Stephen Jones, appointed by the Sunday Times in 1983, stood down this week. Here he reflects on the highs and lows of reporting on a sport he still loves

Jones gets an earful from All Blacks fans in Auckland, New Zealand, where he was voted the fourth-most-hated person in the country

‘Right. You are on!” The words of David Robson, then sports editor of The Sunday Times — and still a guiding light. Modesty should forbid me from quoting what Robson wrote later of his decision to employ me as rugby correspondent in a book about his life in journalism. But it doesn’t. “It was a brilliant appointment,” he wrote.

I was overwhelmed with joy. I was joining in the era of journalists such as Jilly Cooper and Nigella Lawson, and if I never strayed into the world of bonkbusters or cooking, then I was still in awe. Before I even found my feet, the great Brian Glanville, our football correspondent, was in like a shot. “Who needs Rollerball when we have rugby union,” he wrote, comparing the futuristic savagery of that film with rugby. God bless his happy memory.

I was so keen to get started that I even missed my own farewell drinks party thrown for me by colleagues at Rugby World, my first employer. I had arrived to interview for that magazine fresh from a wholly catastrophic academic career at Oxford Polytechnic. I was the only applicant with no experience. The final panel voting went 2-2 between me and another applicant but the editor, David Norrie, like me in his early twenties, was given the casting vote. I have repaid him handsomely over the years of our friendship, by calling him Polecat.

Journalist Stephen 'Steve' Jones sending his prose over the phone during a rugby match.

With another deadline looming, Jones files his words over the phone to a copytaker in April 1984

In my first game as rugby correspondent (the 1983 John Player Cup final at Twickenham, Bristol v Leicester) I was as nervous as many kittens and armed with the usual Sunday Times copy deadline. It was — and still is — terrifyingly short; in fact, if you try to explain how short it is, it probably means that you have already missed it. As one of my best sports editors used to say on the telephone, encouragingly: “Jonesy. Where is your ******* copy?”

And in that first game I covered a fellow former pupil of Bassaleg School in Newport, South Wales, who took a winning hand. No less than 42 years later, having travelled around the world together and sat next to each other at literally hundreds of Test matches, Stuart Barnes and I are still arguing. And no, I never miss any of his columns, ever. He rates the Harlequins and England fly half Marcus Smith, apparently.

We had been the first newspaper to regularly send our rugby correspondent on the Lions tours. The legendary Vivian Jenkins, one of my predecessors, was already a Lions veteran. Thank goodness, he was still active enough for me to get to know him, glorious man. He used to take a telephonist with him on tours, to transmit his copy back to the UK. I never really got round to asking the bosses if it was OK to take a telephonist. It’s been hard enough trying to move myself up the aircraft, pleading that I am 6ft 4in with back pain. It rarely worked. You rotters.

There have been so many job highlights and, being rugby, a fistful of frustrations. I remember when a Press Association story one day in the 1980s announced that Nigel Melville, a scrum half who emerged from Yorkshire, was to be the new England captain. As soon as I read the story I rang him. “Nige. Well done. Fancy a beer?”

Within 15 minutes we sat down together somewhere in the City, where he was working. We had a few beers and a great chat and have been friends ever since. Somehow, I don’t see that working with Maro Itoje now. He is a magnificent player and a magnificent man in all respects. But “Maro. Fancy a few pints?” Somehow, you feel the reply might be in the negative. The gap between players and journalists is widening all the time.

But also, the sheer panoply of the sport has been such a privilege. I have covered matches in Invercargill, deep in New Zealand, South Island, next stop the South Pole; in tropical far north Queensland, Australia; driven across beautiful Fiji in the dead of night, avoiding livestock; found a welcome in Soweto and other townships prior to the emancipation of the bulk of South Africa’s voters. South Africa is a magnificent country that staggers the body and the mind and the senses.

I have been arrested by the Securitate in Romania and by the Carabinieri in Sicily, escaped their trumped-up charges like a breeze. I gloried in rugby and society in Argentina and France, where rugby is monstrous and magnificent. I’ve covered ten sports for our papers, including more than 30 Open Championship golf tournaments.

I’ve been voted into fourth place in a newspaper poll of New Zealand’s most-hated. Above me were Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, two French intelligence agents who blew up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour.

However, it is not the places, but the people. The friendship of colleagues from other papers and other media outlets has been fabulous. You all know who you are and how fanatically we treasure our bonds on tours, and elsewhere. The most-toured is Dave Rogers, the photographer. My blood brother. He made a Lions tour 45 years ago and was lively as ever in Australia last tour.

Nor am I sure if other sports could throw up, say, a more wonderful man than Dudley Wood, former RFU secretary; or Wayne Barnes, the man who proved that, after all, rugby could be refereed; or Jonathan Davies, recently made a CBE after helping to raise more than £50million for the Velindre Cancer Centre in Wales, where my dearest friend, Steve Bale, was treated, before his death.

And what of Jill Douglas, the superlative broadcaster, who has helped to drive the mighty fundraising efforts surrounding the stricken Doddie Weir; or Ed Slater, the great looming Leicester and Gloucester lock fighting against motor neurone disease — or anyone who has kept rugby’s essential spirit alive. I still believe in that spirit. Battered though it is.

One of the joys has been the recent boom in women’s rugby. For many seasons we were the only paper to take women’s rugby seriously. The joyous reaction of the World Cup-winning teams of 2014 and 2025 but also, in parallel, of all the greats who wore the England jersey as heroic amateurs — Gill Burns, Emma Mitchell, Maxine Edwards and so many others — brought tears to the eye. The atmosphere at the stadiums for England 2025 was electric.

And at the Times group, Chris Smith, acknowledged as the greatest sports photographer of all time, still has to be persuaded to tell us his stories of him and Muhammad Ali; my friends Brough Scott, Nick Pitt and Lauren St John, our former golf correspondent — I would number these among journalist greats in any field.

At that same group, past and present, what a fabulous honour to work alongside Nick Cain, Chris Jones, Rob Cole, Alex Lowe, Owen Slot, John Westerby, Peter O’Reilly, Mark Palmer, Alasdair Reid, Mike Atherton, Steve James, Jonathan Northcroft, Martin Samuel, Marc Aspland and Simon Wilde, so too with our columnists Lawrence Dallaglio, Sam Warburton, Sean Fitzpatrick. And so too, to work with the sports-desk hierarchies and our saviours — the deskmen and sub editors who stepped in in the unlikely event that I made a mistake. Or three. And finally, Lucy Dupuis, the finest, most scary but most efficient and most loyal desk manager anyone ever had.

From his first days as a freelancer for The Sunday Times, our rugby correspondent has written with a voice that has both enthralled — and, he admits, infuriated. Here are some of his best bits

And then there is David Walsh. He was pilloried by fans of Lance Armstrong. We paid up hundreds of thousands in court after Armstrong won an initial case. David kept going like only he can, eventually exposed the cheat Armstrong for what he was, and all his Tour de France trophies turned, metaphorically, to dust. I worked with David often in the years he was fretting away on the story. When I heard that Armstrong had caved in, that we had won hands down, I was in Tenby on holiday. I remember walking around North Beach for hours, in sheer joy. I love sport, but journalism I love the most.

Rugby? Crazier than ever. Way too slow to make decisions. There are no more powerful contenders to win the World Cup now than when the competition began in 1987 and that is a disgrace on the face of the sport. We are still waiting for the next rank of rugby countries to come to thrill us, via proper funding.

Too much of the support has been removed from the community game. And also, it was ridiculous to impose the same set of playing laws on amateurs as those which apply in the professional game. People wonder why fewer players now take up the game and last until the end, as they used to. It is because the laws which apply to Big Joe or Big Josephine, ageing players who play for fun at the out grounds, also have to apply to Antoine Dupont, playing sport on a different field on a different planet.

And finally, dear England. Too many excuses over too many seasons. There is optimism at the moment but I am still not at all sure that England will be as dominant as they should be by the next World Cup. The present players have some steel, Steve Borthwick is on the right lines. But my perspective of the years reveals that almost-there England have underachieved for way too long. When we were working on our special World Cup triumph supplement at dawn in a Sydney hotel in 2003, we never realised that there would not be another for at least 24 years.

But at least now, freedom from the deadlines. This is not to say that any job is harder than yours. But the last five Saturday matches of the 2023 World Cup, for instance, ended at around five or six minutes to nine in the evening, English time, frighteningly late for deadlines. The outcome of none of the five was decided until a couple of minutes before they ended, if then; so you had no idea how to lead your report until the final whistle blew. Panic. Please lads, try not to be late, the desk begged.

Jones receives the Sports Journalists’ Association 2016 rugby journalist of the year award from fellow rugby writer Peter Jackson. Jones also won the award in 2014

It was the same for the final, between South Africa and New Zealand. We sat in the traditional semi-panic. Barnes was typing away, filing via laptop. I was filing to Sarah, the angelic copytaker, in Yorkshire. We were both checking things with Polecat, who was watching on TV. We were seeing if anything could take shape, praying that the referee would not hold up the game for the television match official. We didn’t care who won, as long as the game ended. But seconds before the final whistle, it was still in the balance. What’s the intro?

The whistle finally blew; the Springboks won. Seconds later I signed off with Sarah; Barnes triumphantly added his last words. He sat back and punched the air, preparing to press the transmission button. As he did so, someone in the corporate seats way above us dropped a full pint. It fell out of the sky, smashed and soaked Stuart’s laptop, which was immediately dead to the world. The expression on the Barnes face was something to chill the blood, something I have never forgotten.

It has been hairy, harsh, glorious, spectacularly privileged. Some days I won few friends but, frankly, I never gave a stuff. The job was far too serious to worry about that. It has been a lifetime privilege. I feel I have carried myself modestly — I always offered to replace the carpet after tramping up to receive my prizes at the Sports Journalism Association Awards ceremonies.

Rugby is a fine arena in which to work. It is now a little battered, needs a second and third wind in the pro and amateur ranks. But in a sense the rugby was secondary. To be a Sunday Times journalist, to fulfil all my ambitions since the age of seven — that is just above the world.

Stephen Jones will continue to be a contributor to The Sunday Times

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Thrills, friendships and deadline panic: my 42 years as rugby correspondent