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Everyone who sits on a sofa watching 'Match of the Day' is a top soccer expert, as you know. So if you start to worry about such people reading your story and saying, 'That'd never happen' you're going to freeze up. You're writing fiction, and your characters can do whatever you need them to do.

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.

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.

The sports world is an echo chamber. All it takes is one quote from a general manager and a thousand sports columns bloom.

A cliche is like a coin that has been handled too much. Once language has been overly handled, it no longer leaves a clear imprint.

The key to any good sports story is identifying the defining moment. In football games or a boxing match, it's usually pretty obvious. But in golf, sometimes it happens on Thursday. Usually it's Sunday, but guys who don't know the game, they can miss it.

Drama happens in big cricket matches. But also in small cricket matches.

Baseball, boxing, handball - sooner or later every game gets compared to narrative, but only in football are the plays perfectly linear, drawn up with letters, and only in football is the field itself lined like a sheet of notebook paper.

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.