Abstract
Long before the Premiership was just a distant dream in the minds of greedy chairmen looking to make even more money from their football clubs, I was scuffling around Wormwood Scrubs on Sunday mornings playing for the great Nine Elms Dynamos. One morning when we were getting a real spanking, a long-haired centre forward scored yet another goal and ran back past me as I was lying face down in the mud: “You didn't get a picture of that one, did you?”
I was working for The Observer at the time and it made me realise just how many people read the Sunday papers, especially the sports pages. I was lucky to work in that era, before the all-seeing eye of Murdoch's Sky cameras. The great Geoff Nicholson, sports editor when I first arrived at St Andrews Hill, gave me my head and would use whatever I came back with, no matter what the sport was.
To have that trust was fantastic. I was lucky the agencies then were not terrific and not much came in over the wires. But what Geoff was really doing was saying: “This is what we have seen today. This is our view of what happened.” The writers – Hugh McIlvanney and Chris Brasher among them – always had this freedom. For a photographer it was rare indeed.
When Geoff went back to writing, mainly about cycling and rugby, Peter Corrigan replaced him and luckily for me continued the philosophy. I remember going to Hungary for an England game where they scored three goals. I was at the wrong end for all the goals and sold Peter the idea of running a photograph of Peter Shilton, the unemployed goalkeeper at the other end. That wouldn't happen today.
The newspapers have to have on their back pages what everybody saw last night on Sky or Match of the Day – which, of course, means all the papers look the same. I used to read all the match reports, right down the leagues. I was an expert in everything that happened over the weekend, even in Scotland, but now I don't read any match reports at all. I know what happened before I go to bed either from the radio or TV.
Today there are so many photographers sending pictures in via their laptops from the side of the pitch, somebody will get the picture everybody is looking for. Of a bite, if not a goal. It must be so hard to make a name as a sports photographer now – it no longer seems to matter who took it, as long as it is of the right incident.
When the Liverpool player Luis Suarez bit his Chelsea opponent Branislav Ivanovic it was the story of the weekend. No photographer got a picture of it, so the papers used blurred pictures grabbed from television. They looked rough on the page, but the readers will forgive you if it is of the correct incident, because most have already seen the incident on television or online.
So what is the point of having match reports and photographs at all? It would take a brave sports editor to ignore the TV, and show only what their photographer saw. But as circulations are dropping, surely we should try to be different? When I was picture editor of The Guardian in the early 80s, The Independent was very strong with its photography. They had very few ads and great printing, and could use their pictures across eight columns or all the way down the front. Photography sold their paper.
My great fear at the time as we invested in new colour presses was that the Indy would continue printing in black and white and look really cool. But looking at it now, you would never think it cared about photography in the first place. All the subs at The Guardian were so scared to run anything in black and white because millions had been spent on the new presses and they worried about what the editor would think.
The irony is you go to any editor's house and there are black and white photographs all over the walls, so you know what they really like. Now I am not saying we should all go back to black and white, I've lost that one … but why just copy TV? There must be room for a paper showing us something different. If TV is the first reporter, isn't there some room for a poet?
And with the return of photographs, perhaps we can also have a sports feature. We have more pages than ever and they all seem to be live reports with action pictures. I made my name with portfolios featuring some minor and obscure sports as well as those from Wembley and Twickenham. Table tennis was a favourite, but underwater hockey was a real challenge. Surely we need to show readers something they don't see on TV?
I once covered an FA cup game at Fisher Athletic in London's East End, a battle with Bristol City. It was a desperate day, dark and wet, but a bald-headed goalkeeper ran out on to the pitch from the dressing rooms. There's my picture, I thought. Eventually I got a good photograph of him kicking the ball out of his hands. It was made up of a triangle of his white shorts, his shining bald head and the white ball, and when I got it back to The Observer the subs had a competition to come up with the best caption, which can make or break a photograph.
The winner was: “Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well.”