The Super Bowl’s surprise result left sports journalists everywhere in the lurch

A finely crafted on-the-whistle piece remains one of the hardest skills to master – and one of the most painful to scrap when a game doesn’t go the way you’d imagined

Kansas City Chiefs lift the Lombardi Trophy after Super Bowl win (AFP/Getty)

The quarterback who never makes mistakes made one, and the team that never does either made him pay.

That was the introduction to a report from a far-flung alternate universe where the San Francisco 49ers held on and won the Super Bowl in Miami on Sunday. Unfortunately for them – and for sports writers around the globe – they did not.

Reporting on live sport presents a number of unique challenges: the speed of the action, the perceived importance of the event, the tightness of an on-the-whistle deadline. The Super Bowl’s US time zone adds another for journalists like me; bleary-eyed, Red Bull-fuelled, not lucky enough to be in position at the Hard Rock Stadium, but on Kensington High Street instead.