The exquisite vanity of the male sports writer

A good place to catch the highbrow sports journalist in action is the ‘Pseuds Corner’ column of PrivateEye, where he (and it’s always a ‘he’) regularly appears. Here you will discover that to contemplate Manchester City’s mid-season loss of form is ‘like sitting in Rome in 410 and watching the Visigoths pour over the horizon’, warm to the spectacle of Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk ‘striding about the place like the 17th Earl of Egham with a quiver of pheasants over one shoulder’, or learn that the mothers of the former Everton manager Sean Dyche and the French national coach Didier Deschamps both worked in the textile industry, which may explain their sons’ ‘common emphasis on durability and craft over flamboyance and novelty’.

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Who are the highbrow sports journalists? Well, Jonathan Wilson and Barney Ronay of the Guardian and James Gheerbrant of the Times – responsible for the extracts above – would certainly be found on the top table at their annual dinner, and there would doubtless be a place for the Guardian’s Jonathan Liew and Geoff Lemon too.

Other sports do get a look-in besides football: Liew, for example, could recently be found proposing that Nathan Aspinall, an also-ran in the World Darts Championship, was ‘a tower of pixels, a mannequin, an uncredited extra, the silent letter in the middle of a word’, while Lemon weighed in with a bravura account of the Indian fast bowler Jasprit Bumrah sprinting to the crease with ‘arms working stiffly up and down like a man drowning kittens in a bucket’.

The curious, or perhaps not so curious, thing about the above passages is how little they tell you about the sportsman or situation they purport to describe.