Twenty years ago there were two pages of sport a day in the broadsheets. A third felt like a guilty pleasure. Now it is more like 13. Far from being tucked between the weather and the TV guide, the sports section now stands alone on several days a week, slipping out from the rest of the paper without a businessman or politician in sight.

Surely, with all this reporting at his fingertips, both the fan and the coach are ideally placed to make informed judgments about players? Not necessarily. In fact, these ‘extra’ ten pages of sports-writing often comprise not match reports but opinion pieces and personality-driven ‘inside chat’. The articles about the post-match press conferences now take up almost as much space as the reports about the matches themselves.

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