properly all the way through. What he's done has been lazy and sloppy, but not much worse than that."

Yesterday, Harman sent this letter of resignation from the ITWA: “It has been brought to my attention that I have severely compromised my position as a member, having used unattributed material to form part of my writing of the Wimbledon Yearbook. There can be no excuse for such shoddy work, which I deeply regret. I did it without malice aforethought, but that I did it at all is simply inexcusable.

“I sincerely had no idea the extent to which I had let the Club, myself and my colleagues down and feel it is only right that I relinquish my membership. This is a marked stain on my reputation and (I hope) good name."

The email was circulated to the ITWA membership privately. Someone then published it. "That was just not right," our tennis writer said. 

It seems unlikely now that the cherished invitation to become a member of the All-England Club will ever be forthcoming for Harman. More seriously, he could lose his Times job, even though there's not been any suggestion that he has committed any heinous plagiarism while doing his day-job as a reporter for the paper. 

It seems that the digital lynch mob, with their virtual pitchforks and torches, is intent on demanding his head, as they pursue a standard of ethics and conduct which has been sadly lacking in the manner Harman has been treated.