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Sport and the Press • 77

In smaller text below, details about the location and attendance of the match, the
roster for both teams, match statistics, game rating and referee were all included
prior to the written report. The presentation of the key information in this way en-
abled the report to concentrate on the drama of the event: the much lower ranked
Barnsley beating Liverpool, a team placed near the top of the Premier League. The
story began,

a famous afternoon for Barnsley ended deliriously with ladles of the stuff dreams
are made of.

The ready availability of up-to-the-minute information about the progress of
sport contests on radio, television and the Internet has arguably emphasised narrative

flourish in sport news stories over simple descriptive, play-by-play reporting. For
example, the Liverpool–Barnsley match report included detailed play descriptions in
half of the story and framed the rest around the Barnsley goalkeeper Luke Steele’s
‘stand out moments’.
The inverted pyramid style of narration, however, is not the only way a story can
be presented. A more literary approach can be achieved by leading with a seemingly
unconnected statement that cannot be understood without reading further. Richard-
son (2007) suggested that this kind of narrative tends to start with a pronoun—he,
she, it—creating a sense of anticipation for the reader who does not immediately
know to whom (or what) the pronoun refers. The more typical newspaper report,
by contrast, provides all the information the reader needs the first time a person is

mentioned. For example, following a controversy around the eligibility of sprinter
Dwain Chambers to run for England, The Sun’s front page report started, ‘Doping
scandal sprinter Dwain Chambers begged for forgiveness last night’ (Orvice 2008: 1).
The story then used the pronoun he to refer back to this information (an anaphoric
reference): ‘He will run for the UK.’ By contrast, the use of a pronoun can be more
dramatic as information is withheld until later in the narrative (a cataphoric refer-
ence). This style is discernible in a story (Malloy 2007) about Daisuke Matsuzaka, a
pitcher for the Red Sox baseball team, which began,

It wasn’t a fair fi ght.
The Red Sox paid $103 million for Daisuke Matsuzaka, who stood on the
mound last night facing the perpetually awful Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who boast
a team payroll of $24 million. (p. D5)

The identification of different narrative forms in sport news stories gives an indica-
tion of the ways that newspapers use language to construct the events they report.
The next section focuses on the ‘unique type of text’ known as the headline (Reah
1998: 13).