Non-league / Gary Boswell / 04 March 2009 / 2 Comments

Betfair's non-league football correspondent Gary Boswell muses on events leading up to the inaugural Sports Betting Writer Of The Year Award.

It's easy enough to be cynical about award ceremonies. You only have to show me that two minute clip of Kate Winslet again to convince me that a flamethrower would be a handy thing to have access to on such occasions.

But there's the Spike Milligan moment at the BAFTAs that still brings a tear to my eye and Julian Clary showing Jonathan Ross how insulting celebrities should be done. Suddenly when I think of them I'm back in favour of holding them.

And there's no denying that it feels good to receive the applause of your peers so that my shortlisting for the inaugural Sports Journalist's Association Betting Writer of The Year Award - to be celebrated at the Brewery, Moorgate on Monday evening - is a proud moment for The Boz. Therefore all cynicism will be tucked away for the evening. I've even engaged Kate Winslet's speechwriter - just in case!

Having been a poet for most of my writing life, I started writing about betting at the turn of the millennium simply because the poetry had stopped being fun. Betting used to be my release from the frustrations of the elusive Muse but suddenly it became the thing I wanted to write about and in seeking to find a professional outlet that would enable me to carry on making a living as a writer, I started writing about betting on non-league football.

Betfair turned up around the same time to revolutionise the whole betting experience. I became a user immediately but with no writing outlets at that time, I continued writing for all sorts of publications, doing columns for The Football Gazette, When Saturday Comes and Shoot Magazine as well as my main gig with the Non-League paper.

Starting in 2007 to write for the newly launched betting.betfair.com site was for me a major breakthrough. Not just because I was now published in the place where I did most of my betting but also because I was now working with an editor for whom my idiosynchratic poet's ways and non-journalistic background were a positive rather than a negative.

Writers are nothing without an empathetic editor and here was one who did not red pen my wordsmithing - who actually encouraged it. In addition to non-league football he wanted me to write about tennis and handball and any damned sport I knew anything about (I shall go to the grave with a smile on my face in the knowledge that I was Betfair's table tennis correspondent!) and here also was a publication I think perfectly suited to my style.

The butchery that goes on at newspapers is absent from the way betting.betfair.com does its publishing and it strikes me as wholly appropriate that the organisation that revolutionised the betting experience is busy now redesigning the publishing one. The instant public accessing of a writer's archives is a beauty of writing for the web that newspapers will never be able to match.

So I guess I'm very much a sports betting writer now. Along with Derek McGovern and Kevin Pullein who are also on this inaugural shortlist and who both had a big influence on me in my early days. The first because he simply doesn't have to try to make me laugh and who showed the world that betting didn't have to be po-faced.

The second because he's a tipster who shows that there's no substitute for hard work in making sure you achieve positive results. He showed me how to stop the losses at a critical stage of my punting
career.

It'll be no kind of shame to finish runner up behind either of those guys nor the Guardian's Dan Roebuck, the Mirror's Betting Girls - Price and Curle - and the Racing Post's Steve Palmer who had an astounding year's tipping in 2008.

My nomination is based on pieces I wrote for betting.betfair.com highlighting Nigel Clough's Burton Albion as a credible pre-season dark horse for the Blue Square Premier, the winner of the women's French Open Tennis tournament (I picked Ivanovic to win her first Slam) and a piece I wrote for the Non-League Today newspaper.

All in a day's work as they say. And Monday night I get to travel to London as Betfair's shortlisted writer to say hello to the Capital City which I shall treat as a foretaste to another day I'm looking forward to, which is covering the 2012 Olympic Table Tennis final - which I'm reliably predicting will not be won by a Brit!

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