Nic Negrepontis
Nic Negrepontis is a sports reporter at Nine’s Wide World of Sports, with a brief built around live match coverage and detailed analysis across the AFL season, cricket and American sports. His work prioritises the flow of games and the pressure points that decide them, rather than just the final score. A long tenure in digital sports media and club environments underpins a style that blends real-time updates with clear, accessible summaries.
AFL finals and big-game coverage
AFL is the centre of Negrepontis’ current output, particularly high-stakes finals and grand finals. He runs “AS IT HAPPENED” live blogs for major finals, tracking momentum swings play-by-play as elimination and qualifying games unfold. In coverage of a finals clash between Geelong and Carlton, he follows the Blues’ run from a “miracle” narrative into a comprehensive defeat, emphasising how the game turns as the Cats dominate.
In another finals match involving Fremantle and Hawthorn, he reports on an injured player in tears and a Hawks upset, using injury, emotion and scorelines together to show how quickly a qualifying final can flip.
His grand final writing leans on the same match-flow instinct, but with more space for context. In a recent premiership decider between Brisbane and Fremantle, he highlights a burst of four unanswered goals in four minutes and sets that sequence up as the defining moment in an “all-time grand final”. The piece walks through the scoreboard in detail, contrasting missed chances with Brisbane’s accuracy to explain how a third consecutive premiership is secured. Across these AFL articles he consistently anchors narrative in the timing and impact of major plays, rather than in broad commentary, which makes the work useful when the detail of how a game was won matters.
Cricket analysis and Test concerns
Cricket is a second major strand of Negrepontis’ reporting, and his work often centres on structural concerns within the national Test side. In his piece on Ricky Ponting’s reaction to an Australian collapse against Bangladesh, he frames the innings inside a demanding upcoming schedule of 20 Tests in 12 months and highlights the fragility of the batting order. He details how Jake Weatherald, Marnus Labuschagne and Cameron Green fall cheaply before lunch, using dismissals, ball counts and scores to show the extent of the top-order problems.
He notes that Warner and Khawaja have retired and that Labuschagne and Green are out of form, tying experience gaps to the immediate failures in Darwin.
The same article makes space for Ponting’s technical critique, quoting his view that the top order keeps making “the same mistakes” and that players are clouded by technique at the crease.
Negrepontis sets these quotes against concrete match figures, including Australia’s first-innings total of 198 and Steve Smith’s 71, to show that isolated resistance does not cover deeper batting issues. Elsewhere, his cricket work includes list-based or feature content, such as a piece on Test cricket’s 10,000-run scorers and an AFL “Team of the Week” segment packaged within broader coverage.
Together, these articles show a preference for combining statistical detail, historical markers and present-day selection debates in his cricket coverage.
Multi-code perspective and American sports
Negrepontis’ brief at Wide World of Sports explicitly includes American sports alongside AFL and cricket, giving his coverage a multi-code base. That specialisation sits on more than a decade in sports media, including work with professional clubs and leagues in other roles before joining the current masthead. His background includes content roles with AFL organisations and the inaugural AFLW season, as well as years producing and managing digital sports content for a major radio network. That experience with multiple competitions and audiences supports his ability to move between domestic codes and American leagues without changing tone or level of detail.
His public profiles also link him to AFL-focused publications and broadcasts, where he has combined writing and on-air roles. A guest appearance on a sports radio program as an AFL Nation and AFL Record journalist shows him discussing the state of AFL umpiring, indicating a comfort with rules-focused topics and officiating trends.
The overlap between that work and his current reporting gives him a wider view of how coaching, administration and fan sentiment interact across different competitions.
Digital-first reporting and live formats
Negrepontis’ career has been heavily digital, and that shapes both the formats he uses and the pacing of his pieces. Before moving into his current reporting role he spent years as a sports writer and social media manager, overseeing more than 200 accounts across major codes. That work demanded short, clear, high-frequency updates, which is reflected in the way his AFL finals blogs and match wraps break games into digestible passages with score, time and key play foregrounded.
He joined Wide World of Sports in 2025 as a sports reporter, bringing that digital content experience directly into the newsroom. Since then, his pieces have consistently used live-blog structures, rolling updates and embedded commentary to follow games as they happen. When the format shifts to a more traditional match report or feature, such as the cricket analysis with Ponting or the Test run-scorers piece, he retains a focus on clear numbers, timelines and turning points rather than opinion-led columns.
The result is a portfolio that is strongest when a story needs detailed, moment-by-moment reconstruction of games in AFL and cricket, with the ability to connect those matches to broader season-long or structural narratives across multiple sports.
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.