History

5 pieces on this desk, from the 2014-15 season, under 3 bylines. The longest of them runs 860 words.

2 of them were written for this edition of the paper; the rest came out of the archive of the old site and were re-set, not rewritten — the wording, the numbers and the dates are the ones that were filed at the time.

Where the club came from. A franchise that moved cities, changed leagues, changed names and changed buildings has a past that explains a surprising amount of its present, from the shape of its rivalries to the reason certain numbers are not worn. This desk treats that past as a subject in its own right rather than as colour for somebody else’s piece.

History is the desk where sourcing matters most and is hardest, because a half-remembered story repeated often enough starts to look like a fact. The rule here is that a claim about what happened is attributed to something a reader can go and check, and that where the record is contested the piece says who contests it. Legend is described as legend, not smuggled in as reporting.