I did a postgraduate course in magazine journalism at City University in London and got a job on The Guardian’s website.
I was later a sports sub-editor, but had no eye for detail. Chelsea and Liverpool were both knocked out of the FA Cup by lower league opposition, a huge deal, and I got both scorelines the wrong way round on a double page.
Not a useful explanation for The Guardian to use, but a useful explanation for The Guardian.
My thought is, just how difficult is it to get something like that right? My interest in football, if it could be measured, would produce a negative number, but I’m certain that I wouldn’t make such a basic mistake. I suppose that in engineering an eye for detail is a bit more important. Such screw ups tend to end up being very expensive.
Welll, the Mirror ran a match report of a League Cup game involving Liverpool back in 2006 or so. Benitez was manager, and one of the first team centre-backs was a big, blond Finn named Sami Hyppia. The game was on the telly-box, so I watched it.
The match report revolved around how well Hyppia had played, tackles, blocks, passes made etc, etc.
Unfortunately, he didn’t play. The big blond fella at centre-back was one of the 18/19 year-olds out of the youth set-up.
Whoever put the line-ups under the report, got it right.
So much for my argument that at least the Grauniad gets the football scores right. Though a mathematician might say the scores were right to within a simple reversal.
It used to be that nationals recruited subs from local papers; perhaps they should start doing that again…