Ben Smith
Ben Smith is a sports journalist for The West Australian who uses athlete-centred storytelling to explore how competitors think and talk about high-pressure games. His coverage includes interview-led football pieces, such as “Write us off at your peril, says World Cup hero Leckie,” which turns a player’s own words into the spine of the story.
Write us off at your peril
In “Write us off at your peril, says World Cup hero Leckie,” Smith builds the piece around a defiant message from Mathew Leckie, using the quote in the headline to capture the stakes and mindset before a key match. By foregrounding that challenge - warning opponents not to underestimate the side - he places competitive psychology at the centre of the narrative rather than treating it as colour around the result.
The framing signals an interest in how confidence, doubt and external expectations shape a contest, not only the scoreline.
The headline shows Smith’s reliance on direct speech to carry impact, inviting readers into the way players talk among themselves and to the wider world. It also demonstrates his comfort writing around strong, declarative statements from athletes, letting them set the tone instead of summarising their views at arm’s length. That approach gives his work an immediacy that matches the tempo and intensity of elite sport.
World Cup hero Leckie
By describing Leckie as a “World Cup hero” in the same piece, Smith anchors his reporting in the broader career arc of the player, not just a single fixture. The label underlines Leckie’s international pedigree and past big‑tournament moments, giving readers context for why his voice carries weight in the build-up.
It shows Smith’s instinct to connect domestic or current storylines back to what athletes have already proven on the global stage.
That combination of present-tense tension and established reputation is a recurring thread in how Smith frames his subjects. He highlights both what is immediately at stake in the next game and what has already been earned through previous performances. For sources and teams he covers, this means his stories work on two levels at once: they capture the mood around a looming contest while reinforcing the long-term narrative of an athlete’s career.
4 more sports journalists.
Aaron Timms
Aaron Timms is a sports writer at The Guardian who treats sport as a way to interrogate power structures, media ecosystems and cultural currents rather than to file match reports or transfer gossip. He focuses on sports media, ownership and era‑defining stars, tracking how broadcasting, business and masculinity shape what fans see and feel. His work ranges across football, basketball, US sports media and cricket, with recurring attention to US television networks, commentators, podcasts and the “sports bros” manosphere, and to governance, regulation and money in elite football. He writes about figures such as Kylian Mbappé and Victor Wembanyama as markers of new epochs in sport. Timms has also written for The Sydney Morning Herald, Salon, The Daily Beast, The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.
Adrian Proszenko
Adrian Proszenko is distinct for treating rugby league as a year-round ecosystem, with hard-news reporting on the NRL and the off-field decisions that shape it. He is a senior rugby league reporter for The Age, covering the NRL, State of Origin and elite club competitions. His beat spans player movement, governance and the business of the sport, with frequent reporting on squad changes, injuries, judiciary outcomes, selection calls, contracts, salary cap pressure and club politics. He also covers expansion discussions, franchise bids, venue decisions, broadcast and scheduling issues, and industrial disputes. His work relies on sourced detail from coaches, agents, club officials, administrators and players, and he uses reported news, direct quotes and specific facts to explain how decisions are made and what they mean.
Andrew Wu
Andrew Wu is a sports journalist at The Age whose AFL work uses game nights, especially for big clubs, to test how well teams are built, focusing on structure, depth and pressure rather than just the score. He writes where individual star performances meet system-wide problems, asking why a side can fail even when its marquee players deliver. His match analysis treats each game as evidence in a larger case about a club’s direction, with clear, direct reporting built from player roles, match‑ups and key passages that reveal mentality and adaptability. Wu covers major codes, particularly AFL and cricket, bringing a cross‑code view of how teams manage form, fatigue and selection over long seasons. He is drawn to list balance, system integrity and whether clubs and national sides can turn talent into reliable performance with stakes beyond a single match.
Andrew van Leeuwen
Andrew van Leeuwen covers top-level motorsport with a focus on how rules, governance and competitive dynamics shape what happens on track. He writes for Speedcafe about Supercars and international series, treating officiating and regulation as core competitive factors rather than background noise. His reporting follows how race control and judicial processes influence Supercars outcomes, unpacking stewards’ calls, penalties, protests and appeals and linking them to points, grids and race results. He also runs the week-to-week Supercars beat, tracking race weekends, team form, strategy, technical changes, balance of performance shifts and the driver market. Team principals and drivers feature heavily in his coverage of car development, engineering changes and intra-team dynamics. He consistently explains Gen3 regulations, parity debates, format and calendar changes, and covers major global series through the lens of governance, commercial shifts and high-level regulatory change.