“I don’t dwell on football. Also take a look at other sports,” hockey enthusiast Gerd van der Mark wrote from Not on the Messages page last week. He wasn’t the only one. VolkskrantA reader who complained about the newspaper’s lack of interest, for example, in the Dutch cricket team’s good performance against Ireland in the Premier League, or the Dutch volleyball teams’ performance in the Nations League in Rimini.
“There appears to be structure,” according to reader Ton Keetels from Eerde. It is also remarkable that the “evening matches for one sport are still being reviewed in tomorrow’s newspaper, and it seems that the closing date for other sports cannot be met,” according to Hope Molinar from The Hague.
Mark Van Drel, Chief Sports EditorAnd He answers: “The trend in sports is clear. There are more and more matches and more often than not those duels can be followed on television or the Internet. Anyone who has enjoyed a match of hockey, volleyball or cricket, in person or on television, often enjoys reading about such Duel. But with about thirty pages per week, the space for sports is limited. Message about the vast majority of matches de Volkskrant Not.
These factors play a role in our choices: popularity of the sport (football more than volleyball), impact on society (European football more than European hockey), history of events (the Tour de France over Giro Rosa), newspaper tradition (chess, but not motorsport), how well the Dutch do (more women than men), sporting level (more professional than amateur sport), and whether our reporters can be present (more often indoors than outside), access to key players (interviewers or not) ) and match time (weekdays print time is 10.45pm, with a 15-minute delay for important football matches, Friday at 8.45pm).
Moreover, we not only want to win matches; After all, they can be viewed or reviewed everywhere for free. We prefer telling stories that increase knowledge of sports and hopefully make it more interesting to follow sports. Our play-off in the European Football Championship on Thursday was a case in point.
