Back pages back to front
The Jewish prayer book is read back to front and I have found this is the way to approach the sports pages too. The cover story will as often as not be stale news by the time of publication. The next eight pages are normally devoted to football and there is little likelihood of any fresh reporting on matches well dissected by now . Its only towards the end you get more interesting comment pieces.
Thus yesterday I read both the football supplements of the Telegraph and Times in this way. The back page of the Times football supplement contained an extremely well argued piece by the articulate Matthew Syed on archaic employment practices in a football club being far more responsible for the lack of gay players than any crowd. It shows the original thinking of the journalist as last week he was defending the high wages of modern players.
Turning backwards I read the next article by the always entertaining Bill Edgar who comes up with quirky facts and stats e.g. the one that Alan Tanner relied on in his open letter that Fulham have used 49 players since Boxing Day. He also referred to Dier and Dyer both scoring in white for Spurs and Swansea.
Gabriele Marcotti completed a trio of interesting columns by a clever analysis of how Carlo Ancelotti has to accomadate the purchase of marquee signings by his president at Real Madrid.
Over at the Telegraph the gifted young sports columnist Jonathan Liew wrote on the dominance of personality over character on a hatchet job of the ubiquitous Robbie Savage. I could not agree more. His opinions seems designed and delivered to excite the phone in audience than a considered analysis of the game which unlike say Hansen adds value to the appreciation by the viewer.
see here – LIEW
In all I spent a satisfying 30 minutes over my morning coffee which made me conclude that the art of sports journalism was certainly not dead in the face of competition from the Internet and saturation coverage on television and radio.