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It's extremely difficult to describe interestingly what happens on the pitch. Thousands of journalists write millions of words every week trying to do it, so your chances of avoiding cliche are very slim. And you're trying to write fiction, not a match report.

You can have the greatest characters in the world and write beautifully, but if nothing's happening, the story falls on its face pretty quickly.

Every time you write anything, at least half your readers are going to disagree with you. A big part of sports writing is how you respond to that tension.

If you go to the ball game, you don't need to read the game story.

In all Games, there is always a tendency, particularly in the lead up to the Games when there isn't much sport to talk about, to write about things that are not sport.

In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too hard to follow.

The beauties of the game may be lost on some of us sometimes, but many children will read about football when they will read nothing else, not for realism or glamour but for romance.

'Course the world of sports takes itself way too serious. Sports writers are all high and mighty.

We are essentially in the business of telling stories. We would like to think that most of our stories are basically human stories with sports as a backdrop.