[1][2] Among the sports he covered in addition to cricket were rugby union, boxing, rowing, golf, show jumping and the Olympics.
According to his Independent obituarist: "Readers were astonished and amused – and some bemused – by a hilarious wise-cracking correspondent with a unique style."
Covering the England cricket tour of Australia in 1986-7, following a string of poor performances in the run-up to the first Test, he famously wrote that there were only three things wrong with the English team: "They can’t bat, they can’t bowl and they can’t field."
When England went on to comfortably win the Test series, he ended his piece summarising the tour with the pithy: "Right quote, wrong team.
[3] He wrote of David Gower, the English batsman, that he was "so laid back, he’s almost horizontal"; on Shane Warne’s delivery to dismiss Mike Gatting in 1993: "How anyone can spin a ball the width of Gatting boggles the mind"; on the bowler Angus Fraser running in "like a man who has got his braces caught on the sightcreen" (sic); on Merv Hughes, the Australian bowler, "He swings it both ways through the air (and that’s just his stomach) … his coiffeur appears to have been entrusted to an inebriated sheep shearer somewhere in the outback.