Champion’s League Final, Liverpool versus AC Milan playing in Athens. We have four photographers on the pitch, one in the stands with the editing team in Reuters offices in London and Rome. Our first fully captioned and cropped action picture moves to clients within three minutes of the kick-off.

For anyone like me who remembers the days of film, runners and analogue lines when  competitive coverage of a soccer match meant being able to file one in-focus print on a drum transmitter over the phone line by half time, the technology we use now is truly liberating, particularly for the editors. The massively increased speed of transmission allows the story of the game to be told in a more rounded way rather than just as a series of isolated moments, through the use of supporting frames, alternative crops and different angles.

But the “moments” or “plays” are essential to sports coverage, it is the action pictures,  the goals, the fouls, the home run being hit which define the coverage. It is very reassuring when two of your photographers on opposite sides of the pitch nail it, bang on.

Hats off to Messrs. Pfaffenbach and Noble for these eloquent reminders that it is the person holding the camera and not the technology that makes great pictures.