Iain Payten
Iain Payten covers rugby union for the Sydney Morning Herald, using detailed reporting and long-form storytelling to show how the sport looks from the inside. His work focuses on the people, pressures and institutions that shape the game rather than just the scoreline, and he moves easily between breaking news, analysis and deeply reported features.
Rugby union and the Wallabies
Payten’s core patch is elite rugby union, with the Wallabies and top-level competitions at the centre of his coverage. He follows national-team storylines through selection battles, coaching changes, tactical shifts and tour campaigns, often explaining what decisions mean for players and the code as a whole. His match-adjacent pieces look beyond basic summaries to examine why results matter, how squads are built and how performances reflect broader trends in the game.
Super Rugby clubs and other professional teams sit alongside the national set-up in his reporting, giving his coverage a full view of the elite pathway and the tensions between club and country.
Player stories, health challenges and life beyond the game
A defining thread in Payten’s work is a focus on what players live through off the field.
In his feature on a Wallaby who went from British and Irish Lions heroics to fighting a life-threatening illness, he sets out not just the medical crisis but its impact on family, identity and retirement from the sport. He often uses extended interviews and scene-setting detail to tell stories about injury, serious illness, mental strain and the transition out of professional rugby. These pieces give space to partners, former teammates and medical voices, and they frame welfare issues as central to understanding the modern game rather than as side notes to performance.
Rugby politics, money and the direction of the game
Beyond the pitch, Payten reports on how rugby is governed and funded. His stories track decisions by administrators, debates over competition formats, the tug-of-war for talent with rival codes and the financial pressures facing the professional tier. He covers broadcast deals, restructures and high-level reviews in a way that links boardroom choices to what supporters see on weekends. Historical references to past tours, famous series and long-running rivalries often sit inside these pieces, giving readers a sense of how current flashpoints fit into rugby’s longer story.
Reporting style and format
Payten writes in clear, direct language that is accessible to casual readers while still catering to people who follow rugby closely. His news pieces are tightly sourced and focus on fresh developments, while his feature work is more narrative, often opening with a strong scene or anecdote before broadening out into analysis. Quotes from players, coaches and officials are used to show personality and conflict rather than to fill space, and he is willing to spend time on tactical or structural detail when it illuminates why a story matters. Across formats, his coverage is distinguished by its emphasis on human stakes and by an ability to connect individual careers, crises and decisions back to the health of the sport.
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.