Friday, March 05, 2010

Ben Clissit leaves the Guardian

I didn't realise until the other day - when my copy of Private Eye arrived - that Ben Clissit, sports editor of the Guardian for a number of years, had left the paper. I know Ben very, very slightly: we were at the same Hertfordshire comprehensive, Ben a year or two below me, though the only time we've come into direct contact since then was in the late Nineties, when he was assistant sports editor and I spoke to him when trying to interest his paper in a story.

The reason for this small reminiscence is, in part, that Ben's elder brother Phillip actually started a chess club at our school: and while I don't recall Ben playing for our school side (one of the country's best, in our day, outside the fee-paying sector) I'm pretty sure I'm right in thinking that he shared, and shares, his brother's interest in the game. Which would make his departure from the paper a small, but not insignificant, item of bad news for chess. (Most news in chess is small but not insignificant. And most of it is bad.)

Anyway, a colleague thinks that the Linares scores may not have been in the paper, not the day he looked anyway. Might be something, maybe nothing. Might be connected to Ben's departure, maybe not. One small item of news, maybe one small item of not-news-any-more.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes that's right, I don't recall seeing any of the Linares results in the Grauniad, whereas the newspaper had the previous big tournament's results every day.

As you say, probably not a coincidence.

Grauniad reader.