The Super Bowl’s surprise result left sports journalists everywhere in the lurch

A finely crafted on-the-whistle piece remains one of the hardest skills to master – and one of the most painful to scrap when a game doesn’t go the way you’d imagined

Kansas City Chiefs lift the Lombardi Trophy after Super Bowl win (AFP/Getty)

The quarterback who never makes mistakes made one, and the team that never does either made him pay.

That was the introduction to a report from a far-flung alternate universe where the San Francisco 49ers held on and won the Super Bowl in Miami on Sunday. Unfortunately for them – and for sports writers around the globe – they did not.

Reporting on live sport presents a number of unique challenges: the speed of the action, the perceived importance of the event, the tightness of an on-the-whistle deadline. The Super Bowl’s US time zone adds another for journalists like me; bleary-eyed, Red Bull-fuelled, not lucky enough to be in position at the Hard Rock Stadium, but on Kensington High Street instead.

But above all, it is sport’s inherent and ingrained unpredictability that fascinates and frustrates sports journalists. It is, of course, why we were fans in the first place.

In this case, it was quarterback Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs coming back from the dead, with 21 points in five fourth-quarter minutes, to win a Super Bowl they looked destined to lose.

As the confetti rained down and the 49ers looked helplessly around at each other, wondering just how they had just lost something they had for so long assumed would be theirs, those in the press box, and others further afield, were doing much the same, gazing helplessly at their laptop screens and the burning wreckage of their pre-written accounts of proceedings.

The temptation is to try and salvage what’s there, to root through the charred remains and recover something – anything – you can still use. In my experience the ctrl+A, delete approach is far more effective, condemning that original piece to join the countless others, lost forever after being tied to the maddeningly random fate of the bounce of a ball or the swing of a bat.

It is, of course, not the end of the world. Experienced match reporters take such things in their stride – it is part of the job, after all, and one more than worth paying for the privilege of reporting on sport for a living.

In this new age of digital-first reporting, a finely crafted on-the-whistle piece remains one of the industry’s hardest skills to master, and the finest things to enjoy as a reader.

Just remind me of that next time I have to ctrl+A, delete.

Yours,

Ben Burrows

Sports Editor