The former Guardian football correspondent, who has died aged 62, was crisp, prescient and transformative in his writing
It was around about 1990, long before journalists had mobile phones. Kevin McCarra, the former football correspondent of the Guardian who died from Alzheimer’s disease on Saturday aged 62, was travelling from Glasgow to cover a game at Easter Road for Scotland on Sunday when his train got stuck somewhere near Falkirk. Time passed. It became clear Kevin wasn’t going to make kick-off. Still the train didn’t move. He wasn’t going to make half-time, either.
Unable to contact his desk but knowing they had a space to fill and needed copy, he composed a piece about being on the train with frustrated fans, filed when he was finally able to disembark and somehow produced something true and insightful, and far more memorable than anything that had been written at the game itself.
