Returns and surprising reactions

By Martin Warrillow on Dec 3, 08 02:45 PM in General sport

Five weeks? That's almost as long as the football closed season and long enough for me to grow a new job title as assistant content editor (sport).
I feel I should apologise from my absence from the blogosphere for that length of time, a state of affairs caused by a combination of technological problems and ill health.
The former should now have been resolved, the latter is something I have to handle and which I shouldn't be troubling the reader with.
The hiatus was a shame because I had just started some hares running about the Post's new-look sports pages and had already seen some interesting replies.

Even though the space devoted to sport has dropped by over 50 per cent, there was a perception amongst some readers that the amount of coverage had actually increased.
I put this down to the fact that a lot of the national copy which was often used to fill space was ditched while we are devoting far more room to our core sports such as football, cricket and rugby.
You will have also seen some new names appearing, with our sports writers now working across all three of the company's titles, the Post, the Birmingham Mail and Sunday Mercury.
It's certainly brought a fresh look and style to our pages, as has the new 'compact' design.
As an unashamed lover of broadsheet newspapers, I was reticent about the change but even now, after little more than a month, I look in the files and it strikes me how dated and unwieldy some of the old pages look.
Both the Post sports desk and our superiors expected fireworks as a result of the changes, but not in the form they came. The overwhelming majority of phone calls and emails wondered where the previous day's racing returns had gone.
With the available space down by more than 50 per cent, something had to give and a decision had been taken that we would drop them. We did so because we didn't believe that in these days of racing websites, Ceefax and Teletext, enough readers looked in The Post for them to justify their inclusion.
We were wrong, spectacularly so and they have since been restored.
The complaints that weren't about racing returns were wondering about how our cricket coverage will look next summer.
Let's just say that with four-and-a-half months to the start of the 2009 English domestic season, so are we. Your views would be appreciated.