BOXING CLEVER

Provincial newspapers have always had to struggle by on minimal editorial resources. It shows in the quality of their writing staff and it shows in the breadth of their coverage.
A glance at the rugby pages in today's Scotland on Sunday is a microcosm (and the SoS microcosm is getting even more micro by the week) of the problems sports editors in the sticks face under the strictures of the bean counters upstairs..
As with every other native (and that includes players, fans and coaches) charged with following the fortunes of Scotland, "chief rugby writer" Iain Morrison can't let an intro go by without a mention of the brave boys in blue and the number of "positives" to take from another thumping defeat. Morrison is an abysmal chronicler of events and despite having played for his country, and presumably having a few contacts, still can't produce a half-decent news story. He is as much a journalist as, say, the newpapers' statutory columnist Nathan Hines, whose ghosted piece also concentrated on the "positives" of the Dublin drubbing.
Morrison shared the stage with former SoS sports editor Richard "Freebie" Bath who maintains some sort of droit de seigneur there and provided the match report of the France v England match from Paris.
I say provided, because it goes without saying that Bath wasn't in Paris; he was 1,000 miles away in Edinburgh alongside a TV box and thus, with the benefit of the BBC's prolonged action replays, able to inform us that Jamie Noon knocked on in the build-up to England's first try.
I was in the Stade de France and this was impossible to spot with the naked eye in live action.
So my newspaper (and several others) spent around £1,000 (and I haven't done my exes yet) on a weekend in Paris only to be "scooped" by a hack who wasn't even there.
Let's pray the bean counters don't spot this, or we'll all be covering major live sport from our living rooms.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Who on earth needs Frank Gorshin, Mike Yarwood or Alistair McGowan when you can tune in to BBC Sport?
"Super Saturday" kicked off with Football Focus and the great Garth Crooks, who does a Burt Lancaster (as Elmer Gantry) which has to be seen, and heard, to be believed. Elmer was succeeded by Sir Matthew Pinsent, impersonating an investigative reporter, and on the loose in Beijing at licence payers' expense.
Backed up by Gabby Yorath dolled up in her winter finery a la Julie Christie in Dr Zhivago, Matty gave us the lowdown on Human Growth Hormone, how to get it, and where, along with the startling revelation that it can't be detected.
Quite apart from the fact that I can get this insider's info (and a month's supply) with a couple of clicks of a mouse and without leaving my seat, if Matty really wanted to give us a new slant on a doper's Olympics all he had to do was have a word with Jurgen Grobler, his former GB rowing coach who knows a thing or two about this subject. On then to the rugger with Sonia (Hyacinth) McLoughlin. Sonia's interviewing technique consists of shouting, at around 115 decibels, one of two questions: How disappointed are you, Nick/Frank/Brian? Or, how delighted are you, Warren/Eddie?
The girl will go far, but probably not as far as Jill Douglas, unsurpassable exponent of the How? question.
Finally, from Paris came the curtain act, Laurel and Hardy, aka Eddie Butler and Brian Moore. One thing has always puzzled me about Eddie. How can he spend 80 minutes commentating on an international rugby match while at the same time producing 1,000 words or so for the following morning's Observer? Or does he simply, as I suspect, concentrate on his newspaper work and get Alistair McGowan in to call the match?

STARSHIT TROOPERS

Does the left hand know what the right hand is doing at the Daily Star? Does the sports desk ever converse with the news desk, or vice versa? Are editorial conferences spent on anything else apart from debating the size of the bazookas on page one?
Like, for example, content?
Page One today reveals that Cheryl Cole is set to spoil "love rat" husband Ashley's big Wembley day and shun the Carling Cup final between Chelsea and Spurs at Wembley tomorrow.
The back page (just across the fold) reveals that Cole isn't going to play in the Carling Cup final between Chelsea and Spurs at Wembley tomorrow.
Is there anyone still alive on the Star, that disabled asteroid which should have been shot down long ago?

HEADLINE NEWS

When I started out in this daft business the first lesson hammered into me by my first sports editor was that when you wrote a headline the words had to be reflect what was in the intro. The second was that you always include a name.
Whichever Sunday Times sub came up with England Can't Cut the Mustard to illustrate England's one-day cricket defeat by New Zealand got it right on the second point and wrong on the first. Mustard wasn't mentioned until the third or fourth par and the story wasn't about him.
But which sub could resist the possibilities offered by his name?
There are obviously sportsmen and women who lend themselves to abuse by production journalists stricken by pun fever - and Mustard is one of them. Other prime examples are anyone called Bird, Rose or King. The former Celtic player Rafael Scheidt also comes to mind. There are just as obviously other names that will remain immune to puns, notably Mustard's team-mate Dimitri Mascarenhas and Celtic's Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink.
The greatest news pun headline never written (as yet) is the one to announce the passing of Archbishop Desmond Tutu - Ta Ta Tutu.
The greatest sports pun we will never see - regrettably since their careers did not overlap - concerns the dream scenario of a punch-up between two psychotic second row rugby fowards, Danny Grewcock of England and Jean Condom of France.
The Englishman is a karate black belt and would undoubtedly have won, but I guarantee the headline, Grewcock Fills In Condom, wouldn't have appeared in the Sunday Times.

YOU'RE POTTY, MOTTY

I gave the England v Switzerland match two minutes on Wednesday having vowed that if anyone disturbed the minute's silence for the victims of Munich I'd switch off and never watch another football match again.
Full marks to the Wembley fans, no bother at all.
I still switched off, though, in protest at the antics of BBC commentator, John Motson, who was still going through the team line-ups 10 seconds into the tribute.
Is he senile, or just stupid? Whatever, BBC Sports has just lost another viewer.

SPORTING PSEUD OF THE WEEK (AGAIN)

I thought I had read every conceivable variation of meaningless tosh written about Munich '58, but I'd forgotten we hadn't heard from Simon Barnes in the Times. Here's his latest session of verbal wanking: "Sport is life. It is the most vivid form of being alive, at any rate in public. Sport's triumphs and disasters, joys and sorrows, shame and glory have an intensity impossible to find elsewhere on a regular basis and it acquires an added meaning and importance from sport's essential triviality. Sport may be said to be the precise opposite of death."

If you have never met Simon Barnes, let me tell you that he has a fop's ponytail and favours white suits and boaters. He looks like a prick - and writes like one.

But at least this latest offering has made him Sporting Pseud of the Week ... for the second time.

RESTING IN PIECES

There is not a lot new to say about Munich '58, but most newspapers have had a good try this week - and it has not made edifying reading.
Survivors and families have been wheeled out for various anniversaries almost non-stop down the years, most of them with little complaint and with the infinite patience which has become their trademark. The occasion of the 50th anniversary, tomorrow, found them under ghoulish siege.
Bobby Charlton, Harry Gregg, Albert Scanlon, Bill Foulkes and even Kenny Morgans (the forgotten survivor as most of the tabloids labelled him quite justifiably) have all repeated, interminably, what they have said so many times in the past about the crash.
So have the sons of Johnny Berry and Roger Byrne, the daughter of pilot Captain James Thain, the brother of Liam Whelan and the sister of David Pegg. As you would expect from humble and gracious people, their recollections have been both measured and moving.
Inevitably, however, given the age we live in there have been other casualties - most notably those items foreign to most tabloids, the facts. To take the worst of many:
The Daily Mail on Saturday spread a fine piece by Geoffrey Wheatcroft across two of its feature pages, accompanied by a photograph of "the Busby Babes boarding the flight to Munich from which many of them would never return".
Very dramatic, except that among others on the plane steps were assistant manager Jimmy Murphy and trainer Jack Crompton who were not on the last tragic flight. Nor were Ian Greaves, Alex Dawson and Wilf McGuinness among the more recognisable of the players on the picture. The blond quiff of Albert Quixall, who was signed after Munich, also stands out.
Most of us found an error of this magnititude and such basic incompetence hard to credit in a national newspaper and rang the Daily Mail to tell them so. Some of us also posted comments on the newspaper's website. It goes without saying that none of these were published - although a new, correct, photograph did materialise magically there today.
Among the others, the Daily Express still, as I write, has a picture on its website of a youthful Albert Scanlon "who died after the plane crashed" - despite a reader's correction posted underneath.
The Sun, inevitably, weighed in with a piece from an eye witness "exonerating" Captain Thain after he had been blamed by the German authorities for not de-icing the aircraft's wings.
In fact, the pilot was cleared 40 years ago by a subsequent British inquiry who decided that slush on the runway was the cause.
The quotes from the German rescuer eye witness were simply lifted straight from Stanley Stewart's excellent book, Air Disasters, first published in 1986.

A LOAD OF OLD BOWLS

From Nick Halling "in Phoenix" for the Independent comes more evidence that the reportage of indigenous sport should be left to the natives.
We can laugh as long and as loud as we like at the efforts of the Yanks to trivialise the technicalities of football (sorry, soccer), but Halling and the rest of the Brits who are hanging on for dear life to the rear wheels of the NFL bandwagon sure do redress the balance, thus:
"New York's defence made Brady's life a misery throughout, forcing him to throw before he was ready, sacking him five times, and knocking him to the ground. As a result, the ice-cool pass-master had his worst game of the season."
I'm not an aficionado of American Football, but I understand it well enough to know that a sacking invariably means a quarter-back is knocked to the ground.
As for the "ice-cool pass-master", the last time I heard that phrase applied to anyone was in a red-top obit for Johnny Haynes.