Rob Steen obituary

My friend Rob Steen, who has died of a heart attack aged 67, wrote about sport, particularly cricket, with passion and style. “He was the most irrepressible sports fan of us all,” said the Guardian rugby correspondent Rob Kitson. “He cared more about sports journalism than anyone I’ve met,” a lecturer at Brighton University, where Rob taught, told me. He was perhaps proudest of his contributions to the Guardian spanning, intermittently, from 1988 to 2006, his role as deputy sports editor of the Sunday Times in the mid-1990s, and his long relationships with Wisden Cricketer and Cricinfo. He also wrote accomplished biographies of David Gower (1995) and Desmond Haynes (1993) and, with Alastair McLellan, the groundbreaking 500-1 (2001), about the 1981 Headingley test. There was also an empathetic life of the boxer Sonny Liston (Sonny Boy, 1993), and a cult football classic, The Mavericks (1995). Born into a north London Jewish family, Rob was the son of John Steen, a wholesale clothing retailer, and Shirley Dymond. He attended John Lyon school in Harrow, chose not to go to university and embarked on a series of false starts, including time spent as an accountant, an estate agent and a baker. After taking a journalism course at the London College of Printing, he found his home at City Limits magazine. There he developed a distinctive style, more typical of the music journalism of the late 1970s than traditional sports writing, before moving to Hayters Sports Agency, the training ground of so many journalists. Rob married a fellow journalist, Anne Taylor, in 1994, and they chose to raise their children in Cornwall, moving there in 1999. He taught journalism at Falmouth University, and in 2004 became senior lecturer in sports journalism at Brighton University. Few of his students will forget his quizzes designed to show that football existed before the Premier League, or the mock press conferences when he “became” Mourinho, Wenger or mid-hairdryer Ferguson. The students understood that not only did he care about them, but also that he was the most experienced sports journalist there. He took early retirement in 2018 and, drawn by its culture and lifestyle, moved to the Netherlands, where he wrote programmes for the local arthouse cinema in Rotterdam. He continued to get into debates about cricket – and his other great passion, music - with a global network of fellow enthusiasts. His marriage to Anne ended in divorce. He is survived by his children, Laura, Josef and Evie, his mother, and his sister, Jane.