Intelligence in Sports Writing

Even in sports writing you can sometimes denote a sign of intelligence. Most English writers assigned to cover the Portugal-Switzerland game in the first round of Euro ‘08 just phoned it in, making no attempt to sound interested. How do you make a good story out of a game that doesn’t mean much to either team? Henry Winter, the writer for the London Telegraph, found a truly smart way: he wrote it as a study of how Scolari, the new Chelsea manager, operates. It created a whole new perspective on the game and was fun to read.