Remembering those grim dark days when journos had to work

Brendan O’Brien, Prestbury Park
THANKS be to God!
Day three of the Cheltenham Festival and the wi-fi is finally working. This news won’t make any back pages back home but it is by far and away the week’s standout result for the segment of the press corps confined to the overflow media centre.
Forget Ruby’s hat-trick, Henry de Bromhead’s Sizing double or Paul Townend’s breakthrough success, the big cheer among the fourth estate at Prestbury Park came when laptops were switched on this morning.
It’s hard to convey accurately just how problematic it is to do a job at the festival without the reassuring presence of Google and the dozens of specialist racing websites at your fingertips.
For two days there we were transported back to the grim old days of sports journalism by scavaging for A4 press releases, rifling through old copies of the Racing Post and - shock, horror - using a smidgin of actual imagination.
The scars will be some time healing!
All that was missing were those ancient, gargantuan typewriters, the suffocating whiff of Sweet Aftons and a line of phone booths with sweating reporters screaming their copy down the line to the once mighty army of copytakers.
Regrettably, there is little that can be done about the overflow area itself - a freezing tent squeezed into the Guinness Village at the back of one of the main stands where ‘Galway Girl’ has been on an insufferable loop since Tuesday.
Today being Paddy’s Day, there is unlikely to be any respite on that score just yet but, to all intents and purposes, Ireland’s national holiday arrived a day early in the Cotswolds thanks to yesterday’s incredible run of results.
Forgive the earlier mini-rant, everyone wearing the green access-all-areas badge here this week knows - or should know - exactly how fortunate we are to be witnessing such incredible scenes at first-hand.
Eyes rolled upwards in mock disgust as Wednesday rolled on and the day’s workload mounted with every Irish victory but it was a transparent act, for the most part, as it dawned that history was being made and it was us who would chronicle it.
Add in the first day’s heroics from Ruby Walsh, Willie Mullins and Henry de Bromhead’s opening gambit from Sizing Australia and we are already well-stocked for material when it comes to recounting that magical March in 2011.
Now, fingers crossed this bloody email works or it's back to the Dark Ages again

 

Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/fDcEZ0AMEEA/post.aspx

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