Writing a match report - #2

There may be other industries in which employees of competing companies help each other, but I can't think of one. This is what happens in the press box, a place where rivals in print become comrades in the struggle that is meeting a deadline and filling that white space in the sports pages.

With that camaraderie comes a code. You are expected to help the journalist sitting next to you whether that be by filling him or her in on action they may have missed or not seen clearly (like referees, most of the time journalists only get one look at it) or by feeding them some information on, for instance, how many goals a certain striker has scored.

A crucial part of this code is to agree a consensus on how a goal is scored. It is better that everybody gets the description of the goal wrong than one person gets it right and the rest get a b******ing from their editor for getting it wrong. If everybody gets it wrong then anybody pulled up by an angry editor has a defence of sorts by saying that everybody else was wrong too. Many the happy reporter who knew his editor wouldn't be home in time to watch Match of the Day.

If there was any doubt over a goalscorer the Press Association man would adjudicate. It's his job to file goal flashes to his office, from where the goalscorer's name and time of goal will be dispersed across the world. You have to make sure your report tallied with him.

Some will go out on a limb and decide they had seen something different to everybody else. Said journalist would be questioned by his sports desk as to why he had named a different goalscorer to the Press Association. More often than not the reporter would cede with the words: "You better have it right because we don't want to be the only paper in the world that has decided we have seen something the rest of the world hasn't" ringing in his ears.

Another unwritten law that very, very few choose to break is the law that operates in the press conference for the 'Mondays'. Post match Saturdays involve two press conferences. The first is really for the benefit of those reporters filing that evening whose reports will appear in the Sunday papers. The second is for the daily papers. They want something different, a more newsy, personality-focused piece perhaps something that moves on from the match itself.

Once the Mondays’ press conference is finished reporters will gather and agree on 'the line' that they will all use for Monday. Stray from that or break embargo by divulging some of the Monday press conference to a Sunday is met with a large amount of disapproval and, perhaps, exclusion from all the benefits derived from the code that operates in press boxes.

Sometimes all out war can literally break out in the tight environs of the press box.

I've seen two weary hacks almost go toe-to-toe over one's failure to share a post-match quote from Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan. Now, Jordan is the most entertaining and reliable rent-a-quote personality in the game, but I wasn't prepared to be drawn into this one - it was only Palace v Barnsley after all.

A colleague of mine loves to recall an international incident over a cool pint (you can source him as a southerner - us northerners drink warm ale).

Covering an international match between Wales and Romania back in the Nineties he claims that the hacks on the Welsh beat were left mystified when minutes before half time the Romanian scufflers upped and left. All became clear at half-time when the Welsh arrived in the press room to discover that the Romanians had eaten every single sandwich and emptied the tea urn. When one Romanian journalist asked for directions back to Cardiff airport a local hack barked back: "You found the sandwiches by yourself, find the airport by yourself."

At another international match the home nation pack arrived in the press box to discover that the foreign journalists had arrived early and bagged all the best seats by putting their notepads and laptops down before disappearing into the press room. If you can't guess the nationality of those foreign reporters think swimming pool, sun bed and towel.