By ANTON RIPPON So, Arsenal – and the rest – won’t be competing in a European Super League after all. But the Gunners do seem to have the knack of being around when new ideas are floated. When they hosted Sheffield United in a First Division match on Saturday, 22 January 1927, only three weeks […]
By Anton Rippon SJA member and 1988 sports photographer of the year Michael Steele has been named one of three finalists for the 2020 World Athletics photograph of the year award. Steele, a veteran sports photographer with more than three decades of experience, joined Getty Images in 1999 where he specialises in athletics coverage. From […]
By ANTON RIPPON World Athletics will present an award for the best athletics photograph of the year at this year’s virtual World Athletics Awards 2020 on Saturday 5 December. Any professional photographer who has attended an athletics event in 2020 can take part. Photographers are requested to submit one photograph by email to waphotoaward@worldathletics.org, and […]
By ANTON RIPPON IN more ways than one, Sunday’s 40th running of the London Marathon will be different from the previous 39. Only four photographers have received press accreditation for the 2020 race. Mark Shearman will not be one of them, which is a great pity, since the 77-year-old freelancer from Surrey had hitherto covered […]
By ANTON RIPPON Former television sports presenter Steve Lee has died suddenly at the age of 68. For a generation of viewers in the Midlands, Lee was the face of sport in the region before he went on to cover football and county cricket for Sky Sports. He worked on the 1998 World Cup for […]
By ERIC BROWN With British sport trying to cope during the current Covid-19 pandemic, award-winning author Anton Rippon has gone back 80 years to highlight the challenges of playing on during the first full year of World War 2 . Four months had passed since Britain declared war on Germany and citizens uneasily waited for […]
Mike Ingham, for many years the voice of football on BBC radio, has written his autobiography, reviewed by ANTON RIPPON. On 29 May 1985, Mike Ingham was preparing to commentate on the European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels. Ingham and his BBC colleague Peter Jones were waiting to […]
By ANTON RIPPON Steve Bloomer was football’s first super star. He scored a record number of goals for England, endorsed football kit including “the boot that never fails to score”, and when the Queen Mary set out on her maiden voyage his image was part of a giant mural in one of the […]
By ANTON RIPPON It is getting on for a year since the newly-appointed editor gave me the news: after 20 years, my freelance contract with the Derby Telegraph – Evening Telegraph when I started out – had come to an end. Budgets and all that. Being named Midlands Newspaper Columnist of the Year for 2017 […]
By ANTON RIPPON The 2019 press pack who followed England women to the FIFA World Cup provided a watershed moment, both in terms of national print coverage and the number of female journalists. The tournament has become one of the world’s biggest sporting events and as the women’s game enters a new era, it will […]
